Elckerlyc
"Philosophy will clip an angel's wings."
I have always had mixed feelings, a kind of love-hate relationship, with time-travel stories. On the one hand it is interesting to see how the writers used the inherent paradox to tell a compelling story (or failed to do so), on the other hand there is this annoying wrinkle in logic that ruins the fun. Well, for me anyway.
What wrinkle am I talking about? Well, let’s have a freestyle look at how the grandfather’s paradox is generally been depicted:
It is 2135. After decades of solely scientific use the time-machine has fallen prey to commercialism and been made accessible for the general public. (Go everywhen for just $0.99 per hour distance! - [be sure to read the small print first.]) You only need to sign a document, declaring that you shall refrain from any actions that could perceivably interfere with history. [That’s just theoretically, folks, for legal purposes only. History is quite foolproof and looks after its own.]
Of course, that last statement only invites disturbed people to go and try anyway. Our protagonist, suffering from severe self-hatred, decides to go back in time and kill both of his grandfathers (just for good measure) and see what would happen. He sells his house, joins a group of 12 other time-tourists and soon finds himself in the year 2067, bang in the middle of the Chaotic Sixties..
All goes as planned and a month after his arrival the already violent year 2067 lists 2 extra murders that hadn’t been registered before. A time-traveler is suspected but escapes custody by dissolving into smoke that soon is blown away by the wind. At the same moment (sic!) in 2135 his parents, just visiting their neighbours, suddenly feel dizzy, become transparent and disappear completely. The neighbours almost immediately forget they had visitors and wonder why there is a 3rd cup on the table and another, broken one on the floor, as if having been dropped. At the TTT Office (Time-Travel for Tourists) a signed document mysteriously gets unsigned.
In time, twelve exuberant tourists return home, no one is reported missing. Nor is there anyone aware history has been corrupted. (So much for signing legal documents.)
The End.
You can detect the inconsistencies from a mile distance. But the thing I wish to point out is the absence of logic in the chronological order of events.
All the consequences of the extra ‘new’ murders in 2067 manifested itself in 2136 only after the time-traveler departed to 2067 to commit his heinous version of suicide. The story is told, and the causal consequences are effectuated, observed from the timeline of the perpetrator, not that of History itself
This makes no sense. If the action took place in the past then the effects must always have been clear, long before the time-traveler left his home in 2135.
The time-traveler has either traveled to the past or he has not. There is no uncertainty in this and thus cannot be used as excuse for the delay in the rewriting of history. Nor is there any kind of a ‘re-play’ of the past for the convenience of the time-traveler to make his desired changes to the time-line. Every moment is a singular, unchangeable event. So, if there was a time-traveler (thinking he is) tampering with events, it was part of that history from the start. He wasn’t changing history, but creating, shaping it, together with all other people involved.
I was happy to notice I wasn’t the only one thinking along this line when I encountered this on Wikipedia:
The Novikov self-consistency principle, named after Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, states that any actions taken by a time traveller or by an object that travels back in time were part of history all along, and therefore it is impossible for the time traveller to "change" history in any way.
I love time-travel stories as long as they explore the bootstrap paradox, like By His Bootstraps (Robert Heinlein) and The Anubis Gate (Tim Powers) or consider history unchangeable, like Doomsday Book (Connie Willis), but Willis' later ‘Oxford’ novels To Say Nothing of the Dog and Blackout / All Clear contradict that principle. Unfortunately almost all movies or TV-series about time-travel concern altering history.
I am quite capable of suspending disbelief or apply some hand-waving. But any world-building should result in an internally consistent universe, in which logic follows universal pathways.
Should we treat time-travel stories differently?
What wrinkle am I talking about? Well, let’s have a freestyle look at how the grandfather’s paradox is generally been depicted:
It is 2135. After decades of solely scientific use the time-machine has fallen prey to commercialism and been made accessible for the general public. (Go everywhen for just $0.99 per hour distance! - [be sure to read the small print first.]) You only need to sign a document, declaring that you shall refrain from any actions that could perceivably interfere with history. [That’s just theoretically, folks, for legal purposes only. History is quite foolproof and looks after its own.]
Of course, that last statement only invites disturbed people to go and try anyway. Our protagonist, suffering from severe self-hatred, decides to go back in time and kill both of his grandfathers (just for good measure) and see what would happen. He sells his house, joins a group of 12 other time-tourists and soon finds himself in the year 2067, bang in the middle of the Chaotic Sixties..
All goes as planned and a month after his arrival the already violent year 2067 lists 2 extra murders that hadn’t been registered before. A time-traveler is suspected but escapes custody by dissolving into smoke that soon is blown away by the wind. At the same moment (sic!) in 2135 his parents, just visiting their neighbours, suddenly feel dizzy, become transparent and disappear completely. The neighbours almost immediately forget they had visitors and wonder why there is a 3rd cup on the table and another, broken one on the floor, as if having been dropped. At the TTT Office (Time-Travel for Tourists) a signed document mysteriously gets unsigned.
In time, twelve exuberant tourists return home, no one is reported missing. Nor is there anyone aware history has been corrupted. (So much for signing legal documents.)
The End.
You can detect the inconsistencies from a mile distance. But the thing I wish to point out is the absence of logic in the chronological order of events.
All the consequences of the extra ‘new’ murders in 2067 manifested itself in 2136 only after the time-traveler departed to 2067 to commit his heinous version of suicide. The story is told, and the causal consequences are effectuated, observed from the timeline of the perpetrator, not that of History itself
This makes no sense. If the action took place in the past then the effects must always have been clear, long before the time-traveler left his home in 2135.
The time-traveler has either traveled to the past or he has not. There is no uncertainty in this and thus cannot be used as excuse for the delay in the rewriting of history. Nor is there any kind of a ‘re-play’ of the past for the convenience of the time-traveler to make his desired changes to the time-line. Every moment is a singular, unchangeable event. So, if there was a time-traveler (thinking he is) tampering with events, it was part of that history from the start. He wasn’t changing history, but creating, shaping it, together with all other people involved.
I was happy to notice I wasn’t the only one thinking along this line when I encountered this on Wikipedia:
The Novikov self-consistency principle, named after Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, states that any actions taken by a time traveller or by an object that travels back in time were part of history all along, and therefore it is impossible for the time traveller to "change" history in any way.
I love time-travel stories as long as they explore the bootstrap paradox, like By His Bootstraps (Robert Heinlein) and The Anubis Gate (Tim Powers) or consider history unchangeable, like Doomsday Book (Connie Willis), but Willis' later ‘Oxford’ novels To Say Nothing of the Dog and Blackout / All Clear contradict that principle. Unfortunately almost all movies or TV-series about time-travel concern altering history.
I am quite capable of suspending disbelief or apply some hand-waving. But any world-building should result in an internally consistent universe, in which logic follows universal pathways.
Should we treat time-travel stories differently?
