We didn't kill our grandfather

The most common objection to science ever developing any form of time travel is called "the grandfather paradox" -- i.e. the ability to travel in time would mean, theoretically that you could kill your own ancestors, thus preventing your own birth. Indeed -- so the argument goes -- by altering any of the ingredients of the past, even by so much as the flutter of a butterfly's wing, you would inevitably change the present. Since the present manifestly exists, and is as it is, then obviously time-travel cannot occur.

In a recent (July 2010) paper at arXiv.org, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology notes that fiction has been grappling with these problems for far longer than science, but that even most fictional accounts, going at least as far back as the Mahabarata epic of ancient India, deal with travel into the future. "Perhaps because of the various paradoxes to which it gives rise, the concept of travel to the past is a more recent invention," says Lloyd, pointing to Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. "The contemporary notion of time travel, together with all its attendant paradoxes, did not come into being until H.G. Wells masterpiece The Time Machine, which is also the first book to propose an actual device that can be used to travel back and forward in time."

To get around the grandfather paradox Lloyd and his co-authors suggest quantum teleportation and strict "post-selection" of what a time traveler could and could not do -- i.e. killing your own grandfather would be ruled out from the post-selected options and if you did succeed in killing the person who you thought was your grandfather this would have to mean that he was not after all your grandfather and that your grandmother had perhaps had an illicit affair!

Another recent paper (18 August 2010), published by Robert Lanza MD in the Huffington Post, draws on the latest research in quantum physics to go even further. We live in "a world of illusions" Lanza suggests: "Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed when they collapse into just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't yet taken."

In other words events in the past are in a suspended state, with infinitely flexible outcomes, until they are observed. Only then do they collapse into fixed and firm historical "facts." Lanza illustrates his point with reference to the assassination of JFK: "There's enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate you collapse more and more reality..."

(Video Link to trailer for Graham Hancock's novel, Entangled.)

I follow weird research like this because time-travel -- specifically to the Stone Age around 24,000 years ago -- is a central element of Entangled: The Eater of Souls, my first work of fiction. Unlike Jules Verne, however, I do not propose a time-machine as the vehicle. Rather my modern characters gain access to the remote past during out-of-body experiences induced by the consumption of psychoactive drugs such as DMT, psilocybin and Ayahuasca (see my previous essays here on Boing Boing).

At stake is the fate of the Neanderthals, an extinct human species and - through them - of mankind as a whole.

As I reported in Friday's essay we know that the last Neanderthals died out around 24,000 years ago but we don't yet know why this happened. There are indications that our own anatomically modern ancestors who co-existed with them may have wiped them out -- perhaps the first example of ethnic-cleansing in history -- but we don't know for sure. In other words, the fate of the Neanderthals has not yet been observed, is indeed surrounded by even more uncertainty and even more "uncollapsed" reality than the JFK story, and therefore may still be influenced by actions we take now.

This is the central dilemma and jeopardy of Entangled. In my story the Neanderthals are highly-evolved spiritual beings, pure innocence and love. Their goodness is a raw cosmic power that has attracted the attentions of a terrible demon. If he can persuade our own anatomically modern ancestors to exterminate them, then the psychic charge he gains from their mass murder will allow him to manifest physically in the twenty-first century and weave the doom of all mankind. To prevent that my modern characters must travel through time to confront the demon and ensure that our ancestors do not make this terrible mistake.

As the latest in a long line of storytellers to grapple with such problems it's good to know that science fact and science fiction have never been closer together. In the lab as well as in novels we may yet hope to rewrite our own past.

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ill lich

Wait a minute. . . what did he say about my grandmother?!
loroferoz

Have you read Slaves of Time, written by Robert Sheckley?

There’s the idea of actual, physical branching of the time traveler every time he uses the machine (nature abhors a vacuum), and of creation of an infinity of branching lines by repeated use of time travel apparatus (the branches, or “copies” do have time machines too).

There’s the ergodicity of Time, where “reality is a synonym for position”, and “nothing ever happens for the first time”.

Also, there is only one character, he is heroes and villains, oppresors and resistance fighters, and has to be all of that, in due time, maybe at seemingly different times in life.

These ideas among others make it unique among time travel stories.

