Temporal Mechanics
Temporal Mechanics is the study of phenomena that affect or are affected by changes in the flow of time itself. The most predominant of which is time travel. Although it has never been achieved, recent studies suggest that time travel might be possible. Because of the lack of ‘real’ evidence, Temporal Mechanics is at this time mostly a phylosophical study. However, its study can help make time travel possible and prepare to understand it when this happens. The most interesting facet of time travel occurs when someone were to travel backwards in time and affect events that took place. There are several possibilities of the outcome of such a venture:
- The results of the changed event propagate through the timeline, changing the present in accordance with the new flow of events. People in the present would not know if this has occured. The person responsible for the change would
- Become trapped in the past, as there is no longer a direct line tying him to the present (assuming returning to the present was ever possible), or
- Be erased from the timeline, as the present from which he travelled no longer exists and he would never have travelled to the past in the first place from the new present.
- The results of the changed event create an alternate timeline that co-exists with the unaffected timeline. This outcome is less likely, because it would require the formation of a complete universe out of nowhere.
A large number of temporal events can lead to paradoxes, the most famous of which is the grandfather paradox, in which someone travels back in time and kills their grandfather. The death of their grandfather results in them never being born, but since they were never born, they could not have gone back in time to kill their grandfather in the first place. This appears to be an unsolvable time paradox. However, because we have to assume that any paradox will not lead to the destruction of the universe, something can be said about temporal paradoxes:
| Tiemens’ Temporal Theorem |
| All temporal paradoxes are predestination paradoxes. A predestination paradox is a paradox that could not have been avoided — one could say, it was destined to be. Proof It is clear that, in Temporal Mechanics, it is possible for the result to precede its cause. The claim that a paradox must be a predestination paradox then boils down to the statement that for any causal time loop to exist, it must be a closed time loop, meaning that the result and the cause are inevitably linked. If the result happened, the cause must also happen. The proof follows directly from this observation. To make it easier to follow, I will use an example to illustrate the proof. Suppose a ship receives a distress call about another ship being stuck in a strange storm, and moves in to investigate. The investigating ship then doesn’t find the ship sending the distress call, but finds themselves stuck in the storm, and sends out a distress call. Closer investigation reveals that the distress call they received earlier was in fact their own distress call. The time loop is closed. Now suppose the ship found out that it was their own distress call before they moved in to investigate and decide to avoid the storm. The time loop would now be open. However, because the cause now never happens, the distress call will never be sent and so the flow of events changes in such a way that the ship never pickes up the distress call in the first place, removing the time loop altogether as if it never happened. Because it didn’t. End of proof. |