If you travel back in time to stop or fix a bad event and succeed,
then the bad event never happened.
If it never happened then why did you time travel back in the first place?
You can't travel back because what you stopped never happened.
I can't wait to see how they get around that.
I don't know the answer, but not every time travel story utilizes that particular paradox. Perhaps Timeless won't either.
In the kingdom of the blind, you're the village idiot.
[deleted]
They'll probably handle it like they always do by not dealing with it at all.
shareUh, that is NOT "The Grandfather Paradox".
Time travel is impossible. (YES IT IS.) So this, and all stories about time travel, is completely fictional, thus the normal laws of nature and logic don't apply.
Is that so hard to understand?
That's not true. Time travel to the future is possible by approaching the speed of light.
So, if your journey began in 2003, it would have taken you only 5 years to travel to the year 2053, whereas it would have taken all of your friends 50 years.
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/time-travel.html
Yes, but ONLY to the future. Backwards time travel as done in this show is impossible.
Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar and doesn't.
A "travel" has the strong implication that you can buy a return ticket. With relativistic time dilation you cannot travel to the past, and you cannot even return to your own time after you "travel" to the future. It is a one way, only forward ticket.
The show uses the concept of closed timelike curves (CTCs), which are derived from some solutions of general relativity, first formulated by Einstein's good friend Kurt Gödel, a mathematician (of the Incompleteness Theorems fame). CTCs are currently a purely theoretical concept, attempts at a "real" world application predict, for example, a cylinder a long as our galaxy(...), along with near infinite energy, inside which a spacecraft must travel in a specific way.
That's Kardashev III level technology, so we are not going to have it any time soon. The show's execution of CTCs is, of course, totally ridiculous, just as its reversal of the purpose of electrical grounding (that you need to UNGROUND something to keep it from generating static electricity - complete bollocks, there is no way the writers do not know that, that's just a cheapo plot device mr Kripke), all in the name of crafting their story.
Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.share
Is that so hard to understand?
The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past. The name comes from the paradox's common description as a person who travels to the past and kills their own grandfather, preventing the existence of their father or mother and therefore their own existence.
so what the other poster stated is in fact the grandfather paradox, what did you think the grandfather paradox is?
also time travel is possible, we just haven't figured it out yet. the government has time travel technology from captured ufo's. the past, present, and future all occur at the same time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_BbtXj2P4g
Time travel is impossible. (YES IT IS.) So this, and all stories about time travel, is completely fictional, thus the normal laws of nature and logic don't apply
Pat,
Backwards Time Travel = Impossible.
Sorry.
Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar and doesn't.
It is actually a variation of the Grandfather Paradox. You can create countless variations of it with the same basic structure. And, just because something is fictional it does not mean it does not have to make sense, as Mark Twain would also say ("Fiction, unlike reality, has to make sense").
Fanboy : a person who does not think while watching.share
If you travel back in time to stop or fix a bad event and succeed,
then the bad event never happened.
If it never happened then why did you time travel back in the first place?
Once again it's useless to apply logic to a time travel show since there is no such thing as backwards time travel. Indeed there is no such thing as "time". It's an illusion. It's simply how we human beings track the number of revolutions the earth makes, and how many times it travels around the sun. There is only the now.
The only possible "time travel" would be forward by obtaining near light speeds in a spacecraft. As the craft approaches the speed of light, time would slow down for the occupants of the spacecraft. Thus they could take a journey of a few years, and meanwhile the earth will have aged a few hundred years.
Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar and doesn't.
Once again it's useless to apply logic to a time travel show since there is no such thing as backwards time travel.
We thus have experimental evidence from the bending of light, that space-time is curved, and confirmation from the Casimir effect, that we can warp it in the negative direction. So it might seem possible, that as we advance in science and technology, we might be able to construct a wormhole, or warp space and time in some other way, so as to be able to travel into our past.
A closed timelike curve can be created if a series of such light cones are set up so as to loop back on themselves, so it would be possible for an object to move around this loop and return to the same place and time that it started.... the object's future light cone would include spacetime points both forwards and backwards in time, and so it should be possible for the object to engage in time travel under these conditions.
Physicists have long known that some solutions to the theory of general relativity contain closed timelike curves -— for example the Gödel metric. Novikov discussed the possibility of closed timelike curves (CTCs) in books he wrote in 1975 and 1983, offering the opinion that only self-consistent trips back in time would be permitted.
Indeed there is no such thing as "time". It's an illusion. It's simply how we human beings track the number of revolutions the earth makes, and how many times it travels around the sun. There is only the now.
So far this show has avoided that by specifically NOT going back to stop the theft of the time machine. Instead they are going back to prevent the guy from making changes to history.
-----------------------------
I miss Giles.
They stated that you can't to the past where you already exist.
The ripples in time will kill you.
Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'