I have never found the story in English. Read it in Italian from an Urania (praise be to Mondadori) issue. Lost the book. Anybody knows where I can find or download the story, or the book that carried it? (“The robot who looked like me” is it’s name).
anansi133

Most time travel stories are written down in books, and they usually embrace the metaphor of history as a narrative that’s written in a book. To scroll forward or backward in the narrative is like flipping pages in that book.

That Time Traveler’s Convention a few years back pretty much embodied that version. If history is like a book, then we can write in a bookmark for people to find, who want to turn back those pages.

Too much “big man” history study, with dates and names and trivia, can trick us into thinking that little people aren’t part of history. And for those who like to try to run things, that’s a huge advantage.

Computer games like Achron paint a much more nuanced picture of the idea. History reads less like a script written on dead trees, more like a writhing twisting snake that resists being pinned down.

I’d love to see historical re-enactments turn into a tool for historians. What would the JFK shooting look like if re-enacted by hundreds of hobbyists? They might run through several versions of the narrative, and compare the plausibility of those versions.

If history were more of a physical process with almost repeatable rules- less of a list of names and dates- then people could get more used to the idea that our choices actually matter to the future.
danco

AFAIK, the idea that a human (or even a living thing) has to observe something to collapse the quantum probabilities is not accepted by any quantum physicists. The universe counts as an observer, so quantum probabilities are immediately collapsed, whether you see it or not.

SchrÃ¶dinger’s cat was a thought experiment to illustrate a problem, not to comment on the actual quantum state of his cat.
- Unmutual
  
  “The universe counts as an observer, so quantum probabilities are immediately collapsed, whether you see it or not.”
  
  Aw shucks you beat me to it.
  
  The idea that human observation (or human consciousness, more specifically) has the power to collapse quantam states is inherently metaphysical and is not science. It’s only a hop skip and a jump from here to The Secret and the Law of Attraction.
  
  Also I don’t honestly believe reverse time travel will ever be possible. It might be possible to travel forward in time per se, by suspending animation or near light speed travel . . . but not backward.
  
  A friend of mine who is a physics professor recently wrote (regarding a different subject but still pertinent)
  
  “The math predicts an outcome correctly, so you start viewing the mathematical model as reality. This is the biggest problem with string theorists.”
  
  Our mathematical models make it seem like just about all things are theoretically possible, and yet they seem logically to be impossible. In this case I’d go with logic over physics, because I think our understanding of logic is pretty well sussed out but there are plenty of gaps in our understanding of physics, both known and unknown to us already.
  
  If reverse time travel is possible (big if) then I’d say that the branching realities theory is the only resolution to this paradox. But that has much greater implications . . . if there are infinite realities then what is the meaning of anything? If you don’t like the results of your choices in this reality why just take a machine back in time and start a new reality. End result: nihilism.
  
  Of course in the same breath as all this junk science mumbo jumbo the author is also talking about a Demon planning a massacre to accumulate a big amount of psychic energy or something. This is like the plot to every JRPG I’ve ever played ever. I just finished playing Final Fantasy Tactics and this is LITERALLY the exact plot of that game, not to mention Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII (with some minor variations, it even features time compression) Chrono Trigger, and many more I am sure.
  
  If this guy is making a comfortable living for himself I seriously need to quit my job at a pharma company and become a hack writer. I need to get on this gravy train right now.
  - AnthonyC
    
    “Also I don’t honestly believe reverse time travel will ever be possible.”
    
    I’m inclined to agree, but as yet there are no known physical laws to support that. General relativity allows space to multiply connected (think wormholes, as an example). Time dilation allows multiply connected regions of space to become separated in time, then brought back into spatial proximity. Go through one end, come out tomorrow; go through the other end, come out yesterday. Flies in the face of the arrow of time, but there’s not yet a good physical argument why it shouldn’t work.
Unmutual

that book sounds like a JRPG plotline (Chrono Trigger 3 perhaps?) or some anime bullshit.

Also the whole notion of “uncollapsed realities” is horseshit.

What did I eat for breakfast today? I think some toast and a banana, but I’ll never really know for sure unless I can travel back and time and collapse all other possibilities by observing myself eating breakfast.

