I’m sitting around waiting for the e-mail chain to commence regarding this advertising scam. I haven’t heard back from the company in almost 48 hours, which means either they know I’m onto the scam, or they’re trying to secure enough funds to keep me quiet. There’s no way the perpetrators of such a fraudulent campaign would be honestly trying to instigate some kind of advertising deal. They’re in too deep right now. They need to bite the bullet and admit I caught them. After that it’s up to them whether or not they want to pay me to keep me quiet.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading this article by Laura Sanders on ScienceNews called “Taming Time Travel,” in which physicists grapple with paradoxes by trying to ensure the impossible remains…well, impossible.
Whenever you’re high and you’re talking to your friends about time travel, someone inevitably brings up what is known as the “grandfather paradox.” It’s usually you’re stupid friend who starts in on the paradox, because smart people know better than to drudge up the old, boring conversation topic. Most of us want to know more about the earth’s rotation and orbit in relation to time travel. How can you make sure that on November 5th, 1955 the earth will be in this precise place in the universe so as to ensure safe passage between today and that date? What if on November 5th, 1955 Earth is tilted differently on its axis than it is on July 22nd, 2010? And what are the odds that Earth would be fixed at the same location on it’s near-circular orbit around the sun on that day as it is today? Wouldn’t both of those attributes make time travel nearly impossible? You’d be firing people out into space unless you selected a date and time where the planet was in the exact location in space as it is the moment you choose to send someone back in time. One snow day half a decade ago I wrote an entire story about this. It was very tongue-in-cheek. Very…Fiction Writing For Dummies. It was called The Epoch Study (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). It’s really bad. But the idea is there.
But, whatever, your stupid friend doesn’t care about that. Your stupid friend just wants to know if it’s possible to go back in time and kill your grandfather, and — if so — will it negate your own existence? Now physicists are tackling this question, most likely because they too are tired of their stupid friends bringing it up when they’re getting high.
Some guy from Oxford thinks that it’s actually possible for the time traveler to remember killing his grandfather without actually doing it. That would, of course, explain how a drunk dude could go back in time and “kill his grandfather” without negating his own existence. But that’s a fucking cop out. Pay me that guy’s salary, call me a physicist and let me come up with ridiculous assumptions like that. Bullshit!
Ah, but this other guy, Seth Lloyd, he’s got the right idea. He’s an MIT guy, and they know their shit. Fuck Oxford. The article states, “A bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used to later kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or ‘some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment…’ In this version of time travel, the grandfather [Lloyd] says, is a ‘tough guy to kill.'”
As unrealistic as this all sounds, it makes perfect sense. If you’re alive, you shouldn’t be able to go back in time and kill your grandfather in order to negate your own existence. It’s pretty simple. Even the stupid LOST time travel rules (1977 is their past, so they can’t die — but for us 1977 is our present, so we can die) seems to address this. Which is why your retarded friend who gets high and wonders if he can kill his own grandfather to create a time travel paradox is not worth getting high with ever again.
Johnny Guitar – Bangkok By Night
Dreamend – Iceland
