Real Time Analysis
Most every book or movie with time travel as a central theme gets it wrong. If time travel is possible in real life, you will not be able to go back in time and "change the past" and create a new timeline, and a new present for yourself. The scientific reasoning for this involves some common sense and the fact that I am always right.
In Back to The Future, Marty time travels back to 1955, makes some changes, and then returns to 1985 to find that the present is different. In this scenario, Marty starts in an initial timeline A. After traveling back in time, he begins altering the timeline, and creates timeline B so that timeline A does not exist anymore.
The problem is that time fits together like a jigsaw, you can't derail it from one timeline to another. In other words, since timeline A will always yield timeline B, it will never exist in the first place. Marty will always experience timeline B, because timeline A doesn't make sense by itself, and you can't have more than one timeline.
So if time travel is possible and if you travel back in time, your "changes" will always produce the same timeline you started with. This is because your journey back in time was already compensated for in the timeline.
The Back To The Future trilogy is ripe with offenses. The timeline is constantly revised and people disappear from pictures and newspapers. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seems to get it right in some places (though other parts purposefully abuse time travel cliches), but Dirk Gently's Holisitc Detective Agency gets it wrong.
Star Trek sometimes gets it wrong like in All Good Things, but occasionally gets it right, like in Time's Arrow (though there are issues here too). Red Dwarf is similarly plagued. Early episodes such as Future Echoes and Statis Leak get it exactly right, but episodes like Timeslides, The Inquisitor, and Out of Time feature gratuitous timeline editing.
These are just off the top of my head. It would be interesting to compile a larger list and see what percent of popular fiction treats time travel correctly. Stay tuned for further elaborations on how Real time travel would work.
In Back to The Future, Marty time travels back to 1955, makes some changes, and then returns to 1985 to find that the present is different. In this scenario, Marty starts in an initial timeline A. After traveling back in time, he begins altering the timeline, and creates timeline B so that timeline A does not exist anymore.
The problem is that time fits together like a jigsaw, you can't derail it from one timeline to another. In other words, since timeline A will always yield timeline B, it will never exist in the first place. Marty will always experience timeline B, because timeline A doesn't make sense by itself, and you can't have more than one timeline.
So if time travel is possible and if you travel back in time, your "changes" will always produce the same timeline you started with. This is because your journey back in time was already compensated for in the timeline.
The Back To The Future trilogy is ripe with offenses. The timeline is constantly revised and people disappear from pictures and newspapers. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seems to get it right in some places (though other parts purposefully abuse time travel cliches), but Dirk Gently's Holisitc Detective Agency gets it wrong.
Star Trek sometimes gets it wrong like in All Good Things, but occasionally gets it right, like in Time's Arrow (though there are issues here too). Red Dwarf is similarly plagued. Early episodes such as Future Echoes and Statis Leak get it exactly right, but episodes like Timeslides, The Inquisitor, and Out of Time feature gratuitous timeline editing.
These are just off the top of my head. It would be interesting to compile a larger list and see what percent of popular fiction treats time travel correctly. Stay tuned for further elaborations on how Real time travel would work.
posted by flowbeus at 12:38 PM
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