Of course the minute I am done observing myself my own recollection of that will become suspect once again.
Anonymous

What about people who take two different meanings from a single observation?
Anonymous

oh come on, history is a story, especially of stuff that happened before everyone alive today was born. take any ancient event, and your understanding of it will deepen and sophisticate with ever more research. the collapsing of realities in question better refers to that kind of thing, rather than what you’ve got in your memory. even memory can easily be erroneous, especially concerning interpretations of events.
Anonymous

In mu opinion the notion of time-travel is largely based on a poetic fallacy; the image of the river of time which we can travel upon.
The universe could (should?) be more correctly thought of as existing as a series of “states”, each comprising the physical state of all particles (or waves, or something we haven’t conceptualised yet).
This universe can then be thought of as constantly moving from one state to another (in slices of time which we can make arbitrary infinitesimal), based on the laws of physics.

In this view, the idea of travelling to a previous physical state is more obviously spurious. There is only one time – now – and there is and can only ever be one state – the one existing in our arbitrarily small slice of time we call “now”.
The previous states simply do not exist. The raindrop from 5 minutes ago is not still out there in a previous metaphysical “past state”; those molecules and atoms have moved on and reconfigured and exist only in the here-and-now.
- AnthonyC
  
  “This universe can then be thought of as constantly moving from one state to another (in slices of time which we can make arbitrary infinitesimal), based on the laws of physics.”
  
  But that isn’t how the laws of physics work. Relativity tells us that time is not a universal invariant. Different observers moving at different speeds will disagree on what order certain events happened in, or how far apart the locations where they occurred were. There is no universal concept of simultaneity.
  
  Slices of time won’t do you any good; you need slices of space-time, which are far less convenient and intuitive. Add in quantum mechanics, which includes non-local effects (but no superluminal signaling that we know of), and things get messy.
Art

So great to see that C.C. cover artwork again!
Variable Rush

Time travel to the future IS possible. I’m doing it right now, it’s quite slow at the speed of one second per second.
Rockslide

“Since the present manifestly exists, and is as it is, then obviously time-travel cannot occur.”

That statement makes no sense. If time travel did occur and did in fact alter the past, it would also alter the future and it would be all that we ever knew to begin with. We would have no alternate reference point and so to us, it would appear as if things were as they always had been.

This argument that “if time travel ever becomes possible, we would know about it already” is invalid. It would be very easy to hide time travel, and it would also be essential in my opinion, to hide it.

We have no way of knowing that our current history has always been as it is. There’s no way to prove it.
gerg

i thought time travel could be fairly well explained using parallel universes. If you kill your grandfather, you aren’t killing your own, but rather a copy from a now distinct universe. Your own grandfather remains alive.
Spankey

First Post :)
I agree with Roger Krueger,
My issue with time travel is spacial rather than based on paradox; the Earth rotates around the Sun, and the Sun around the Milky Way and the Milky Way around…?

Travelling in time will also need to put the traveller in a place where he/she will not be transported into the void of space.

For instance if I were to travel back in time by 12 hours, the Earth would be where it was 12 hours ago leaving be dangling in space! So the way I see it, safe time travel would also need safe teleportation…

just my two cents :)

as far as the “Dead Grandfather” scenario goes I believe that it shouldn’t be two much of an issue; reality will just diverge into two streams – one where the grandfather was killed, and another where he wasn’t, leaving both reality streams valid – one where you did exist to go back and kill the grandfather, and one where you didn’t exist because you killed the grandfather.
Vanwall

I always liked Alfred Bester’s take on killing off your ancestors, or famous historical figures – a loopy mad scientist, (he’s mad at his wife who’s having an affair) goes back in time and starts killing off people to wipe out his wife. Things don’t work like that: time isn’t a positive, or a negative, or a dimensional thing, it’s personal – he wipes out his own reality, becoming a ghostly presence in the real world, leaving things the same. ‘S-OK, tho, he finds all the other’s who tried the same thing earlier, they exist in their own little hell. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed”, 1958
Brainspore

In other words events in the past are in a suspended state, with infinitely flexible outcomes, until they are observed. Only then do they collapse into fixed and firm historical “facts.”

So the “I CAN’T HEAR YOU! TRA LA LA LA LA!” tactic really works?
Anonymous

The author states that the concept of travel to the past is a more recent invention.
I find this hard to believe, as anyone wanting to go back to their youth would conceptually form an historic time travel scenario.
Perhaps the higher incidence of futuristic stories (if that is indeed the case) had to do with fiction. The past is boring, you already know what happened. The future is uncertain, you can let your imagination run wild.
Anonymous

Time travel is impossible, because there is no such thing as time.

