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Philosophers, Physicists, and the Time Travel Paradoxes

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Time Machine Tales

Part of the book series: Science and Fiction ((SCIFICT))

Abstract

More than 30 years ago Quentin Smith, a philosopher who believes in a finite length to the past, wrote a refutation to those who believe in an infinite past and, while that paper has nothing to do with the paradoxes of time travel, in the course of presenting his reasoning he included the following curious passage:

“He felt the intellectual desperation of any honest philosopher. He knew that he had about as much chance of understanding such problems as a collie has of understanding how dog food gets into cans.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A time traveler admits (to himself) how perplexed he is by paradoxes in Robert Heinlein’s classic tale “By His Bootstraps,” Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941.

  2. 2.

    Excerpt from a conversation between two paradox-puzzled time travelers in Larry Niven’s story “Bird in the Hand,” The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1970.

  3. 3.

    Q. Smith, “Kant and the Beginning of the World,” New Scholasticism, Summer 1985, pp. 339–346.

  4. 4.

    L. Niven, “Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation,” Analog Science Fiction, August 1977. Niven took this title from a physics paper with that title, authored by Tipler, that had appeared three years earlier in Physical Review D (April 15, 1974, pp. 2203–2206).

  5. 5.

    L. Sprague de Camp, “A Gun for Dinosaur,” Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1956.

  6. 6.

    This is a statement of the belief that the past cannot be changed, an idea we will examine later in this chapter.

  7. 7.

    Look back at note 93 in Chap. 1.

  8. 8.

    This is what is called a bilking paradox, and such paradoxes will be discussed later in this chapter. Brown gave this story a lot of thought. At one point in the tale one of the colleagues, puzzled by how the inventor will be able to place the cube into the time machine at three if it has already vanished from his hand and appeared in the machine, asks “How can you place it there, then?” Replies the inventor, “It will, as my hand approaches, vanish from the [machine] and appear in my hand to be placed there.”

  9. 9.

    L. Dwyer, “Time Travel and Some Alleged Logical Asymmetries Between Past and Future,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March 1978, pp. 15–38.

  10. 10.

    M. Jameson, “Dead End,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1941.

  11. 11.

    E. Binder, “The Time Cheaters,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1940.

  12. 12.

    V. Grigoriev, “Vanya,” in Last Door to Aiya (M. Ginsburg, editor), S. G. Phillips 1968.

  13. 13.

    M. A. Abramowicz and J. P. Lasota, “On Traveling Round Without Feeling It and Uncurving Curves,” American Journal of Physics, October 1986, pp. 936–939.

  14. 14.

    F. J. Bridge, “Via the Time Accelerator,” Amazing Stories, January 1931.

  15. 15.

    This story idea (the letter was signed only with the initials T.J.D.) may well have been the inspiration for R. Rocklynne, “Time Wants a Skeleton,” Astounding Science Fiction, June 1941. Not all fans agreed with T.J.D. A few years later, for example, a teenager named P. Schuyler Miller (1912–1974), who would author several time travel classics himself, wrote a letter to the editor of Astounding Stories (June 1931) stating “there is nothing in physics … to prevent yourself from going into the past … and shaking hands with yourself or killing yourself.” That did, however, provoke the following harsh reply from another, more skeptical reader (in the December 1933 issue): “P. S. Miller once wrote that time traveling is not incompatible with any laws of physics … ‘he don’t know from nothing.’”

  16. 16.

    C. B. White, “The Lost Continent,” Amazing Stories, July 1927.

  17. 17.

    F. Flagg, “The Machine Man of Ardathia,” Amazing Stories, November 1927.

  18. 18.

    C. Cloukey, “Paradox,” Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1929.

  19. 19.

    H. F. Kirkham, “The Time Oscillator,” Science Wonder Stories, December 1929.

  20. 20.

    By this time Gernsback had lost control of Amazing, and Science Wonder was his come-back as a publisher of pulp ‘scientifiction.’

