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Paradox-free time travel - Printable Version

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Paradox-free time travel - Tachyon - 09-26-2020

Here’s the popular explanation:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uoq-yp092320.php

And the paper:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc

Which seems to be similar in approach to methods I’ve been looking at here:

http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/chaos_anatomy.pdf


RE: Paradox-free time travel - stevebowers - 09-26-2020

I think this is an example of what Winchell Chung calls the 'Self Healing Timeline', where you can go back and change the past, but only change those events which do not affect the future.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/timetravel.php#id--Time_Travel_Theory--Time_Travel_Models--Self-Healing_Timeline

So yo can go back and kill your grandfather, but only if your grandfather's identical twin can take his place, or your grandmother has access to frozen sperm, and so on. Or someone else becomes Hitler and pretends to be him for the rest of his life. Or you become Jesus and die in His place. If your actions result in a future which is effectively indistinguishable from the present you started from, that is acceptable.

Not all information about the past is accessible, and you can go back and change those events which do not affect the present, because of incomplete information. For instance there are about a dozen possible candidates for the identity of Jack the Ripper, and if you go back and prevent one of those candidates from killing anybody, one of the others would surely oblige and carry out the murders. (If not, then the timeline would be altered detectably, which would mess everything up).