Grandfather paradox
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects. Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining time in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars.
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Time travel
- Time travel in fiction, Grandfather paradox
Time travel is the concept of moving backwards and/or forwards to different points in time, in a manner analogous to moving through space, and different from the normal "flow" of time to an earthbound observer. In this view, all points in time (including future times) "persist" in some way. Time travel has been a plot device in fiction since the 19th century. Traveling backwards in time has never been verified, presents many theoretic problems, and may be an impossibility. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is known as a time machine.
A central problem with time travel to the past is the violation of causality; should an effect precede its cause, it would give rise to the possibility of a temporal paradox. Some interpretations of time travel resolve this by accepting the possibility of travel between branch points, parallel realities, or universes.
Another solution to the problem of causality-based temporal paradoxes is that such paradoxes cannot arise simply because they have not arisen. As illustrated in numerous works of fiction, free will either ceases to exist in the past or the outcomes of such decisions are predetermined. As such, it would not be possible to enact the grandfather paradox because it is a historical fact that your grandfather was not killed before his child (your parent) was conceived. This view doesn't simply hold that history is an unchangeable constant, but that any change made by a hypothetical future time traveler would already have happened in his or her past, resulting in the reality that the traveler moves from. More elaboration on this view can be found in the Novikov self-consistency principle.
See also
Books
- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
- About Time by Paul Davies
- An Experiment with Time by J. W. Dunne
- Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Organizations
Leading scholarly organizations for researchers on the history and technology of time and timekeeping
- Antiquarian Horological Society – AHS (United Kingdom)
- Chronometrophilia (Switzerland)
- Deutsche Gesellschaft für Chronometrie – DGC (Germany)
- National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors - NAWCC (United States of America)
Miscellaneous arts and sciences
- Anachronistic
- Date and time notation by country
- List of cycles
- Network Time Protocol (NTP)
- Nonlinear (arts)
- Philosophy of physics
- Rate (mathematics)
Miscellaneous units of time