  21. 21.

    E. L. Rementer, “The Time Deflector,” Amazing Stories, December 1929. Gernsback may well have been the editor, before he lost Amazing, who bought this story, and the magazine’s new management simply used what remained in inventory.

  22. 22.

    F. Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” Science Wonder Stories, April 1930.

  23. 23.

    Look back at note 26 in “Some First Words.”

  24. 24.

    Despite these words, Gernsback apparently hadn’t given up entirely on the ‘invisibility of time travelers’ view, as he had only a few months earlier published another such tale: R. A. Palmer, “The Time Ray of Jandra,” Wonder Stories, June 1930. In this story (one either silly or hilarious, take your pick) a time traveler moves into the future by means of a ‘time ray.’ Unfortunately, the ray works differently on the various chemical elements, and not at all on either hydrogen or oxygen. Thus the time traveler—or at least much of him—and his machine do vanish into the future, but left behind are “several gallons of water spilled on the floor.” (The human body is about 60 % H2O.)

  25. 25.

    For example, Nicholson’s item (2) is a precise plot outline for L. Raphael, “The Man Who Saw Through Time,” Fantastic Adventures, September 1941, and a version of item (4) is in Robert Heinlein’s famous “All You Zombies—,“ Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1959.

  26. 26.

    One cannot, however, fault the imaginative powers of James Nicholson (1916–1972). He eventually became President of American International Films, the company that made such science fiction ‘classics’ as Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), the 1963 X (The Man with the X-Ray Eyes), and The Time Travelers (1964).

  27. 27.

    The opening line to F. M. Busby, “A Gun for Grandfather,” Future Science Fiction, September 1957.

  28. 28.

    Jiri Benovsky, “Endurance and Time Travel,” Kriterion—Journal of Philosophy, 2011, pp. 65–72.

  29. 29.

    R. P. McArthur and M. P. Slattery, “Peter Damian and Undoing the Past,” Philosophical Studies, February 1974, pp. 137–141; P. Remnant, “Peter Damian: Could God Change the Past?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, June 1978, pp. 259–268; R. Gaskin, “Peter Damian on Divine Power and the Contingency of the Past,” The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, September 1997, pp. 229–247.

  30. 30.

    This work is in the form of a letter to his friend Desiderius (who later became Pope Victor III), in which Damian rebutted Desiderius’ defense of St. Jerome’s claim that “while God can do all things, he cannot cause a virgin to be restored after she has fallen.” Desiderius thought the reason God could not restore virgins is that he does not want to, to which Damian replied that this meant God is unable to do whatever he does not want to do, but this meant that God would then be less powerful than men, who are able to do things they don’t want to do (such as go without food for a month). This is a good example of the dangers involved when getting into debates with theologians.

  31. 31.

    The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was so inspired by Damian’s view that the past could be changed that he wrote a short story based on it (see “The Other Death,” originally published in The New Yorker, November 2, 1968) and put a character in it named after Damian.

  32. 32.

    E. Stump and N. Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy, August 1981, pp. 429–458.

  33. 33.

    P. Geach, God and the Soul, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969.

  34. 34.

    A summary of those opinions can be found in G. Brown, “Praying About the Past,” Philosophical Quarterly, January 1985, pp. 83–86. Debate continues on the retroactive prayer into the 21st century: see, for example, K. Timpe, “Prayers for the Past,” September 2005, pp. 305–322, and T. J. Mawson, “Praying for Known Outcomes,” March 2007, pp. 71–87, both in Religious Studies.

  35. 35.

    M. Dummett, “Bringing About the Past,” Philosophical Review, July 1964, pp. 338–359.

  36. 36.

    Reprinted in the posthumously published Grumbles from the Grave (edited by Heinlein’s widow, Virginia Heinlein), Del Rey 1990.

  37. 37.

