Perhaps the end of a semester and heading into the Christmas holidays is a bad time to decide that ye olde blog needs some attention. But my New Year's resolutions are all starting early: sticking to my diet, finally losing weight, and writing more.
Back to said thesis statement.
I'm heading into my second semester as a Junior in college and I've already started the research process for an extensive project that, I plan, will be the main attraction to my creative writing portfolio (which you can peruse as you please here). It will consist of several short stories exploring the problems, theories, and possible results of time travel. Which means lots of essays on Temporal Metaphysics that are entirely out of my depth, but hey, I try to be a well rounded person.
So here's an interesting theory: temporal loops. Or, at least, what I understand of temporal loops. Imagine a time-line, just your average black line with little labels of dates and events.
Now imagine that you draw a semicircle sitting right on top of it. This is the path of a time traveler. He breaks away from the main time-line at point A and rejoins it at point -A (it can't be point B. B comes after A, and he's gone back in time. See?)
Just the very fact that he has broken away from the time line causes many problems, such as:
1.) By going back in time he has temporarily erased himself from the immediate future (let's call that point B, since it looks so lonely). Not only is his once possible future (point B) forever changed and possibly forever abandoned, but he has also linked his past (point -A) with with a new future, creating a conflict between future and past. In effect, past and future become the same and the words now mean nothing to the time traveler.
2.) He has now inserted two 'copies' of himself into one point in time. The implications of this are, as of this blog post, unknown.
3.) And finally, there is the loop itself. You can pretend it acts like temporal erosion: once created, it isn't certain whether it will cease to be immediately. Will it vanish as if it never was traveled? Will it gradually cease to be over time? Or is it a permanent track that, once beaten down, will stay there for all eternity?
This last question, of course, could be answered if one knew what sort of matter the time traveler is traveling *through*. It could be imagined that, since there is a version of the time traveler that will always go back in time at point A, the time loop will never have a chance to close. But that observation also brings up a series of *other* problems.
1.) Assuming the time loop never closes, will the time traveler be caught up in it again when he returns to point A, forcing him to forever move between point A and -A indefinitely?
2.) If so, does this mean that all his 'past selves' will be caught up with his once 'future self,' causing him to multiply infinitely until he reaches the number where the death of his older selves is equaled by the addition of his younger selves?
3.) If not, then how does the universe handle the fact that his life will continue to play out to its end over and over again separated only by the length he traveled like a broken record?
Though he will not experience it directly, the time traveler has, in effect, gained a sort of immortality and placed the entire universe on repeat.
And this is all the things I thought of based on *one* paragraph of *one* essay I read on Temporal Metaphysics and Causal Time Loops.
Get ready. There will be more!
And feed the Grumbies.
-L
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