On Time Travel Logic

     On Time Travel Logic

 

Any logic of time travel must address time paradoxes and time loops. The former are never observed, the latter are self-supporting.

          Time paradoxes are never observed for one of two reasons: 1) in a single time-line, low-probability events prevent the paradoxes (your gun jams) or 2) there are many time-lines (you shoot Hitler, and wind up in the timeline where another lunatic ruled the Nazi party).

          I propose a compromise: the timeline protects itself by unlikely events, including branching off an alternate timeline. I speculate that the probability of branching off an alternate timeline to be about 10^-100, for that is the ratio of observed dark energy to its theoretical value.

          So you can use the threat of time paradox to force desired events, but only if the event is more likely than 10^-100. For instance, you can force at most 332 favorable coin flips before the universe strands you in an alternate timeline.

          And that’s if you aren’t hit by lightning. Most of the time, the universe will use the most likely unlikely event to de-paradox. If seeming to be conscious and angry will convince the would-be paradoxer to lay off, then the universe will seem to be conscious and angry. If seeming to be objective and indifferent will convince the would-be paradoxer to lay off, then the universe will seem to be objective and indifferent. It’s an observer effect, mandated by logic and psychology.

          Time loops are to time paradoxes as underdetermined linear systems are to overdetermined. They have many solutions, rather than one or none. Time loops are self-caused; external causality neither forbids nor mandates them. They happen or not on their own, for weird reasons of their own.

          Hmm... that sounds rather ‘quantum’... and quantum is notoriously both weird and timey-wimey...