    See Jan Pinkerton, “Backward Time Travel, Alternate Universes, and Edward Everett Hale,” Extrapolation, Summer 1979, pp. 168–175. The time machine in Mitchell’s story is more fantasy than anything else. It is simply stated that if the clock runs backward, then it travels backward in time.

  38. 38.

    Wells’ failure to use paradox in his famous novel surprises most modern readers and, in fact, one of the first reviewers specifically criticized him for this lapse. See the 1895 review of The Time Machine that appeared in Pall Mall Magazine, by Israel Zangwill, reprinted in Parrinder’s book (note 1 in the Introduction).

  39. 39.

    T. Powers, The Anubis Gates, Ace 1983, a work with equal shares of physics and magic.

  40. 40.

    C. L. Moore, “Tryst in Time,” Astounding Stories, December 1936.

  41. 41.

    See, for example, P. J. Riggs, “The Principal Paradox of Time Travel,” Ratio, April 1997, pp. 48–64. The ‘principal paradox’ is that time travel is inherently contradictory because it permits the possibility of traveling to an earlier time to prevent the trip. The grandfather paradox is a special case of this. For more discussion, see T. Chambers, “Time Travel: How Not to Defuse the Principal Paradox,” Ratio, September 1999, pp. 296–301.

  42. 42.

    R. Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” Collier’s, June 1952.

  43. 43.

    R. Silverberg, “The Assassin,” Imaginative Tales, July 1957.

  44. 44.

    See, for example, the novel by C. L. Harness, Krono, Franklin Watts 1988.

  45. 45.

    A. Porges, “The Rescuer,” Analog Science Fiction, July 1962.

  46. 46.

    P. S. Miller, “Status Quondam,” New Tales of Space and Time, November 1951. This is the Miller I mentioned back in note 15.

  47. 47.

    N. Schachner, “Ancestral Voices,” Astounding Stories, December 1933.

  48. 48.

    N. Schachner, “The Time Imposter,” Astounding Stories, March 1934.

  49. 49.

    C. Dye, “Time Goes to Now,” Science Fiction Quarterly, May 1953.

  50. 50.

    The ‘paradox’ is that, assuming you do arrive in the past with a working gun, why can’t you kill your grandfather? After all, you must fail in that quest because otherwise you wouldn’t be there from the future to even try. But why must you fail? It is, of course, not actually necessary to try to kill your grandfather to run into this paradoxical situation—just go back in time to any moment in the past and try to kill yourself! You won’t succeed (if the past is unchangeable), but why not? (To argue ‘because the past is unchangeable’ is to beg the question. We need more insight than that.)

  51. 51.

    M. Reynolds and F. Brown, “Dark Interlude,” Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951.

  52. 52.

    C. South, “The Time Mirror,” Amazing Stories, December 1942.

  53. 53.

    F. Brown, “First Time Machine,” Honeymoon in Hell, Bantam 1958.

  54. 54.

    J. W. Meiland, “A Two-Dimensional Passage Model of Time for Time Travel,” Philosophical Studies, November 1974, pp. 153–173. Science fiction had already considered time travel suicide in, for example, K. Neville, “Mission,” Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1953.

  55. 55.

    F. Arntzenius, “Causal Paradoxes in Special Relativity,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, June 1990, pp. 223–243.

  56. 56.

    P. Worth, “Typewriter from the Future,” Amazing Stories,” February 1950. See also note 106 in Chap. 1.

  57. 57.

    For example, in J. H. Schmidt, “Newcomb’s Paradox Realized with Backward Causation,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, March 1998, pp. 67–87, we read that “there are as yet no generally accepted solutions” to the grandfather paradox.

  58. 58.

    S. Gorovitz, “Leaving the Past Alone,” Philosophical Review, July 1964, pp. 360–371.

  59. 59.

    F. M. Busby, “A Gun for Grandfather,” Future Science Fiction, Fall 1957.

  60. 60.

