Does this theory make sense to you?

Question

First I'll start with my theory "When traveling to the past, the present you left cannot be changed because any action you take in the past would have already altered your present before you go to the past." Basically my theory states that you cannot cause what they call a time paradox because everything up until the point you arrived in the past and the present you left already happened before you left. Here is an example in case you dont understand. Lets say I grew up in a world without ever knowing Hitler existed. I make a time machine and go back into the past. Way back when Hitler was just a child. I miscalculate where I want to appear in the past and bam land my time machine right on top of Hitler killing him. To me he was just a poor kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. Any decision I make by choice will alter nothing because any choice I make has already been made. In my opinion it is more logical that the famous time paradox theory.Make sense?

By the way my theory does not state anything you do in the past will not change the present you left. It simply states anything you do in the past had already happened before you left to go the past in the first place which prevents the possibility of a paradox from ever happening. If you dont understand what that means please dont tell me I'm wrong.

If my theory held true the idea of going back and killing my mother or father is impossible because it would cause a paradox cauisng me to have never existed.
The theory is based on their being only 1 timeline and there is no way I could prevent my own existence after having traveled back in time because it already happened. And if I prevented my own existence then there is no way I could have traveled back in time in the first place according to my theory. The idea is everything that happened in the past already happened including anything I did after traveling to the past.

Answer 1

Let's look some assumptions people commonly make when looking at this problem.

1) Time Travel is possible and through it you can affect the past.
2) There is only one time-line to travel down; that is that when you travel back in time, it is the same timeline you came back on.
3) The past is static; that is, when you go back in time it is to the same past as the one you read about in history class. It cannot change. Therefore the present cannot change.
- (you say that you're your theory is not saying this, but I can see no logical way around those two statements being equivelent save for the reasoning behind why. You're just saying it in a different form. I'm probably just misinterpeting what you said though).
4) Events that happen in the past affect history.


Given that all those 4 hold, then you would actually run into a paradox because a decision you made affected the past. Since there is only one past under those assumptions, then the future you go back to is changed by a chain reaction along the one time-line. You are assuming inconsistent things.

That need not be the case.

Throw out assumption 2. Now there are many worlds and many time-lines. You might be trying to go back along your time-line, but by altering events you create a branching in history. One to coincide with a "history" consistent with your accident, and one to coincide with how you remember life.

Your choice still alters something, just nothing anyone else who can't jump between the 2 different histories is ever going to notice.

Here is another way to avoid the paradox by throwing out assumption 4.

Say there is only one timeline and one world. Look at the world at a given moment as being a single frame in a 3-Dimensional film. Assemble all these frames into one roll of film. That is our history. Now you somehow figure out how to jump out of your place on the reel and go back and alter some of the previous frames (like the one where Hitler was a kid is now Hitler as a kid with a time machine squishing him). But it is just a frame and doesn't affect other frames. When you go back, all the other frames remain the same.

That last one seems to me as the one you were trying to ensnare in your theory.

People claiming that someone else would just take Hitler's place are assuming for some reason that's beyond my ability to comprehend, that time is a sentient being that wants to be a certain way. I can think of no logical reason for this to hold.

Answer 2

I heard a physicist talking on a PBS radio program about ideas in the physics community regarding the possibilities of time travel. One idea they had was that if you did go to the past, you would just be unable to do anything to change history. Circumstances just wouldn't allow you to do something like kill your younger self. Maybe if you tried to shoot yourself, the gun would misfire or after you shot him you would discover you had shot the wrong person, or whatever. This sound like what you are talking about. So others have considered that possibility. I personally don't like it because I cannot think of any mechanism that would constrain your behavior that way.

Another idea is that you can never travel back to a time before the time machine was built. That solves all the paradoxes and interestingly, H. G. Wells' story "The Time Machine" obeys this rule.

Another idea is that any changes you make in the past cause a new parallel universe to be created. This idea was mentioned in the second "Back to the Future" Movie.

Of course, none of these ideas tell you how to build a time machine, just what the constraints might be if you could.

Answer 3

There is no such thing as time travel. Everything in our world as we know it is a messurement, from math to messureing liquids gases and of course time. We humans invented these messurements so we had a point of reference, or could have an idea for a time of day etc. As we advanced we humans refined these messurements even better. These time paradoxs you and others have talked about do not have a place in the real world as well. Let me give you an example. Take todays clock with the numbers 1-12 and now remove them from the clock and straghten out the numbers, and what do you have? A number line and what is a number line? A messurement. In this case the messurements are in hours, minutes and seconds. Think about it, the hours, minutes and seconds mean nothing, as all they are is a messurement. Therefore we do not move any more forward in time than we can backwards. Moving forward in time includes the hours, minutes and seconds that we count down and live our everyday lives in. You are wasteing your time (no pun). The paradox is: there is no paradox as well as time.

Answer 4

I think your theory is actually a proof that time travel of an 'actor' is impossible, since if you really did travel into the past in an 'acting' capacity, you clearly *could* kill your parents, but that clearly didn't happen, hence you must not have been able to go back in the past as an 'actor'

now, going back in the past as a 'witness' is another story. heisenberg aside, you could watch the past as much as you liked. In theory you could do that today with a verrrrry powerful telescope looking at light that left earth 'back then' and has bounced around a few singularities and come back to you.

Answer 5

what would happen if you wanted to kill someone you knew before you had the chance to meet him? your theory holds up for the unknowns, but what about for someone you know, say your mother? If you go back to kill her before you were born, then you would have never existed in the first place to go back and kill her, and she would still live, and you would be born again, only to want to go back in time and kill her. Its an endless loop unless there is more than one timeline running in parallel with each other. That way, you could go back and kill her, but your world would not change at all if you went back. The different timeline would be afected, Time travel is not possible yet if at all, and the only way to really understand the implications would be to experience them

Answer 6

you will not land on top of Hitler according to the rules of your theory. You state that the present cannot be altered by anything you do in the past because the past already happened. Its an improbability.

Answer 7

your theory has merit although if you go back far enough you may cause an alteration in evolutionary development of certain species and such . the story " sound of thunder " by h.g. wells is an example of that train of though . if you step on an animal say in 60 million BC you may be eliminating a food source for a current species and it will never develop. You may ,if unprotected , release ,say measles or another germ which could kill millions and in turn wipe out entire civilization's . just a though "something must occur be for it can exist "

Answer 8

Suppose that it is like a movies. O.K. So you make a time machines and then go to the past. There you change something. So in the future it like when you cut a part of the movie. So it's like lost but the movie is the same.

Answer 9

I feel sorry for that poor little boy. Shame on you!

There would be another boy who went on to become what we know today as Hitler. No matter what you do, history will not be altered. Everything has been written and it's called fate. It's just that we don't know it.

Answer 10

Ok according to the paradox all times exist so you still know who hitler is and you have now changed the future but yourr previous time still exisited. nice try