The Time Travel Conundrum
I find it an absurd notion that time travel is possible - not because I don't believe that if you splat particles together at incredibly high speeds in the space-time continuum you can't knock one backwards; if eminent scientists say this is possible, then it must be so and I have read 'In Search of Schrodinger's Cat' which is a fine read if you are of the nerd-orientation.
No, my feeble brain is more logical. If time is an infinite line that we travel along, albeit in one direction (due to the Entropy thingy after 380,000 years - see my earlier blog), if time travel was possible at some point in the future, then indeed we would know about it.
Much like 'The Terminator', starring a muscular US Politician, if people can already travel in time we would know about it. I know nit-pickers would say that maybe the time travellers have not travelled far enough back in time to tell us yet or indeed they have but they came and went unobserved, but I would suggest that's not the point.
The Loop of Time
Quantum Physics itself says that the mere act of observing an event changes the outcome - so the observer is part of the system that determines the outcome just by looking at it. In the same way, time travellers cannot enter the world unobserved as their presence has an effect. The Loop of Time mind bender says that if I should travel back in time to a point in the past where I existed, my very presence would interfere with my current self and therefore change the future and so all events leading up to the point I travelled back would be different - which means something would have changed before I travelled back. Which means I could not travel back in the same state I arrived there - oh you get my drift. You set off a loop of events that eventually disappear up ones own backside. By extending the argument, even if I travelled back in time to any point before I travelled back, I would alter the state of the world all the way back to the point I started to travel backwards - so I could not have travelled back in that state.
For this reason, time travel as we view it on TV could not take place - even consuming some air when you arrived back would forever change the world, just the act of arriving back would change the world. There are more plausible explanations that involve every event having an infinite number of outcomes and what we observe today is the continuum of one strand, so if we travelled back we might just as well end up on some other strand of reality. But events are occurring every micro-nano-milli second of time and so why do we ever observe the results of just one possible outcome? Don't look at me, I asked the question. But maybe it is to do with that nasty old 'Arrow of Time' again.
Anyway, there is another absurdity - should I ever travel back in time and change the world, theoretically I will forever be caught in that loop and live like Bill Murray in 'Groundhog Day' forever more, for each time I reach the point in my life I decided to travel back, I would indeed go back and start the loop again. The follow on question would be - do I age in the process? Of course the daft answer is that I would take with me a device to beam me back out again, but that poses equally illogical questions.
I Must Get Cleverer
The simple fact is I am not clever enough to understand all this but in my little world, the concept of time travel as in Sci-Fi TV or films is pretty much hokum. So as a supplementary point to my blog on 'The Arrow of Time', I would argue even if we cracked time travel, we could not use it to change events.
Pondering time over, it's time to travel.
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