    David Horacek, “Time Travel in Indeterministic Worlds,” The Monist, July 2005, pp. 423–436.

  61. 61.

    S. Krasnikov, “Time Travel Paradox,” Physical Review D, February 14, 2002, pp. 064013–1 to -8.

  62. 62.

    R. G. Swinburne, “Affecting the Past,” Philosophical Quarterly, October 1966, pp. 341–347.

  63. 63.

    “The Red Queen’s Race,” Astounding Science Fiction, January 1949.

  64. 64.

    O. Saari, “The Time Bender,” Astounding Stories, August 1937.

  65. 65.

    This story describes something a bit more than ‘simply’ affecting the past; it has a causal loop in it. The time traveling historian makes his trip because of an event in the past that his trip causes. Such paradoxes will be the subject of the next section.

  66. 66.

    L. Sprague de Camp, “Aristotle and the Gun,” Astounding Science Fiction, February 1958. Asimov and de Camp were close friends, and their two stories with similar premises are clearly the result of a bit of friendly rivalry.

  67. 67.

    P. Geach, “Some Problems About Time,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (P. F. Strawson, editor), Oxford 1968.

  68. 68.

    M. Sinclair, “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched,” in After the Darkness Falls (B. Karloff, editor), World Publishing 1946.

  69. 69.

    D. Beason, “Ben Franklin’s Laser,” Analog, December 1990.

  70. 70.

    Like just about everything concerning time travel, however, not all think this. For example, the great German physicist Max Planck (1858–1947), the 1918 Nobel physics laureate, said (in 1922): “Physics hence is inclined to view the principle of least action more as a formal and accidental curiosity than as a pillar of physical knowledge.” Still, he did also declare that he thought it unlikely “the dominance of such a simple law could be a mere accident.” Quoted from Marc Lange, “Conservation Laws in Scientific Explanations: Constraints or Coincidences,” Philosophy of Science, July 2011, pp. 333–352.

  71. 71.

    See A. Carlini, et al., “Time Machines: The Principle of Self-Consistency as a Consequence of the Principle of Minimal Action,” October 1995, pp. 557–580, and “Time Machines and the Principle of Self-Consistency as a Consequence of the Principle of Stationary Action (II): The Cauchy Problem for a Self-Interacting Relativistic Particle,” October 1996, pp. 445–479, both in International Journal of Modern Physics D.

  72. 72.

    I. D. Novikov, “An Analysis of the Operation of a Time Machine,” Soviet Physics JETP, March 1989, pp. 439–443.

  73. 73.

    R. D. Driver, “Can the Future Influence the Present?” Physical Review D, February 15, 1979, pp. 1098–1107.

  74. 74.

    R. F. Young, “The Dandelion Girl,” The Saturday Evening Post, April 1, 1961. See also note 49 in Chap. 2.

  75. 75.

    R. Wilson, “The Message,” Astounding Stories, March 1942.

  76. 76.

    G. C. Edmondson, “The Misfit,” Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1959.

  77. 77.

    M. Weisinger, “Thompson’s Time Traveling Theory,’ Amazing Stories, March 1944.

  78. 78.

    “Typewriter from the Future”: see note 106 in Chap. 1.

  79. 79.

    Theodore Sider, “Time Travel, Coincidences, and Counterfactuals,” Philosophical Studies, August 2002, pp. 115–138.

  80. 80.

    See, for example, David King, “Time Travel and Self-Consistency: Implications for Determinism and the Human Condition,” Ratio, September 1999, pp. 271–278.

  81. 81.

    Nicholas J. J. Smith, “Bananas Enough for Time Travel?” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, September 1997, pp. 363–389.

  82. 82.

    This does present us with the curious (although non-paradoxical) situation that the time traveler will find, upon his appearing in the future, the date he will write (in his personal future) when he returns to just after he left on his time trip.

  83. 83.