Time is a construct of human consciousness.
kip w

That Classics Illustrated boasts strong art by Lou Cameron (who eventually got burned out on being mistreated by the company and went into writing novels), with a memorable panel of the Time Traveler journeying forward and wondering what wonderful advances Mankind is making. He is unaware that he’s passing by a futuristic wasteland where two opposing soldiers wrangle at close range with the equivalent of fixed bayonets.
- Prufrock451
  
  And it’s up on the web, too – http://www.tkinter.smig.net/ClassicsIllustrated/TimeMachine/01.htm
LuciferWept

David Gerrold already covered this issue, as well as several other time-related paradoxes, rather thoroughly in his excellent 1973 novel, The Man Who Folded Himself. Every time the main character travels backwards in time, he creates an alternate time line/alternate reality. It is a brilliant story and at just over a hundred pages, can be read in almost one sitting. Highly entertaining and thought-provoking, I picked up a copy after watching the equally fantastic independent film, Primer, which is also about time travel. Primer made my brain hurt in a good way and after viewing it I instantly hopped online to read essays and opinions, and that is when I stumbled across the reference to Gerrold’s novel. That was a wonderful week for absorbing new ideas/perspectives :)
DrPretto

What if there were more than 1 dimension of time and space (the one we are right now)
What if an alternate (but real) dimension Nazi Germany and Japan won World War 2?

Travel in time is interesting, also travelling between alternate dimensions if it could be possible.

This article is interesting:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25494/
- DrPretto
  
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
  
  Parallel universe (fiction)
  Parallel universe or alternative reality is a self-contained separate reality coexisting with one’s own. A specific group of parallel universes is called a “multiverse”, although this term can also be used to describe the possible parallel universes that constitute physical reality. While the terms “parallel universe” and “alternative reality” are generally synonymous and can be used interchangeably in most cases, there is sometimes an additional connotation implied with the term “alternative reality” that implies that the reality is a variant of our own. The term “parallel universe” is more general, without any connotations implying a relationship, or lack of relationship, with our own universe. A universe where the very laws of nature are different â€“ for example, one in which there are no relativistic limitations and the speed of light can be exceeded â€“ would in general count as a parallel universe but not an alternative reality. The correct quantum mechanical definition of parallel universes is “universes that are separated from each other by a single quantum event.”
  
  Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths” used the concept of parallel universes before the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics had been developed.
bcsizemo

I never like the “grandfather paradox”, it seems irrelevant.

If I go back in time then I am simply in a different place and time. If I kill my grandfather then I would not be born, that makes logical sense. But at the same time I already exist in that time (as my older self). So logically I wouldn’t be born, but I would already exist and would have essentially created a new time line.

This Micheal J. Fox Back to the Future stuff about disappearing because your parents never hooked up makes no sense.

At least in my view, time is not retroactive.
jaimeb

Dr. Ronald Mallet (a huge HG Wells fan) has found a potential way to travel back in time, but you would only be able to travel back as far as the first time the method is implemented. IE, if it were implemented today, in the future you could only travel back as early as Oct 27 2010. He writes about this and his reasons for researching time travel in an interesting, accessible book called “Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.” I’m not sure why his method is not yet a reality. Once implemented, we could start seeing all sorts of people come from the future– maybe we’re not ready to pull this trigger.
Naberius

Wait, what? Did you just cite a ‘paper’ on quantum physics published in The Huffington Post?

Surely you’re aware it’s been conclusively shown that 87 percent of all scientific information published in The Huffington Post is completely lacking in any factual basis?*

*Tanner, G; Wu, X, et al (2009). What a Load of Shit: A Quantitative Analysis of Scientific Information Published in The Huffington Post. Journal of Huffington Post Studies, 59(4), 286-295. doi:10.1037/1065- 9293.59.4.286
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Yes, somebody actually cited (apparently non-ironically) a “science” article from “The Huffington Post” — honestly, even if you like their politics, isn’t it obvious that the site is full of woo? With the Religious Right conducting its war on science, can’t the Left unify behind reason?
Derek C. F. Pegritz

Neadertals as beings of pure innocense and spirituality?! Do you know ANYthing about Neandertals–anything at all? Neandertals were human: no more, nor less, human than we are; they were just more adapted for life in arctic conditions than Homo sapiens sapiens were. They were just as brutal, vicious, and survival-oriented as *any* humans–maybe even more so, considering the harshness of the environment they inhabited. In terms of culture, they were probably much like today’s Inuit peoples: strong family ties, very ritualized lives, and no aversion to violence *when necessary.* Sure, they were spiritual and community-oriented: ALL HUMANS ARE; the former is a side result of our brains’ advanced pattern-matching capacity that complements the latter, which is a fundamental characteristic of our genus. Ergo, Neandertals were not much different than so-called “modern man.”

