Proof by induction:<\/p>\n
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one day somebody invents a machine that lets people travel back in time. That will be a big day in history — the day that travel back in time finally becomes possible!<\/p>\n
Here’s the problem: Precisely because it will be such a big moment in history, sooner or later people from the future are going to want to come back and visit that historic day. In fact, since people will be traveling to the same destination from all different eras in the future, that particular moment in history is going to become awfully crowded.<\/p>\n
And not all of those visitors from the future will be as careful as they should be. One of them, inevitably, is going to do something that will interfere with the sequence of events that resulted in the invention of the time machine.<\/p>\n
When this happens, the time machine will no longer have been invented on that day. That entire future timeline will cease to exist, curious time traveling tourists and all.<\/p>\n
Which means that we will enter an alternate timeline. In this new timeline, travel will only be invented sometime later.<\/p>\n
But in this new timeline, the same sequence of events will happen, only at a later date.<\/p>\n
And so, alas, QED. Nobody will ever invent that time machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Proof by induction: Suppose, for the sake of argument, that one day somebody invents a machine that lets people travel back in time. That will be a big day in history — the day that travel back in time finally becomes possible! Here’s the problem: Precisely because it will be such a big moment in … Continue reading “Why you can’t travel back in time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16388"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16389,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16388\/revisions\/16389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}