    A science fiction suggestion that in certain situations (particularly causal loops), might actually be good advice! From L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Best-Laid Scheme,” Astounding Science Fiction, February 1941.

  84. 84.

    L. Dwyer, “Time Travel and Some Alleged Logical Asymmetries Between Past and Future,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, March 1978, pp. 15–38.

  85. 85.

    P. Bolton, “The Time Hoaxes,” Amazing Stories, August 1931.

  86. 86.

    F. J. Bridge, “Via the Time Accelerator,” Amazing Stories, January 1931.

  87. 87.

    E. Binder, “The Time Cheaters,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, March 1940.

  88. 88.

    J. Blish, “Weapon Out of Time,” Science Fiction Quarterly, Spring 1941.

  89. 89.

    A. B. Chandler, “The Tides of Time,” Fantastic Adventures, June 1948.

  90. 90.

    W. Sheldon, “A Bit of Forever,” Super Science Stories, July 1950.

  91. 91.

    M. Leinster, “The Gadget Had a Ghost,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1952.

  92. 92.

    D. I. Massor, “A Two-Timer,” New Worlds SF, February 1966.

  93. 93.

    H. Harrison, The Technicolor Time Machine, Doubleday 1967.

  94. 94.

    C. Simak, “The Birch Clump Cylinder,” Stellar 1 (J. del Rey, editor), Ballantine 1974.

  95. 95.

    D. Knight, “The Man Who Went Back,” Amazing Stories, November 1985. This same idea was used earlier in the story “Compounded Interest,” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1956) by Mack Reynolds, in which the inventor of a time machine has the money to build his gadget because he uses it to go back into the past where he deposits a small sum, which then grows (through the ‘magic’ of compound interest) into the cash he needs to fund his time machine.

  96. 96.

    G. Fulmer, “Understanding Time Travel,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Spring 1980, pp. 151–156.

  97. 97.

    G. Fulmer, “Time Travel, Determinism, and Fatalism,” Philosophical Speculations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Spring 1981, pp. 41–48.

  98. 98.

    M. MacBeath, “Communication and Time Reversal,” Synthese, July 1983, pp. 27–46.

  99. 99.

    H. Reichenbach, The Direction of Time, University of California Press 1956, p. 37.

  100. 100.

    J. L. Friedman et al., “Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves,” Physical Review D, September 15, 1990, pp. 1915–1930. Another physicist, however, has flatly rejected this need for the Principle, calling it redundant: see D. Deutsch, “Quantum Mechanics Near Closed Timelike Lines,” Physical Review D, November 15, 1991, pp. 3197–3217.

  101. 101.

    S. Mines, “Find the Sculptor,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, Spring 1946.

  102. 102.

    R. M. Farley, “The Man Who Met Himself,” Top-Notch Magazine, August 1935 (Top-Notch was an adventure pulp published between 1910 and 1937).

  103. 103.

    The reason for this line in the story is that earlier the question of “Where did the time machine come from originally?” was raised. The answer: “There was never any ‘original.’ … There is no round-and-round circle of events, no repetition. Merely one closed cycle.” This is, in fact, the modern view of causal loops, expressed in a 1935 (!) science fiction story.

  104. 104.

    See note 99 in Chap. 1, and the related discussion there.

  105. 105.

    One philosopher calls this bit of dialog “unhelpful,” while ignoring the fact that it appeared in a science fiction pulp magazine and not a scholarly journal, and was clearly meant to dazzle teenage boys (see note 39 and related discussion in “Some First Words”) with the concept of a causal loop, rather than to break new ground in metaphysical thought. See Richard Hanley, “No End in Sight: Causal Loops in Philosophy, Physics and Fiction,” Synthese, July 2004, pp. 123–152.

  106. 106.

    G. Nerlich, “Can Time Be Finite?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, July 1981, pp. 227–239.

  107. 107.

    P. S. Miller, “As Never Was,” Astounding Science Fiction, January 1944. This is the same Miller who appears in note 15 (and see note 46, too).

