Time Travel Paradoxes

It's impossible to consider the subject of time travel without addressing the issue of paradoxes. These occur where time travel would result in what appear to be logical inconsistencies or impossibilities.

Many people believe that the paradox problem is itself enough to render time travel impossible. Regardless of the physics, the philosophy of time travel is a fascinating area for "thought experiment".

Various paradoxes have been raised, these usually involve an apparent breach of causality in one way or another. The most well-known version is the "grandfather paradox".

The Grandfather Paradox

This is a very simple idea with serious repurcussions for the concept of time travel. Let's say that I invent a time machine and travel into the past. I meet my own grandfather when he was a boy and kill him.
The result? One of my parents is never born, therefore I can never be born.

So I couldn't have gone back in time and killed him.

This is a logical contradiction - and a philosophical nightmare!

Resolutions

There have been numerous proposals for dealing with the apparent causal paradoxes of time travel.
The easiest is simply to say "so what?". The paradox only exists because of our "common sense" view of linear causality - possibly related to the arrow of time. If we step back and look at the system as a whole then we can see a multi-dimensional causality. Unfortunately most of our existing laws of physics assume linear causality in one direction or another, so this resolution is unpopular.

An alternative is to call on the "multiple universes" theory. By travelling into the "past" we are actualy travelling into an alternate or parallel universe. From the moment we arrive, the universes start diverging. Whether the universes "split" or whether they always existed in parallel in some higher "dimension" is a matter of taste.

One side-effect of this resolution is that we can never return to our original time - we are stuck in the parallel universe and can only move forwards into its future. If I shoot my grandfather then get back into my time machine and return to 2013 it will be a 2006 where I was never born. Once I have stepped on that butterfly then my original universe is forever inaccessible to me.

Another interesting idea is the "mobius strip" timeline, discussed here by Anthony Edwards. How the mobius strip generalises to multiple dimensions when multiple time travellers are involved is beyond my grasp - I get lost after the klein bottle!

An interesting technical approach to resolving the paradox is the Novikov self-consistency principle proposed by Dr. Igor Novikov. This essentially says that paradoxes won't happen - it's impossible to create a paradox however hard you try. In this view the universe is in some way "self-righting". If you attempt to shoot your grandfather then something will go wrong - you'll miss, the gun will jam, etc. Or, if you succeed, you'll later learn that your father was adopted; so he still gets born and still marries your mother. This reminds me of the anthropic principle: the universe is this way because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here.

Perhaps the simplest resolution of temporal paradoxes is to say that since they only occur when we travel into the past, then travel into the past is impossible but travel into the future remains a possibility.

Unfortunately this makes time travel rather pointless - it achieves little more than we could get through long-term suspended animation or near light speed travel.

Your Children are not Your Children

They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

© Kahlil Gibran, 1923, 1973.

The Multiverse Theory

Anyone who has not spent the last ten years on a desert island, has at least once heard of “the multiverse”, or parallel universes. As many of us have seen, parallel words, in theory, are worlds very similar to ours, with little (or in some cases, large) changes or differences. The multiverse theory speculates that there could exist an infinite number of these alternate realities.
What’s the point? In a parallel reality you have already killed the dinosaurs, and you are lying under the ground at a depth of eight feet (because that’s what happened there.) In the other you might be a powerful king. In another you might never have even been born since your parents never met. Now that’s a memorable image.

Presentism

Time is something that we perceive as a matter of course, if we view it at the moment, we usually divide it into past, present and future. Presentism argues that the past and the future are imagined concepts, while only the present is real.
In other words, today’s breakfast and every word of this post will cease to exist after you have read it, until you open it again. The future is just as imaginary, because time cannot exist before and after it happened, as claimed by St. Augustine.

Stop running from your problems

Face them head on. No, it won’t be easy. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.

The Story behind The Scream

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Edvard Munch, who never married, called his paintings his children and hated to be separated from them. Living alone on his estate outside Oslo for the last 27 years of his life, increasingly revered and increasingly isolated, he surrounded himself with work that dated to the start of his long career. Upon his death in 1944, at the age of 80, the authorities discovered—behind locked doors on the second floor of his house—a collection of 1,008 paintings, 4,443 drawings and 15,391 prints, as well as woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, lithographic stones, woodcut blocks, copperplates and photographs. Yet in a final irony of his difficult life, Munch is famous today as the creator of a single image, which has obscured his overall achievement as a pioneering and influential painter and printmaker.

