Physicist Proposes a Solution to the Grandfather Paradox of Time Travel

In speculation about time travel, the grandfather paradox is the notion that you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather. This would result in you not being born. But if you weren't born, how could you kill your grandfather? Physicist Seth Lloyd of MIT performed experiments with protons attempting to somewhat simulate these conditions and found that the paradoxical problems failed to occur:

By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.

But this dictum against paradoxical events causes possible but unlikely events to happen more frequently. “If you make a slight change in the initial conditions, the paradoxical situation won’t happen. That looks like a good thing, but what it means is that if you’re very near the paradoxical condition, then slight differences will be extremely amplified,” says Charles Bennett of IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”

Link | Photo: Paramount

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The Problem with a Time Paradox is you would never know
you could go back and change what you like, that time line if it is a line? would change in (NO TIME)? and we would be unawear of it.
it may be that time travel is happening right (NOW) that might account for the multi universe theroy?
I don't know but it's FUN

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Catch me on hotmail if you want to talk; I have what I think eliminates the possibility of the grandfather paradox from being an issue in the first place. I'm serious, but the few people I've talked to, its going way over their head.
Just email me with 'Paradox' in the subject, I'll make sure I jump on it ASAP, copy/paste what I got and see what kind of feedback I get.
And this isn't based on the multi-verse model either, this is straight up.

'alpinedigital' at hotmail, and hurry up!

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I can't help agreeing with snarlz. On first reading this 'solution' seems to throw up more problems than it solves. On the other hand, as a sci-fi writer, I love the idea that you fix paradoxes by distorting probablility around the location of the paradox. If I went back in time, all my ancestors would suddenly become invulnerable from that oint forward. Whatever anybody did to kill them would be bestet by all kinds of 'accidental' failures! It's a comedy writer's dream!

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