Saturday, July 02, 2005

If time travel were possible ...

I was doing some general thought last week on quantum mechanics and realized that if time travel were possible, not if it had ever been done or ever will be done, if it were merely possible then our entire current universe could be the result of temporal causation violations.

What we think of in stories and sci-fi as time travel causation violations, i.e. going back and killing your parents, is simple and trivial in the grand scheme of the universe. If reverse time travel is simply possible then at the quantum level, causation violations can happen instant to instant between particals, and literally everything. We would live in a soup of intertwined universes, constantly merging and wiping out futures, and pasts, micro-second to micro-second.

Over billions of years this continuous "fiz" of very small causation violations could add up to very significant deviations and improbable realities.

Not that I think that your reading this is an improbable reality ... but there it is. Perhaps even more improbable that I was able to write it.

Remember Carl Sagan's recipe on how to make an able pie? "Step one, first create a universe ..."

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