 |
 |
Paradox 3
Name: N/A
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Since the space-time continuum or spaceloops are never ending circles
of time and homogeneous matter is it possible that instead of creating the
future now, now or in the future we are creating the past?
Replies:
Nope. Suppose time were a loop, which it has a perfect right to be.
By definition then the exact same events must recur over and over. (The
procession of events is the only definition of time.) In that case
everything that is, was and will be is already fixed, and something we do
now *cannot* change a past that is also our distant future because it already
*has not*. And if time is not a loop, you cannot affect the past by
definition. So you need not worry about it either way.
Alternatively, if you argue that events "mostly" but not completely
repeat themselves, that is, the Civil War will come again in forty billion
years, but maybe this time Stonewall will not be killed by his own troops
and the South will win, then you are asserting that history tends to repeat
itself mostly. This could well be true, but would have nothing to do with
time per se, but rather with some really strange long-time oscillating
patterns in the chain of causes connecting all events. If such patterns
exist there is no reason you could not in principle tap into them and indeed
affect the "next" Civil War, but you would still be affecting the future and
people yet unborn, who may nonetheless act a lot like those already dead.
If you (or Jean-Luc Picard) do something really nasty and cause the "next"
evolution of life to misfire, it would not be any different conceptually
than starting the Big (thermonuclear) War tomorrow and wiping us all out.
Either way we get to enjoy today.
christopher grayce
Click here to return to the Physics Archives
| |
Update: June 2012
|
|