  108. 108.

    It is not sufficient to say that perhaps she polished the watch. Polishing would remove material from the watch, which means she gives him a watch different from the one he gives her in the past.

  109. 109.

    Bradley Monton, “Time Travel Without Causal Loops,” The Philosophical Quarterly, January 2009, pp. 54–67.

  110. 110.

    Professor Hanley (note 105) says the answer to such questions is “straightforward”: the information comes “from itself.” I think the issue is rather deeper than that.

  111. 111.

    See D. Franson, “Package Deal,” in Microcosmic Tales, Taplinger 1980. The British philosopher J. R. Lucas had a similar scenario in mind when he wrote, in his book A Treatise on Time and Space (Methuen 1973, p. 50), “It is very important, not only for reasons of modesty, that I should not be able to use a Time Machine to go into a public library and read my own biography.” Robert Heinlein didn’t agree with Lucas: in his 1956 novel The Door Into Summer the protagonist, an inventor, travels thirty years into the future, where he reads some patent disclosures for inventions that he doesn’t remember, even though they are in his name. He then returns to his own time and promptly files the patents!

  112. 112.

    M. R. Levin, “Swords’ Points,” Analysis, March 1980, pp. 69–70.

  113. 113.

    P. Anderson and G. Dickson, “Trespass,” Fantastic Story Quarterly, Spring 1950.

  114. 114.

    Why would God do such a thing? Apparently ‘just to have some fun with geologists and biologists,’ as creationists call such ancient fossils ‘sports of nature.’

  115. 115.

    G. Klein, “Party Line,” The Best from the Rest of the World (D. A. Wolheim, editor), Doubleday 1976 (story originally published in France in 1973).

  116. 116.

    J. Finney, “The Love Letter,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 1959.

  117. 117.

    T. N. Scortia, “When You Hear the Tone,” Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1971. See also L. Padgett, “Line to Tomorrow,” Astounding Science Fiction, November 1945.

  118. 118.

    M. Leinster, “Sam, This Is You,” Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1955. This story was later broadcast as an episode on the “X-Minus One” radio drama program. See also F. A. Reeds, “Forever Is Not So Long,” Astounding Science Fiction, May 1942.

  119. 119.

    L. Del Rey, “Fools’ Errand,” Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1951.

  120. 120.

    N. Schachner, “Lost in the Dimensions,” Astounding Stories, November 1937.

  121. 121.

    ‘Time traveling’ by crossing time zones is an idea that one can trace at least as far back as to Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story “Three Sundays in a Week.”

  122. 122.

    From Robert Forward’s 1992 novel Timemaster.

  123. 123.

    J. Harrison, “Jocasta’s Crime,” Analysis, March 1979, p. 65.

  124. 124.

    M. MacBeath, “Who Was Dr. Who’s Father?” Synthese, June 1982, pp. 397–430.

  125. 125.

    W. Godfrey-Smith, “Traveling in Time,” Analysis, March 1980, pp. 72–73. This false claim had already been raised by a physicist (L. S. Schulman, “Tachyon Paradoxes,” American Journal of Physics, May 1971, pp. 481–484), and even earlier by a science fiction writer (P. Anderson, “Time Patrol,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1955).

  126. 126.

    Phil Dowe, “The Coincidences of Time Travel,” Philosophy of Science, July 2003, pp. 574–589. See also J. Berkovich, “On Chance in Causal Loops,” Mind, January 2001, pp. 1–23, and P. Dowe, “Causal Loops and Independence of Causal Facts,” Philosophy of Science, September 2001, pp. 89–97.

  127. 127.

    R. Dee (this is not the ‘Dee’ of Harrison’s story!), “The Poundstone Paradox,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1954.

  128. 128.

    C. L. Harness, “Child By Chronos,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1953.

  129. 129.

    R. Heinlein, “All You Zombies—,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1959.

  130. 130.