If you want to read a truly realistic depiction of Neandertals (or, at least, contemporary humans who have modeled their culture on extrapolated Neandertal conditions), check out David Zindell’s Neverness and The Broken God.
generalsystemtheory

It physical terms we as human beings are confined to one line of time. conciousness travels in one direction through electrochemical dipersal of selective functional triggers. one such is triptase a brain chemical that regulates our perception of time. in emergency fight or flight situations the brain can become blocked with other nuerochemicals and the triptase doesnt make it to the receptor, thus slowing down the perception of time. but we are still confined to one direction.
relatavistically, if a communications relay was travelling fast enough towards earth and was able to stay in constant contact with earth at some point mission control would hear the reply to their question before they had asked their question, because the leading edge of the signal would be intercepted in the intervening collapsed distance. the speed at which the relay would be travelling would have to be close to the speed of light and the communication link would have to be of a certain latancy but still this would begin to resolve the grandfather paradox…if you get the answer to your question before you ask it, would you still ask the same question, and would you still get the same pre-emptive(subjectively)reply? A lot of this relativity subjective overlap has to do with the fact that the earth is perpetually engaged in a geometric spiral, and so observers can be effectively overtaken.
However if there is infallible comprehension of potentiality and probability, then it is possible for that comprehension to produce time-like effects by prempting things of a probability of or approaching 1. such infallible knowledge is contained in the doctrines of divine omniscience and contributes to the [philosophical} appreciation of synchronicity.
The most compelling human equivilent reverse time travel is supposed more mystical, and as this author has put it “out of body” such as akashic record keeping ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records) and allegedly advances have been made in remote viewing as a form of espionage. the differance is that remote viewing is often constrained to view the present and its immediate environs, whereas the akashic records are apparantly a complete and up to date record of the past seen through three particular prismatic and distinctive differances, the moral chronicle, the logical chronicle and the chronicle of facts. this is exactly where the arrow of time resides IN THE OTHER DIRECTION…time and its expended energy is unravelled into three strands which can be experienced seperatley in the subjective conciousness of an individual located in the present.. the important thing is that nobody has every shown them to have any ability to change. It is only God, using infallible foresight and comprehension that can really create timelike effects from the deep past, by foreseeing their relevance in the future.He can also share what he sees in the future with us before it happenes, although often we have free will and can alter the entirety of the event group by responding to de ja vu with immediate mobility of change.
Anonymous

Chuck Palahniuk had an interesting take on the grandfather paradox in Rant, a highly underrated piece of fiction.
LuciferWept

“David Gerrold already covered this issue…” I was referring to the grandfather paradox…Gerrold’s novel has absolutely nothing to do with Neanderthals or time-traveling via psychedelic substances! LOL :)
WriterSP

The river of time concept is unfortunately a very persistent image in peoplesâ€™ minds. The whole notion of the moments of our lives being relegated to a period that has passed, and of us â€œmoving onâ€ to the next one, is in large part due, I believe, to the diurnal nature of our environment. The opening and closing of each day lends itself conveniently to compartmentalizing our daily lives into a definite series of sequenced events.

In truth, there is no real break of before and after, only continuous movement from place to place–which is the essence of change, starting at the molecular level (or probably much lower). To visualize this more clearly–in a simplistic way–imagine a typical day on a world that never rotated, where the sun always stood at zenith, round the clock (whatever â€˜thatâ€™ might be on such a world!) How would the â€œpassageâ€ of time be measured? Surely, it would be based on a measure of distance to-and-fro, a count of steps or heartbeats, where the â€œpastâ€ would be so identified as so many beats less than todayâ€™s count. The idea of counting backwards to return to an earlier count would be absurd, for the movement always continues onward, and to reiterate and earlier post, â€œitâ€™s always NOWâ€.
Ambiguity

This is like the plot to every JRPG I’ve ever played ever. I just finished playing Final Fantasy Tactics and this is LITERALLY the exact plot of that game, not to mention Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII (with some minor variations, it even features time compression) Chrono Trigger, and many more I am sure.