Munch's The Scream is an icon of modern art, a Mona Lisa for our time. As Leonardo da Vinci evoked a Renaissance ideal of serenity and self-control, Munch defined how we see our own age—wracked with anxiety and uncertainty. His painting of a sexless, twisted, fetal-faced creature, with mouth and eyes open wide in a shriek of horror, re-created a vision that had seized him as he walked one evening in his youth with two friends at sunset.

Edvard Munch, has described himself in a book written in 1900 as nearly going insane, like his sister Laura who was committed to a mental institution during this time period as well. Personally he discussed being pushed to his limits, and going through a very dark moment in his life.

The scene of The Scream was based on a real, actual place located on the hill of Ekeberg, Norway, on a path with a safety railing. The faint city and landscape represent the view of Oslo and the Oslo Fjord. At the bottom of the Ekeberg hill was the madhouse where Edvard Munch’s sister was kept, and nearby was also a slaughterhouse. Some accounts describe that in those times you could actually hear the cries of animals being killed, as well as the cries of the mentally disturbed patients in the distance. In this setting, Edvard Munch was likely inspired by screams that he actually heard in this area, combined with his personal inner turmoil. Edvard Munch wrote in his diary that his inspiration for The Scream came from a memory of when he was walking at sunset with two friends, when he began to feel deeply tired. He stopped to rest, leaning against the railing.  He felt anxious and experienced a scream that seemed to pass through all of nature. The rest is left up to an endless range of interpretations, all expressed from this one, provocative image.


The Real (And Not at All Universal) Meaning Behind Edvard Munch's The Scream

Edvard, came from a grim and deeply religious family. His father, a military doctor, married a woman 20 years his junior, who hailed from a once well-to-do clan that had fallen on hard times. She bore five children, of which Edvard was the second, and she died early, leaving behind a tragic letter to her family saying, “We all, who God so carefully has bound together, may meet in Heaven never to part again.” Munch’s dad became morose and fanatical; he would read this letter aloud to his clan at the dinner table, regularly, and lecture his kids on the horrors of hell that awaited them if they strayed from the righteous path. This fatalistic atmosphere definitively colored Munch’s view of the world.

Which brings us back to “The Scream,” actually originally known as “The Scream of Nature.”

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Notice anything about this tale? “The Scream” is often taken as an image of personal isolation or alienation. But it is significant that the scene takes place in public, not in some lonely interior (of which there are many in Munch’s work). Whatever emotion is seizing the wailing central figure, it comes upon him not when he is isolated, but when he is “walking along the road with friends,” represented by the strolling couple glimpsed in the painting behind him, apparently oblivious to the drama taking place in the foreground.

The key to the image is that its terrifying epiphany is felt to be an expression issuing through the figure from the landscape or the cosmos itself (“I felt the great scream in nature”). This is what Munch’s then-radical Expressionist styling, in which everything — sky and sea and the wailing, deformed figure itself — conveys so perfectly, depicting a universe fully animate with turbulent emotional meaning.

Munch was trained to see the universe as being filled with divine meaning, as subject to a plan — but he also could no longer fully believe in this plan. And so the universe speaks but has no voice, shrieks but makes no sound, issues forth a sense of loss that transcends any human fellowship.



Regards,

Ismail R Raslan

Special thanks to Dr.Rakan Nazer

Challenges keep us alive

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the water close to Japan has not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring the fish. If the return trip took more time, the fish were not fresh.


To solve this problem, fish companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer.


However, the Japanese could taste the difference between the fresh and the frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of the frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, the fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, they were tired, dull, and lost their fresh-fish taste. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis! But today, they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan

How did they manage? To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks but with a small shark. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. The challenge they face keeps them alive and fresh!


Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired and dull? Basically in our lives, sharks are new challenges to keep us active. If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. “Your challenges keep you energized. Don’t create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.


Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go..!

Challenges and difficulties are the essence of success. They keep us alive and we need them to stay active and fit for life!