Know about the grandfather paradox and the concept of traveling back in time
Learn about the grandfather paradox and the concept of time travel to the past.
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Transcript
60 Second Adventures in Thought. Number Two, The Grandfather Paradox.
Will time travel ever be possible? Rene Barjavel was a French journalist, and science fiction writer, who spent a lot of his time thinking about time travel. In 1943, Barjavel asked what would happen if a man went back in time to a date before his parents were born and killed his own grandfather.
With no grandfather, one of the man's parents would never have been born, and therefore, the man, himself, would never have existed. So there would be nobody to go back in time and kill the grandfather in the first place, or the last place, depending on how you look at it.
The grandfather paradox has been a mainstay of philosophy, physics, and the entire Back to the Future trilogy. Some people have tried to defend time travel with arguments like the parallel universe resolution, in which the changes made by the time traveler create a new separate history branching off from the existing one. But the grandfather paradox prevails.
Although the paradox only suggests that traveling backward in time is impossible, it doesn't say anything about going the other way.
Will time travel ever be possible? Rene Barjavel was a French journalist, and science fiction writer, who spent a lot of his time thinking about time travel. In 1943, Barjavel asked what would happen if a man went back in time to a date before his parents were born and killed his own grandfather.
With no grandfather, one of the man's parents would never have been born, and therefore, the man, himself, would never have existed. So there would be nobody to go back in time and kill the grandfather in the first place, or the last place, depending on how you look at it.
The grandfather paradox has been a mainstay of philosophy, physics, and the entire Back to the Future trilogy. Some people have tried to defend time travel with arguments like the parallel universe resolution, in which the changes made by the time traveler create a new separate history branching off from the existing one. But the grandfather paradox prevails.
Although the paradox only suggests that traveling backward in time is impossible, it doesn't say anything about going the other way.