Modelling time travel in fiction @ Things Of Interest

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2024-04-17 22:00:06

Time travel is a subject of great interest to me - not the actual, you know, nuts and bolts physics of it, but the various possible models that can be imagined. I've written a variety of fiction based around these. The most important thing, I find, when coming up with a new theory, is to try to trip it up in every way imaginable and make sure it still works.

By FAR the most likely of all the various possibilities. There are no time travellers because it's impossible to travel through time. Time is an illusion, perhaps, not even a proper dimension. Spacetime is a rigid crystal with worms (us) stuck inside, never changing.

The postulation that time is a loop - that is, after the universe ends in a Big Crunch, it goes back to the original Big Bang and starts all over again exactly the same - essentially doesn't change the fact that time travel is impossible. As nothing coherent can actually survive the Crunch and Bang, nothing can actually go all the way around the loop and be present in its own past.

This model, assuming it allows an individual to travel back in time to their own past light cone, allows individuals to interfere with their own past and thus necessarily includes some level of predestination paradox. For example: somebody comes from the future and tells you to get into the time machine. You get into the time machine. You go back to the past. You tell your past self to get into the time machine. It is also entirely possible for universes employing this model to include causal loops: ideas and objects which have no origin point.