If this guy is making a comfortable living for himself I seriously need to quit my job at a pharma company and become a hack writer. I need to get on this gravy train right now.

I don’t know — sounds like the creators of JRPGs are the ones with the gravy train. At least they got your money.
Variable Rush

So… through the power of psychotropic drugs the main characters go on a spirit quest to the ancient past and battle demons in what probably amounts to nothing more than a “bad trip.”
Prufrock451

That thing about JFK’s assassination is a bunch of hooey.

You can’t conflate “nobody knows what happened” with “nobody talked about what happened” or “the guy who knows what happened got shot”.

JFK’s assassination was an observed action, the result of deliberate acts by a conscious being composed of a few trillion trillion atoms. In this example, Schrodinger’s Cat is dead, and Oswald shot him. (Yeah, yeah, put your hand down, Mr. Grassy Knoll.)

As for a medical doctor writing about time travel in the Huffington Post, I’m still waiting for the rebuttal in the Drudge Report from my dentist.
MattF

Gosh, I remember that cover. I had a -huge- collection of ‘Classics Illustrated’ comix when I was a kid, probly worth billions now if it hadn’t been tossed out.
airshowfan

Wow, I’m amazed that this thread got this far without anyone linking to “Wikihistory”, a.k.a. “Everyone kills Hitler their first time”:

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html

With that out of the way, I thought that it was pretty well-accepted within the sci-fi world that, when you travel back in time, you create an alternate timeline that is identical to the one you came from, but slightly different starting with your arrival at some past spot, and it’s in your interest to keep those differences minimal so that when you fast-forward this Timeline B back to your starting time, it’s similar enough to your original Timeline A that there’ll be a “you” who gets in a time machine and disappears (presumably off to some Timeline C) and is then replaced by you. All the time-travel stories where the past cannot be changed, or where there is “real time” communication between some people in the past and some people in the future, or (even worse) where changes in the past cause people to abruptly shift their awareness from one timeline into another, never felt as plausible or as elegant as the ones with branching timelines. With branching timelines, you can basically do whatever you want and not cause paradoxes.

Also;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPKH7eiDkZ0#t=5m40s
Hiroaki

This description of the effects of observation on quantum fluctuations seems to assume that only “your” observation counts. Both of the uncertain events described as examples (the assassination of JFK and the death of the last Neanderthals)were already fully observed. At a minimum, those responsible for each event observed exactly what occurred. If someone observed the events already and thereby fixed the quantum states already, our individual lack of observation should be irrelevant to the events’ fixity. Shouldn’t it?
- sabik
  
  @Hiroaki, that’s why the standard “Copenhagen” interpretation of quantum mechanics is not very widely believed. The traditional formulation of your question is called “Wigner’s friend”. The only reason the standard interpretation is still the standard interpretation is that nobody’s come up with anything convincingly better. Besides, there’s no reason to rush things â€” it’ll get settled in a few decades or centuries.
  
  Of course, to the lay-person or science fiction writer trying to make sense of things, it’s a bit confusing that there’s a dozen or more competing interpretations â€” especially if they don’t realise that there’s a dozen competing interpretations.
  - Hiroaki
    
    Thanks! I just looked up Wigner’s Friend, so it’s only lunch time and I’ve already learned my new thing for the day. Objective collapse vs. subjective collapse is a wrinkle about which I hadn’t read before. Fascinating.
TimO

Futurama’s “Roswell That Ends Well” episode did it best with Fry bedding his grandmother after accidentally nuking his grandfather.

Fry: But won’t that change history?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: [ultra sarcastic] Ohh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. “I’m My Own Grandfather”!

Bender: Fry, stop interfering with history! I don’t wanna have to memorize a lot of new kings when I get back.
Snig

Occasionally in genetic studies of humans, they come across someone who doesn’t fit expectations. If they can, they discreetly question the mom, in order to see if the “Milkman effect” is in play.
Crubellier

I note that Mr Hancock appears to be communicating from a universe where the authorship of The Time Machine is indeterminate and oscillates between HG Wells and Jules Verne…
jeremyhogan

“Unlike Jules Verne, however, I do not propose a time-machine as the vehicle. ”

Wells?
Matt Volatile

rrr… hv jst n qstn: Why s BngBng gvng ths ntd kk frm fr hs lntc, psd-scntfc, nnsns pnns?
- freshacconci
  
  Lighten up. Look at the nerdy discourse it’s generated. Boingers live for this stuff.
dougrogers

“In other words, the fate of the Neanderthals has not yet been observed,”

Pics or it didn’t happen.
- Anonymous
  
  Despite Mr. Hancock’s sketchy grasp on theoretical physics, I thought the premise for his book sounded interesting – until I got to this part…
  
  ‘In my story the Neanderthals are highly-evolved spiritual beings, pure innocence and love.’
  
