I want to kill my grandfather, should I be worried?
20:54
Frankly, yes. Unless of course you are referring to the great ‘Grandfather Paradox’ a time paradox that has been perplexing physicists for way too many years.
In a nutshell, it intends to disallow time travel to the past, by saying that if you went back in time and killed your grandfather, you would disallow yourself form being born, raising the question, if you were never born, who killed your grandfather? Let that settle in. Matter of fact, sit back and let that run in your head for a bit.
To prepare you for what impends, let’s lay down some simple truths.
Things cannot vanish, or just disappear into thin air, by the second law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation.
Things can't appear out of nowhere for the same reasons.
Nothing can be at two places at the same time.
Yeah. We have common sense. That's what tells us about all these facts above. So let's get rid of this presumption parasite. For that, we have to super small. Billions of times smaller than we are right now. By a few billion times. Let's stand next to a hydrogen atom. Remember electrons? Those funny negative balls that stay in shells? You were told that they revolve around the nucleus, and they stay in their shells. If you are going to say this to a particle physicist, make sure there's nothing around that is sharp and easy to throw. They don't stay in there shell, and they are not balls. They are not definite structures that revolve the nucleus, 'they' are actually just a weird fuzz around the nucleus. They also suddenly disappear from shell and magically appear in other ones.
It's like going from the 1st floor to the 2nd floor, and not existing on the way.
In your face thermodynamics. Well, actually, thermodynamics is not violated. Yet.
So that's common sense folks. Wait, look at the animation again. Notice that red wave? That's energy. In some form. A simple rule is that electrons go to a higher shell when they get energy and a lower shell when they lose energy. They also exist at two or more places at the same time.
I know it hurt me a little bit to know I will never be able to prevent myself from losing that bag I really liked on vacation a few years ago. But don’t lose all hope. You might still be able to go back in time.
- Multiverses:
Physicists consider the possibility there could be more than one parallel universe, or multiverses. So you can go back in time, but you’ll end up in a different past, in a parallel universe, where your actions would not affect your universe, preventing a loop being formed.
But let’s be honest, that’s boring.
- The cool one.
You’ve probably heard of Schrodinger’s cat. A PETA approved thought experiment, where a cat is in a sealed box with a nuclear device that has a 50% chance of killing that cat in the next hour. At the end of the hour, at the instant before the box is opened to reveal the answer, that cat is deemed dead and alive. The cat simultaneously lives and dies. The experiment deals with the dual nature of waves and particles, where every particle is simultaneously a wave, hence is located at more than one locations. Where common sense says you can’t be with that in mind, think about the paradox. I kill my grandfather, hence preventing my birth. The story could go two ways, either it carries on, where I am not born, so I don’t kill my grandfather, my grandfather lives, and so on. Alternatively, my grandfather did die, so I didn’t exist, so this patch of time didn’t exist at all. Two possibilities, one solution. One solution. One solution? Why just one? When talking about the Schrodinger’s feline friend, the instant before the box is opened, it does not fall to one solution. Its human intervention that forces the tip to one side. There is a superposition of states. The same could happen in the paradox case. The grandfather is simultaneously dead and alive, two things parallel, at once.
Well, that should sort it. See you back in 1997.
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