Those wishing to preserve the possibility of time travel must discard any hope of traveling to the past, which we will henceforth refer to as “past-travel,” due to the paradoxical problems involved in the journey. Of the many paradoxes that plague theories of past-travel, the double occupation paradox proves most severe, not only due to its underlying physics violations, but also the fact that those who argue against the paradox have failed to acknowledge its severity. The paradox holds that a time machine cannot past-travel because it would collide with its past self, as no two things can inhabit the same place at the same time. Some have argued that the machine should move physically on a 3D plane, but this has been refuted on matters pertaining to personal identity. However, even if we accept discontinuous travel, neither the time traveler nor the machine can past-travel because the process would attempt to duplicate matter and energy already existing in the past, thereby violating the law of conservation and other principles of physics. Moving forward, we will examine a scenario that demonstrates the paradox’s effects.
An Einstein Problem
Suppose 1950 is the present, and physicist Albert Einstein secretly invented a time machine in 1949 shaped like a British telephone box and christened the “Time-Dial.” Whether the machine is stationary or not, as we will see shortly, is irrelevant. Presently, Einstein plans two trips into the past; his reasons for traveling are also irrelevant. The first trip is to exactly one year ago, after he first completed the Time-Dial, and the second is to 1550 A.D. We will ignore the other paradoxes involved in these voyages and focus solely on how double occupation results in neither of these trips o...
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Nahin, Paul J. Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. New York, NY: American Institute of Physics, 1993. Print.
Shoemaker, Sydney. "Time Without Change." The Journal of Philosophy 66.12 (1969): 363-81. JSTOR. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
Only sixteen of the 179 pages relate to Albert Einstein. The rest of the novel describes some of his "dreams" from April 15 to June 28, 1905. What if time were a circle? What if cause and effect were erratic? What if the passage of time brought increasing order? What if we had no memories? What if time flowed backward? What if we lived for only a day? What if time were measured by quality and not quantity?
Summerville, Bruce D. "The Time Machine: A Chronological and Scientific Revision."Literature Resources from Gale. Gale, n.d. Web
Opposed to this view of the persistence of objects through time is three dimensionalism. Three dimensionalism appears to be more in line with our common everyday sense of how objects persist through time; one in which we believe in, as Chisholm puts it, “the concept of one and the same individual existing at different times” (143). In contrast to the four dimensionalist, then, the three dimensionalist maintains that objects persist by being “wholly present” at each point at which they exist. Ultimately, Chisholm uses his arguments against temporal parts in order to support his general theses concerning personal identity over time. However, it is not within the scope of this paper to explore the underlying reasons Chisholm might have had for arguing against the four dimensionalist: that topic is best left to a more extensive project on the subject of the persistence of objects through time. For now, we will just take a look at three criticisms that Chisholm proposes for the temporal parts theorist: (1) that the so-called spatial analogy is not accurate, (2) that the doctrine of temporal parts does not solve the Phillip drunk/ Phillip sober puzzle, and (3) that the doctrine is of no use in solving various other metaphysical puzzles.
What is time? Is time travel possible? When nothing is changing does time still exits ? Is that really true? Are you real? Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that is significant to us when questions and other clams bring curiosity about whether things are real or not.
John McTaggart in his essay “Time” presents a radical argument that claims time is unreal. While the argument is interesting and has attracted much attention for his arguments, I remain unconvinced of the argument he makes. This paper will lay out McTaggart’s argument that time in unreal, critically analyze why I believe McTaggart’s argument fails and present an alternative idea about time, utilizing aspects of McTaggart’s argument.
Fossum, Robert H. Hawthorne’s Inviolable Circle: The Problem of Time. Florida: Everett/Edwards Inc, 1972. 77-79
In this essay we will consider a much more recent approach to time that came to the fore in the twentieth century. In 1908 James McTaggart published an article in Mind entitled 'The Unreality of Time', in which, as the title implies, he argued that there is in reality no such thing as time. Now although this claim was in itself startling, probably what was even more significant than McTaggart's arguments was his way of stating them. It was in this paper that McTaggart first drew his now standard distinction between two ways of saying when things happen. In this essay we shall outline these ways of describing events and then discuss the merits and demerits of each, and examine what has become known as the 'tensed versus tenseless' debate on temporal becoming.
Smith, Q., & Oaklander, L. N. (1995).Time, change, and freedom an introduction to metaphysics. London: Routledge.
According to Lewis’s account of backwards time travel, the issues of personal identity in basic fission have already been settled. All arguments about fission and personal identity branch off of two basic objections as to whether or not persons B and C are identical.
In this short story, Dr. Yu Tsen, a Chinese spy for the German army, realizes that he is soon to be murdered by a Captain Madden and that he must pass on information of paramount importance to “the Chief” before his death. Reflecting upon his impending doom, Tsen remarks that “everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…” (The Garden of the Forking Paths, 40). This immediately smacks of Borges theories on time, namely his point that time is like an ever-rotating sphere, which appears in “A New Refutation of Time.” Essentially, all the actions that have occurred and will occur take place in what is perceived as the present, and this is the moment our protagonist chooses to live
...onding research are amongst the biggest names in the scientific world. Einstein of course, who laid the foundations. Karl Schwarzschild, who was at the forefront on picking up where Einstein left - Frank Tipler, who devised one of the first models of a time machine; and inspired a generation – Kip Thorne who opened the possibilities of wormholes in the fabric of space-time – and Stephen Hawking, who has explicitly shown a repeated interest in the topic. Even then that’s just to name a few! In the coming chapters I will analyse their work, and investigating whether in principle it is realistically possible to build a working time machine, given our current state of technological and physical progress as a civilization.
“That’s the most improbable thing I’ve ever heard. A time machine? Not likely- no, impossible!” And yet, he eyed my device as it glowed, pulsing ever brighter, with a sense of apprehension. I could see the gears turning in his head. He was probably thinking something along the lines of “If there’s any chance at all this man could have done it, I need to be afraid.” Of course, he didn’t need to be afraid.
Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell, and Richard Dawkins. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. New York, NY: Free, 2012. 7-8. Print.
Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Trans. Walter Englert. Newburyport, MA: Focus Philosophical Library, 2003.
Quoidbach, J., Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2013). The end of history illusion. Science, 339(6115), 96–98.