Today I am sick, and when I am sick I have a lot of time to sit and think. But luckily for you, the reader, I am not thinking about my “love life” or what I am going to do with my life. I am thinking about time travel.
Time travel is a complex and very confusing thing. As the 10th Doctor has said “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” To understand time travel one must understand time. Everyone knows what time is, we have grown up knowing what it is. As little kids we know that there is the past, which has happened before us, there is the present which is what is happening right now at this very second and then it turns into the past, and then lastly there is the future. The future has yet to happen, and no one knows what is going to happen in the future. I know as a high schooler who is looking into colleges, I stress about the future.
But time is not that simple. Many philosophers have spent years studying it, trying to grasp it.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines time as “a limited stretch or space of continued existence”, or “as the interval between two successive events”.
From what I’ve gathered on the internet there are two main concepts of time. Concept one is Presentism. The thought of presentism is that only the present is real, that the past and future does not exist. Everything occurs in the present and whatever has happened in the past or future does not exist. The second concept Block Universe View is the concept that is more widely used. It is the concept that the past, present and future coexist together. But these concepts do not tell us why we move forward in time, or why we cannot go back into the past.
Now that I have said a very tiny bit on time, I shall dive into the scary wormhole of time travel.
Time travel is moving from one point in time to another point in time. So how do we do that? Do we travel really fast in one direction, of course not, we would just end up break the the sound barrier which is not time traveling. We need to bend time to be able to create wormholes to the point of time we are trying to get to. Wormholes are bridges between time and space that things can travel through.
Traveling through time has consequences, and they are called paradoxes. The most commonly known paradox is, what would happen if you killed your grandmother? You would then be nonexistent because if your grandmother is dead, then your mother was never born thus you were never born either. But killing your grandmother would lead to many other things not just you not being born. It could lead to many different things, because one person has a huge effect on things. Like say for example, after your grandmothers death it could send your grandfather into depression, leading him to commit suicide. But your grandfather was going to be elected as congress men in the early 2000s, so now they elect someone else. But of course it does not have to be that dramatic.
Time traveling is a dangerous and impossible thing. As a wise wizard once said “Mysterious thing, time. Powerful, and when meddled with, dangerous.”
Highly Functioning Hermit 