Posted on 02/17/2015 6:11:33 AM PST by BenLurkin
One of the fundamentals that underpins not just physics but every aspect of existence is the law of cause and effect, always in that order. Changing the past would violate that: your actions would affect what caused you to go back in the first place – so if you did manage to kill Hitler he wouldn’t have done what led you to go back and kill him.
That doesn’t stop filmmakers exploring the consequences if you could somehow drop in on history. For Hollywood, applause and special effects are more important than cause and effect, and time travel offers unlimited opportunities to push both imagination and CGI to their limits. Hence screen time machines have included a police box (Dr Who), a phone booth (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure), a DeLorean sports car (Back to the Future) and a big nudes-only energy ball (Terminator).
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Indeed. I shudder to think of a world without Elvis. :-)
A Sci-Fi story that I don’t remember the title. A guy goes into some small cinema and watches a Roman army fighting a gory battle - and it IS gory, heads, arms, legs getting lopped off everywhere. He realizes he is actually watching a film of the real centuries old battle.
It turns out some guy has invented a time machine in the sense he can go back to any point in history and record it in real time, and the best thing he can think to do with it is to record the events, run it as a movie, and sell tickets.
Enter our hero, who proceeds to go back and record the events leading up to Pearl Harbor (along the line that Roosevelt knew and let it happen), the crucifixion of Christ, etc. - you name it - all the turning points in history. He then blabs his findings to the public and causes all kinds of Hell.
Soon he is being chased by “Them” and no matter what he does, they are always seconds behind him. Figuring he was going to be caught, he sends out (via YouTube? :-)) the instructions on how to build the machine as his last act of defiance.
“They” catch up to him but instead of killing him, ask him what he considers “the past”. He comes up with all kinds of historical dates. “They” remind him “the past” can be as short as a few seconds ago (which allows anybody anywhere to look into anyone’s life and see all the skeletons in the closet).
Then they let him go to a Brave New World where everyone can view your past - in detail.
Funny thing is that I thought as he did - “the past” was long ago, not everything up until the last second. Man, if everybody could look into my past . . . :-)
After I read Psychoshop I don’t believe in paradoxes anymore. The argument against it being an issue in there is size, given the over all size of the universe little “impossibilities” in Earth’s history really just don’t matter.
Relativity. There is no base reference. All of that motion is relative.
“The Once and Future King” was a Twilight Zone episode in 1986.
Good episode.
Thanks for the clarification. (At least I remember seeing it!)
OK, it’s not much. But it’s still enough to be tricky to get your head round. It’s all down to time dilation, something predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity but which we can measure, whereby the faster someone goes (and Sergei spent over two years in orbit on Mir and the International Space Station travelling at over 17,000mph) the slower their clock goes relative to those back down on Earth. It’s more complicated than this because gravity is also involved, but Sergei has aged fractionally less than he would have if he’d not gone into space."
This is almost as much BS as something Jen Psaki might say.
Regarding that last one, Heinlein used to call me every year to sign me up for the blood drive at the WorldCon. He called once when I wasn't home and my youngest son took the call. Heinlein chatted with him, and described to him the plot of the story he was then writing, which turned out to be Door.
Another good one is David Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself.
I'm currently writing a novel about time travel, and one of the key issues is, would you try to change the past? In the novel, that's called "time crime," and the penalties for trying it are very severe. My main character is sorely tempted once to try it, but decides against changing the past.
well, a more competent guy did win WWII and killed millions more than Hitler. his name was Josef Stalin
Which would actually make it a bigger computational problem.
Yes. http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/303/heinlein_all_you_zombies.pdf
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