So I’d have already seen my self travel back in time and am just repeating what’s already happened. Which would mean I’d have already seen my current self in advance and am now just experiencing the same event from the other way around?
Maybe you did… you just didn’t know it was you and it had no major impact on you, so you don’t remember it!
I think that’s assuming a linear timeline. The alternative would be visiting your younger self and then returning to an entirely different future
And that’s why time travel is classified as science FICTION because the paradox would make the situation impossible, among all the other reasons time travel is impossible.
It depends on how you imagine time travel and causality. Is it a stable time loop? Or do you visit another version of reality with different outcomes? When you travel, are you unraveling the course of history to be redone? Or are you visiting an unyielding etching of the timespace continuum? If time is a set of dimensions, as all modern physics supports, then theoretically it wouls be possible to move through those dimensions in all directions. Special relativity confirms that movement affects how you move through time, but if you go backwards in time, you are still moving forward from your own reference point. That’s the only way to retain your memories.
I believe I’m just assuming a linear timeline in this scenario, visiting a different dimension is definitely a possibility instead of going back on one timeline
With one linear timeline, you basically have Back to the Future rules. You can go back and change things, even if it rewrites you out of existence. Of course, there are some logical paradoxes that arise from that theory of time, so most versions rely on some delayed repair mechanism, like how the photo of Marty slowly disappears, or how The Ancient One explains the Time Stone to Professor Hulk. Time Cop, Butterfly Effect, and Looper do the same, with changes going into immediate effect like old injuries becoming later scars in real time, but erasing yourself really ought to be devastating to spacetime itself. I liked the concept in Butterfly Effect where the time traveler experiences all the memories of their new life in the altered timeline with every new change, but then they abandon the hard sci-fi aspect to get cute with stigmata. Donnie Darko probably handles it the best, where time travel itself creates a universe-ending paradox that requires the destruction of the time traveler.
Essentially, you jump from now back to another location in spacetime where you didn’t exist the first time around. If you overlap with yourself, you’re either going to gain a new retroactive memory, or there’s some magical maguffin that erased the memory (like the Tardis does for the Doctor), or some universal force reconciles the timestream and eliminates the paradox.
That’s interesting response thank you, definitely food for thought
Watch the movie named The Time Traveller’s Wife. It is absolutely superb and based on sort of that idea, but not quite.
There’s also a series that was cut short.
Semi-related: You may enjoy Steins;Gate.
Timelines bro
Yeah I didn’t factor in multiple timelines lol
Can’t go back in time, not because of time itself as much but because of the chain of causality. It’s a fantasy. And, from what I understand, many worlds is lazy fiction at worst (it’s okay if it’s just a characteristic of the setting and not the main reason everything works and the plot goes forward, idk 🤷), and an unconvincing and convoluted interpretation at best.
Depends on how your time travel works.
Real time travel would require to set everything back in place except your brain/body,
so you haven’t technically traveled back in time, but everyone around you effectively thinks you have
as they’d never accept themselves as being part of a universe that’s been ahead for 30 years and then reversed in place.But then what would happen if I choose not to travel back in time even though I’ve already seen myself do it??
This is a physics question. But the current laws of physics do not allow for going backwards in time, certainly no way for anything to interact with a past version of itself, so even if, IF it was possible under some future model that will replace the current one, there’s no way to predict what would happen with the current model because the current model says it doesn’t happen.
It’s like asking pre-Copernicus physics to calculate the movement of different star systems around a galaxy.
Watch that. Good video that explains it
