The Paradoxes of Time Travel

The next statement is a starting point for something to expand on, in regards to viewing time as something other than linear. “A time traveler, like anyone else, is a streak through the manifold of space-time, a whole composed of stages located at various times and places. But he is not a streak like other streaks. If he travels toward the past he is a zig-zag streak, doubling back on himself. If he travels toward the future, he is a stretched-out streak. And if he travels either way instantaneously, so that there are no intermediate stages between the stage that departs and the stage that arrives and his journey has zero duration, then he is a broken streak.”(p. 146) I would have to disagree with it being broken, but rather fixed in time moving, neither
forward or backwards. But regressing into the present moment and becoming even more spatially aware of the present moment surroundings and how it feels. Imagine you could travel through time, and that you do it in the future, remembering the present moment as you see it now. That is neither broken or moving on a linear timeline, but rather fixed in place focusing on the past memories and imagining the future ones. Could that be the future and the past still happening? Is time travel only possible through thought alone? To plant our conscious self in this present moment, into our past or future selves?
Branched timelines are introduced in the paper, a branched timeline would create a ‘paradox’ in itself as it would create ripples through the fabric of time. Many different variations of the same thing happening differently at a mere infinite amount of possibilities. “The more we extend the assignment of personal time outwards from the time traveler’s stages to the surrounding events, the more such events acquire multiple locations.”(p. 147) This early indication of “branched” timelines, sets the framework for a very interesting theory. It would then seem that as you move forward or backwards through time you create different variations and different versions of yourself, or a ‘branched’ timeline. This would be why you would have to be the same person traveling back in time, as the person who is in the time that you are traveling back too. If they were different, then any change you made in the past would have no effect on your present or future. You (the time traveler) would have to be the one who observed the change from the time you moved either forward or backwards in time, in relation to the time you left. Now while the future is always uncertain, there would be no way for you to observe any objectionable change.
Another example that shows how time travel is on a plane and not linear would be, “We might expect that when a time traveler visits the past there will be reversals of causation. You may punch his face before he leaves, causing his eye to blacken centuries ago. Indeed, travel into the past necessarily involves reversed causation. For time travel requires personal identity – he who arrives must be the same person who departed. That requires casual continuity, in which causation runs from earlier to later stages in the order of personal time.”(p. 148) This further shows that you, or rather the time traveler, would in fact have to be the person who not only travels through time, but the same person that arrives in the past or future. For a linear plane of time to exist, then what happens in the past would be fixed in the present and the future would always be the same, regardless. However, if time exists on a plane, altering the past would change the present while always altering the future. As the paper argues that Tim, or Tom would travel back to 1921 and kill their grandfather, it also shows how this would not change the past or the present, but rather that it would both alter and not alter them from happening, creating a branched timeline. What would happen is, “the branches are separated not in time, and not in space, but in some other way.”(p. 152) Let’s say for the sake of the argument that they were in fact successful in killing their grandfather. At the exact moment the ‘thought’ was to occur inside of their mind, and the realization that they would in fact be successful in their attempts to kill their grandfather, then, they would cease to exist, making the whole situation impossible. The branched timelines would be different variations of all the possibilities that could have ever occurred, creating infinite timelines. If they were able to kill their grandfather, before their father was ever born, which in turn led to the creation of them; then they would in fact be unable to kill their grandfather, because that would erase the entire timeline that led to their birth. The event would never be able to occur, because they would no longer exist. If they were never born, then they could never go back in time in the first place to kill their grandfather, there is no way for them to have ever been born if they were to kill their grandfather before he ever even birthed their father. This is what seems to be the ‘oddities’ surrounding the paradox of time travel. If this is indeed the case of how one would precede through time at different variations of your present location, then there would be no way for them to alter their own timeline. Time, location, and space are all three distinct variations of time that proceed to eclipse one another. This eclipsing of time, specifically your location in geo relations to the space that surrounds you, is your exact moment in time of the present location that you would be able to return to and because you can already do it, it is happening now. If your thoughts are temporal and the space between thoughts has no physical location, then things such as what is happening now must have already happened and we are merely reliving it through memory. Because, it is happening now in the present, then the future is the present moment’s past.
The only way for it to be possible for Tim to kill his grandfather, is for a branched timeline to occur on many different planes. “We have this seeming contradiction: ‘Tim doesn’t, but can, because he has what it takes’ versus ‘Tim doesn’t, and can’t, because it’s logically impossible to change the past.’ I reply that there is no contradiction. Both conclusions are true, and for the reasons given. They are compatible because ‘can’ is equivocal.”(p. 150) But even if there is a branched timeline, the timeline that branches from successfully killing his grandfather creates a paradox in time where Tim no longer exists. Because when he does in fact kill his grandfather, he erases his timeline of existence, dying before he was ever born. This is the real ‘Paradox’ within time travel, and an endless one at that. It would seem likely then, that there are laws or rules that would have to govern time travel. Such rules would have to apply and be unbreakable, such as not contacting yourself or anyone from your family in the past. Because if you saw a future version of yourself, then your past would not longer be the same and whoever you are at the moment; either the past version of yourself or the present one, would change completely and no longer be the same person. This is why branched timelines would make the most sense. Like the ending of the paper states; “It remains true at all the personal times of Tim’s life, even after the killing, that Grandfather lives in one branch and dies in the other.”(p. 152)

Therefore, this is the ‘paradox’ that would seemingly take place, over and over again, rendering the whole experience impossible. Einstein said that, “the distinction between past, present, and future is merely a stubbornly persistent illusion.” I do not remember where I heard this but another variation may be, “reality is an illusion.”(Einstein) Metaphysical reality is the barrier between the seen and the unseen world. An invisible
barrier between space and time. Your location is only relevant to your location in the present moment. Thought is instant, so possibly because we think time travel is possible, we may think it into existence? The present time, and the past memories, as well as the imagination of a future, could make traveling through thought possible, but that is a paradox for another time. To slip through time is a paradox itself, how could you go back without already having done it?