Why Time Travellers (Still) Cannot Change the Past
نویسنده
چکیده
It is widely believed that if backward time travel were possible, one could go back in time and, with the benefit of foresight, prevent one’s past mistakes and the terrible events of history. One could kill Adolf Hitler when he was young, urge Ned Kelly to cover his knees, and so on. Sadly, this idea is incoherent—I call it the second-time-around fallacy. There can be no first time around of a set of events, with the time traveller absent, followed by a second time around of the very same events, with the time traveller playing a role: for either there is no second time around; or else the second time around is a genuinely distinct series of events, to be involved in which is to avoid rather than change the original series of events. To see this, consider that to say that an event (for example, Australia losing the America’s Cup in 1987) both did and did not occur, simpliciter, is to assert a contradiction. To be able to say without contradiction that some event both did and did not occur, one must posit at least two times or places such that the event occurred at one, but not at the other. Suppose that times are multiplied. One might posit two temporal dimensions, saying that time is like a plane rather than a line. Then the year 1987, for example, is a line across the plane, and the time traveller can travel to a point
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