    S. Lem, “The Time-Travel Story and Related Matters of SF Structuring,” Science Fiction Studies, Spring 1974, pp. 143–154.

  131. 131.

    G. Benford, “Down the River Road,” After the King: Stories in Honor of J. R. Tolkien (C. Tolkien and M. Greenberg, editors), Tor 1991.

  132. 132.

    M. Gardner, “Mathematical Games,” Scientific American, March 1979.

  133. 133.

    See, for example, Jack Williamson’s 1938 novel The Legion of Time, and C. L. Moore’s, “Tryst in Time,” Astounding Stories, December 1936. L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000), too, was an early pioneer in the exploration of the MWI idea in science fiction long before Everett. In his 1941 novel Lest Darkness Fall, for example, he uses the analogy of a tree (the “main time line”) that is always sprouting new branches.

  134. 134.

    N. Bond, “Parallel in Time,” Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1940. See also S. N. Faber, “Trans Dimensional Imports,” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1980.

  135. 135.

    W. Sell, “Other Tracks,” Astounding Science Fiction, October 1938.

  136. 136.

    Just like Marty McFly does at the end of the 1985 film Back to the Future. The movie is fun, but pulp science fiction did it first.

  137. 137.

    M. Leinster, “Sidewise in Time,” Astounding Stories, June 1934. Splitting universes with multiple time tracks and time loops became quite popular after Leinster’s and Sell’s stories; you can find the basic idea repeated yet again in Alfred Bester’s “The Probable Man,” Astounding Science Fiction, July 1941, for example, in which each new journey into the past causes the future to fan out into an infinity of new time tracks.

  138. 138.

    L. Watt-Evans, “The Drifter,” Amazing Stories, October 1991.

  139. 139.

    In Jack Haldeman’s 1990 novel The Hemingway Hoax we read that “there is not just one [parallel] universe, but actually uncountable zillions of them.”

  140. 140.

    In “Quantum Mechanics for Cosmologists,” Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press 1987.

  141. 141.

    J. R. Pierce, “Mr. Kinkaid’s Pasts,” Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1953.

  142. 142.

    A. Everett, “Time Travel Paradoxes, Path Integrals, and the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” Physical Review D, June 25, 2004, pp. 124023–1:124023–14.

  143. 143.

    For a modern philosophical argument specifically rebutting Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the MWI, see Theodore Sider, “A New Grandfather Paradox?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 1997, pp. 139–144.

  144. 144.

    See note 34 in Chap. 3.

  145. 145.

    R. A. Healy, “How Many Worlds?” Nous, November 1984, pp. 591–616.

  146. 146.

    B. S. DeWitt, “Quantum Mechanics and Reality,’ in The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (B. S. DeWitt and N. Graham, editors), Princeton 1973.

  147. 147.

    B. Shaw, “What Time Do You Call This?” Amazing Science Fiction, September 1971. When a bank robber in one world tries to make his escape into the other world, he literally runs into ‘himself’ trying to escape after robbing the ‘same’ bank in the parallel world!

  148. 148.

    D. S. Goldwirth et al., “Quantum Propagator for a Nonrelativistic Particle in the Vicinity of a Time Machine,” Physical Review D, April 15, 1994, pp. 3951–3957. See, too, the earlier D. S. Goldwirth et al., “The Breakdown of Quantum Mechanics in the Presence of Time Machines,” General Relativity and Gravitation, January 1993, pp. 7–13.

  149. 149.

    D. R. Daniels, “The Branches of Time,” Wonder Stories, August 1935.

  150. 150.

    These sad, resigned words were written when the author, David R. Daniels (1915–1936), was just twenty years old. A year later he committed suicide.

  151. 151.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

    Paul J. Nahin

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Nahin, P.J. (2017). Philosophers, Physicists, and the Time Travel Paradoxes. In: Time Machine Tales. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48864-6_4

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