Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> What the scientific paper actually says (as best I can understand it) is that, if the universe is entirely deterministic, the conditions necessary for time travel can only occur when the time traveling wouldn't cause a paradox.

It's actually even more general than that: under non-deterministic laws (such as the way most people currently understand quantum mechanics), if time travel is possible at all, the probability of it will only be nonzero for time travel scenarios that do not cause a paradox. (I don't think this is discussed in the paper referenced in the article, but it is discussed in some of the other papers that that paper references--IIRC the Novikov paper is one of them.)



Thank you! That explanation actually makes the paper make a lot more sense.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: