“The Big Time” by Fritz Leiber is one of my all time favorite novels. His time travel works on the principle of 'The Law Of Conservation Of Reality." There’s only one timeline, and it’s possible to change it, but it requires a lot of work.
If you go back and kill baby Hitler, he’ll come back to life and no one will remember anything. It takes vast armies fighting thousands of secret battles to change one thing. But when a Big Change hits, look out!
It depends on the type of time travel rules. One theory suggest going back in time creates a branch in the time-space continuum, one where the time travel happened, one where it did not.
With this branching time-space rule, there’s one timeline, where no time travellers appeared, and one where they did.
That’s like somebody saying in 1912 that fax machines could never be invented because no printouts were magically appearing on their desk. The technology had to be invented before it could be used. If a time traveler has to step out of a machine, that machine has to be invented first. The idea is that backwards time travel would only be able to travel as far back as the invention of backwards time travel.
That being said, from a physics standpoint I can absolutely see backwards time travel as being impossible. We can’t move negative distances across spatial dimensions, so why would we be able to move backwards in time?
That’s what I think is so neat about time travel. As a rational concept it’s so outlandish and ridiculously unlikely. Everything we know about physics says “Nope.”
But the concept to the human imagination seems to be such a natural and easy to grasp fantasy.
Perhaps borne from our desire to fix mistakes, prevent tragedies, and “be in the right place at the right time.”
On the simplest level we learn best through our mistakes, but wish dearly we could hang on to that knowledge while hitting “Ctrl + Z” on the consequences.
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How would any time travelers have known about his party? Did he advertise it? Or did he assume he would invent the time machine? Maybe time travelers just went to a much cooler party where there were drugs and people other than Stephen Hawking.
So you are apparently a time traveler from the past who still uses “bitches” to refer to women. A quick update, in this time and age this is considered sexist and you might want to get up to date with other expressions as well
Yeah, the Simpsons is STILL going, it has gotten weird and subversive since Nancy Cartwright and Dan Castenella died, they won’t recast them because that’s taboo, but they won’t lead them end the series, so it’s now a bunch of avant garde silent art animations
I live in a timeline where time travel has not yet been invented. Even if someone invents it in the future and travels to the past to the party, that’d create an alternate timeline where the party is attended and civilization leaps bounds ahead in glorious post-scarcity, magical socialism fashion.
But nooooo since the timeline was forked at that point, no matter how many people do, in fact, attend the party, I’m stuck in the “strand” of the timeline when no one ever did because time travel has not been invented.
Depends on how you see it. It could also be that for some reason or another even with backwards time travel no one shows up. And thus you avoid having a paradox
Or it could be like a time portal so once you build one you an travel back to any point it existed in but one to a point where it doesn’t exist since you need time travel infrastructure
I mean, that for the most part makes sense. Although in that case, wouldn’t it have been reported that “no one attended the party but the food and the snacks were somehow missing”?
That said. Unsure how exactly it went but I read somewhere that if you had the power of True Invisibility, that is being undetectable at any wavelength of light, then you’d basically be able to simulate negative mass, and from there to “time travel” it’s kind of a straight line.
However, IF, your theory is accurate, then you are the prime instance of you. All time travel alternatives are just YOU in another scenario, not different versions of each other, they are all YOU.
There’s different ideas on how time travel “could” work and one of them is the timeline-split notion upon which you base your idea. In that vain it’s solid.
Other ideas are that time travel always results in a loop or that its perhaps only possible under very specific circumstances (ie you can’t pick an arbitrary location or time to travel to nor to travel from).
My hunch is that even if time travel were possible there’s simply no practical experiment to tell whether you are in a split timeline (and if so how it differs from others), aka it’s outside of the realm of scientific // logical inquiry.
If y’all like exploration of time travel go watch the show Travelers some time. It has some interesting premises in that regard.
There is also the harry potter version, any time travel is woven into the only timeline. The past is “edited” to always have included the events time travel.
This can be considered similar to the branching method; where the original branch without the events of the time travel simply ends; only the “new” branch continues.
There is also the Paycheck method. There is no travel you can only observe by looking through a special “time telescope.” Maybe plenty of people observed the party, they just weren’t able to physically attend.
First I ever hear of the Paycheck method honestly, at least under that name. Reminds me of a short story about the government keeping a secret “chronoscope” machine and the efforts of the MC to democratize that knowledge.
Yeah, now that I think of it more, I can’t see a single good reason for a time traveler to show up at this party. Going back in time to prove the existence of time travel to the past has a very good chance of handing control of time travel away to people who can undo your existence without you ever being aware of it.
Even if you just wanted a conversation with one of the brilliant minds in physics, it would be smarter to pick a random lecture or non-time-travel-themed party.
Yes, or someone did show up despite knowing the risks because they trusted Hawking to understand the dangers of revealing the secret of time travel and not sharing it with any living soul. If time travel were to ever become possible and somewhat commonplace then the chances are probably close to zero that everybody chooses not to attend this party (assuming the invitation remains famous for long enough). Perhaps the party was crowded with people thinking the same way.
It’s much more likely that it all just played out exactly the way Hawking said it did, of course. But it’s a fun thought experiment to play around with.
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