David Lewis and Dr. J have both mentioned the grandfather
theory: if one were to go back in time, she could not kill her grandfather
because he would be incapable of having her parent who would be incapable of
giving birth to her. In one scene in Back
to the Future, Marty saves his father from an oncoming vehicle and saves his life; this is an interesting
alternative to the grandfather theory.
We never considered the possibility of saving our parent, grandparent,
or distant ancestor from death; something else would have saved them, as we
exist, yet we could have also?
One major fallacy arises as the movie concludes: the dynamic
of each of Marty’s family members has changed.
Because Marty altered his parents’ path, they became more confident and
successful. Their lives are drastically
different: considering this, Marty’s existence would be too, and he would not
exist or would exist as a different Marty, one who did not travel backward in
time and eventually return.
My time machine theory (please ignore the logical errors):
if one person had access to a time machine, travelled back in time (assume they're leaving 2015), and stayed
for more than a moment, the present (2015) would change. Someone would have stayed at a stop light one
second longer, another person would not have bumped into their future spouse,
etc. If numerous people time travelled backward, the present would begin to
change drastically. If many people travelled back in time, the present would
change constantly, every fraction of a second, you would be a different person
or cease to exist. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but one person could change
the present and future, so numerous people could radically alter it.
Richard Taylor’s description of time travel is simple,
undermines all of our classroom theories, and is a total buzzkill: “To imagine
“returning” to an earlier time is merely to imagine the recurrence of the
events of that time” (484). In other
words, it is impossible and left solely for the imagination. According to Taylor, “The future is something
necessarily lying ahead of us, and the past, behind us”…sorry Marty (486).
Sidenote: way easier
to follow than Looper.
Check out if you're bored, finished all your homework, and enjoy silly conspiracy theories and/or buzzfeed-like articles:
i do agree with you time machine theory. The actions that a person would make would in turn change the future if that person was to return there like Marty did in Back to the Future. This could be the reason Marty was named Marty because at the end his parents like that name when he talked to them. But this is never known that Marty's name actually came from himself until he did travel back in time. They had seen him before but he had yet to experience this for himself. It is a very difficult topic to touch. A better illustration would be the movie time machine.
ReplyDeleteIn the movie time machine, the man character is in love with this girl. She gets killed and because he is an inventor, he builds a time machine to go back and save her. Every time he does this, she dies in a different way. This shows you that you cannot change the past because the outcome will be the same but have different ways of being reached.
All this talk of potential time travel has my brain nerding-out with possibilities. Please tolerate me while my pants ride up and my laughs become speckled with snorts.
ReplyDeleteLogically, I am in favor of Steven Hawkins' prognoses that traveling back in time is impossible within the context of our universe. As Gabby pointed out, traveling back in time yields too many paradoxes that threatens the stability of our universe. Also, the grandfather theory can be further simplified to illustrate this point. If a man were to grab a pistol, step into a time machine, travel 15 minutes back in time, and then use the pistol to shoot his previous self before he steps into the time machine, he just successfully created a paradox that cannot be sustained by our universe. If he dies before he gets in the time machine, the man cannot travel back in time to shoot himself. And if the man cannot travel back in time, then he cannot shipped himself. These realities are mutually exclusive.
This problem leaves us with the problem of trying to conceptualize how this could work if traveling back in time is possible. My suspenders are officially quivering with excitement. Imagine space and time represented by a line, where points represent events past, present, and future. Because reality would be altered so drastically as a result of time travel, traveling back in time may result in the time traveler entering into an alternative universe whose space time intersected our own. In the suicidal time traveler theory, the man would not be shooting his previous self who stepped into the time machine, rather he would be shooting a version of himself in an alternative universe that intersected our universe. From this moment forward, the suicidal time traveler would be traveling along the space time line of the intersecting alternative universe. For this reason, he would be able to shoot a copy his previous form without interfering with his original previous self's ability to step into the time machine.
Ladies, ladies, calm down. I'm only one man. Take a breath. I'm done spitting my mad theoretical astrophysicist game.
Chicks dig science.