"If only I could turn back time" warbled flourescent-haired pop minx Lene in Aqua's drear-fest of the same name. What, Lene? What if you could? What would you do? Apart from not do your hair that ridiculous colour in the first place.
I watched that "Deja Vu" the other day. You know, the crime thriller where Denzel Washington discovers a police agency who have managed to look back into the past a few days and can prevent a murder from happening. It was alright to be fair, although my scientific mind quickly shut up shop when talk of time travel started. Mainly cos its bollocks.
Today I'm not here to discuss the scientific rights and wrongs of TT - I simply can't be bothered. Instead I want to focus on the concept of it, and how it is ultimately impossible in my opinion.
Picture the scene: On your way to work, you crash into someone in your car. Nowt major, but it was your fault and there's a hefty bill coming your way. Fortunately, you also discover the secret of time travel while you're on the pot at lunch so you quickly jump in your crudely-fashioned time portal, zoom back to 5 seconds before the incident and put the brakes on. Perfick.
Except..it isn't. Having gone back in time you've now altered the past so your 'old' self's experience of the event changes (i.e. you don't crash). Therefore you don't need to get into your teleporter and fix the damage. You've created an alternative ending. Still sounds feasible, yes?
Where it falls over logic-wise for me is that as far as events are concerned now, you came close to an accident and stopped in time - any person looking on at that event would see only a near-miss, because that's what happened. But in reality you intercepted your own stupidity and didn't crash. Therefore you don't have a big bill coming and you don't need to go back to fix it. You therefore don't experience any of the act of going back in time to fix it therefore that technically never happened. But it did happen, so how can it be possible that those occurrences don't exist any more? Your real-time experience now is that you narrowly avoided a crash, so the need to return to fix it doesn't need to happen any more. So how can it have?
I guess it's difficult for me to explain in a few words, but the basis of my argument is that time is a never-ending stream of occurrences which you can only experience once. The theory of time travel in films is that you can go back in time to fix the past before it occurs, but in doing so you eradicate the very need to go back and the actual act of doing so, so how can time travel exist? By the same token, you could go back far enough to actually precede any desire to return to the past, therefore preceding the invention of all time travel devices as well. It's a huge paradox which I simply can't condone on any level. Sorry folks.
Anyway, that's enough cyber-twaddle for one evening, but it does get the new blog up and running nicely. I believe there is the ability to post comments and arguments so feel free. And if we could reduce the number of knob gags at the same time, it'll be a happy side effect.
1 comment:
Knob gags rule
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