  Urrrghh…
Roger Krueger

The much more mundane objection I have to most time travel stories is that they assume a stationary earth. Even with massive computational power and a non-expanding universe, finding two points in time to travel between while remaining within a survivable falling distance of earth’s surface seems unlikely.

For the survivable-falling-distance moment to occur over precisely that same square foot of ground you started on is preposterous.

(I’m going with the idea that you shouldn’t ignore science the general public understandsâ€”a spinning, orbiting earthâ€”but something less well-known like the expanding universe isn’t quite as objectionable to ignore or hand-wave away. Although it’s still a lot clearer/better known than the intricacies of quantum mechanics.)

Once you add in an expanding universe, even in space things are going to look seriously different at your destination than they did at your starting point.

Although I suppose that supplies a novel way of reaching a few distant planets in a future that has time travel but not FTL drives. Something interesting has to come within a reasonable rocket ride of where we currently are sooner or later, right?
epo

Surely the present is the way it is because the past is the way it was.

This takes into account time travellers and anything you are going to do while travelling back in time at some point in your future is already reflected in the present.
- freshacconci
  
  Yes. What he said.
Unmutual

“His books (the non-fiction ones, at least) are well put-together in terms of language and story. I found the fun to read, even though I didn’t necessarily accept what he put forward.”

how do you define a hack then?

Hacks are technically proficient . . . they can write a compelling story for example, but if you are savvy enough you realize that all of their ideas are cribbed from other sources and there isn’t much creativity, or they are merely hopping on a bandwagon.

Have you seen the movie Adaptation? Kaufmann’s fictional twin brother was a representation of the allure of hackery. Kaufmann was trying to go against the grain by writing a non-compelling biopic about an orchid poacher. He was trying to resist the urge to pepper his story with well worn and trite genre tropes. And in a parallel universe was his brother who sat around and dreamed up stupid movie-pitch concepts like The Thr3e (the killer, the cop and the victim are all the same person!) and then went to screenplay seminars to nail down his craft.

He made millions but more importantly when Charlie read the script, his reaction wasn’t “this is awful” it was “this is good!”. He was jealous of the hack brother because not only did he not give a shit and still made millions of dollars, he was a decent writer in his own right.
Prufrock451

You know, if you don’t buy or read Graham Hancock’s books, they don’t collapse into bullshit.
Ambiguity

He’s loopy. He’s a crackpot. He’s a hack. Why give his such a prestigious (and usually so sceptical, pro-science and pro-knowledge) platform?

I’ve read a few of his books (Supernatural and Fingerprints of the Gods). You could criticize him for being highly speculative and accepting alternative theories which are denounced in the domains he writes on, but I don’t think you can call him a hack, at least in my understanding of the word. His books (the non-fiction ones, at least) are well put-together in terms of language and story. I found the fun to read, even though I didn’t necessarily accept what he put forward.

You know, I like McKenna’s works, not because I think they were right (I think just about all of his pet theories were wrong), but because they told good stories. I don’t think Hancock’s books are as well-written, but they can kind of be enjoyed on the same level: suspend a little disbelief; read; return to normal.
Ambiguity

I normally think of a hack writer as someone who can’t really write well (just to make sure I’m not too idiosyncratic in my definition, Google tells me it is a “a mediocre and disdained writer”). I think Hancock writes well, if not entirely convincingly.

I Saw Adaptation, and I liked it. If I remember correctly, though, I wouldn’t have called Charlie’s brother a hack — more of a “sell-out.”

I’m pretty skeptical about most things, so I don’t I try not to let the question “did the writer convince me” affect my enjoyment of a book very much. I wouldn’t have enough to enjoy if I did that.

Anyway, I, for one, welcome our current speculative, guest blogging overlord, although he think he needs to tone the sales pitch down a wee bit. Sometimes BB gets a little too literal for me, and I think it’s good to shake things up a little bit. I think David P. does a good job of throwing in a little “woo” on occasion, and it’s a good thing when the guest bloggers occasionally take up the torch.