I have always been fascinated by the idea of time travel. It's been an obsession of mine ever since I was a little kid. I have some thoughts on the subject that I plan to post eventually, but in the meantime I have a thought experiment for you all to think about. Consider it a kind of prologue; something to stir the water and stimulate speculation. It's just something to bear in mind and something that will serve as a frame of reference when I finally get around to delving deeper into the matter.
Alright, the experiment begins with a large vault. The vault has a combination lock on the door, and you are the only one that has the combination. Inside the vault there is a time machine and a table. On the table there is only a single coin. Now, on Friday evening you set this coin so that it is facing heads up on the table. You seal and lock the vault and leave for the weekend. No one else can enter the vault while your gone, since no one else has the combination, and no one else is able to disturb the coin. On Monday morning you return and open the vault. Then, depending on what you find, you plan on doing one of two things:
- If you find that the coin is still on heads, you plan to get into the time machine, travel back to Saturday afternoon and flip the coin to tails. That being the case, the coin should have been on tails when you opened the vault on Monday morning, having already been flipped by yourself on Saturday. However...
- If you find that the coin has been flipped to tails, you plan to destroy the time machine, rendering it impossible to have ever traveled back to flip the coin. But if that's the case, then how did the coin ever come to be on tails?
i am fascinated with time, too;
ReplyDeletewould you please check this post and tell me what you think about how/if we can change the past by acting in the present?
http://dorinadimitriu.blogspot.com/2009/07/napkin.html
as for the time travel experiment, i am fascinated with that too, and i will definitely think about it.
Yes, read your post. Intriguing idea, the question on whether our actions in the present retro-actively effect choices made in the past. Kind of turns cause & effect on its head, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteAs for changing the past, the upcoming post I mentioned with deal specifically with that subject. The experiment here does everything it can to violate that possibility, of course. That's the idea.
I left an uneaten big mac on the kitchen table this past weekend, when the wife and child were not at home. I left it there because I had gone to a nearby McDonald's for a large fry. Just a fry since I enjoy polluting my stomach with content that can virtually withstand nuclear fallout.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, they mistakenly? added a big mac to my order and I drove away thinking how I had just pulled off a great screw job to corporate America, which I loathe and try to sabotage whenever I can. Satisfied with the Fry, I left the sandwich on the table, while I went out to mow the grass in the front and back yard, which took about 45 minutes, with many breaks in-between thinking I had just had a stroke of some kind.
When I return, the first thing I notice was the wrapper had been carefully opened and the burger completely consumed by some apparition or another, because the table is pretty high off the floor and I did not see any suspicious Hamburgler around, thus something dastardly and unexplained had happened in the midst of lawn care.
The dog, a tiny little stomach crawler, had an odd look of content on its face and a bit of a bulge in the belly, but surely this was not possible? Beats me. I never learned the fate of that free burger, but I do wonder if dog, in general, are smarter than the average Bear?
I'm trying to wrap my mind around what connection this has to the post above? Leaving things on a table? Your future self traveled through a time-space vortex to eat your free cheeseburger? Maybe it's a meditation on delicate Karmic balance of the universe. An easy Big Mac fell in your lap, and you lost it just as easily.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, you should know by now that dogs are capable of supernatural feats whenever there's food involved.
My time travel theory would be this.
ReplyDeleteIf you travel to the past and change something your timeline, will be unaffected and a new timeline created.
So if you entered your vault on Monday morning to find the coin heads up. Then with your time machine went back to Saturday night and flipped the coin to tails you would come back to find the coin still heads up.
However your doppelganger in the other timeline you created would find the coin tails and would be scratching his head wondering "what the hell".
Atypical Scott my dog would have ate the wrapper as well.