Time-traveling consequences: Part 2:- Grandfather Paradox
Previous cycle:-
In Part 1, we had discussed “Bootstrap Paradox” in which an object, idea, or thought traveled back to the past from the future, without having a true origin, gets stuck on an endless loop. You can check out the whole story here if you hadn’t yet:-
Prologue:-
“Man can do what he wills. But he cannot will what he wills!” — Sir Arthur Schopenhauer.
What if someone from the future traveled back to the past to avert this ongoing COVID global pandemic, thus saving the whole humanity. But if there wasn’t any COVID pandemic in history, how come the future traveler got to know about it?
The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past. If someone were to go back in time and kill their grandfather before their mother or father had been born, then that means the time traveler would never have been born. That means the time traveler could not have gone back in time to kill their grandfather. But if the time-traveler didn’t go back in time to kill their grandfather then their grandfather would live. Hence, the cycle would start all over again. A paradox.
Referring to the image, we can deduce that this paradox doesn’t follow a linear chain of events. Somewhat it follows a cyclic spinal loop that couldn’t be explained over the linear narrative. But as we are adapted to believe in a linear chain of events, let’s try to deduce some linear solutions to this problem, to avoid this paradox.
A linear chain of events solution:-
1. Boring Solution:-
One of the most simplistic solutions we can come up with that the time-traveler traveled to some other world and killed his grandfather there. Thus, the grandfather of his world remained unaffected and eventually give birth to this assassin time-traveler.
2. Logical Solution:-
The man you killed was NOT your grandfather. Read the following story collected from here:-
Say you, like most people, only knew your grandfather as an older man. One day you saw a photo of him as a young man and you remember it clearly. So when you get sent back in time to kill him (for whatever reason), you remember that image of him as a young man and you go on the hunt. You find him, and you’re sure it’s the right man. Because he can’t possibly identify you, you approach him and talk to him. You confirm his name is the same as your grandfather’s name. You take a blood sample and somehow perform a DNA test. It is absolutely 100% your grandfather. Completely certain, you kill him. Yet you still exist. You stick around in your version of 1955 and wait to see what went wrong.
It’s only at the man’s funeral that you realize your actual grandfather had a twin brother who had been horribly murdered as a young man — a story your family was always too hurt to share with impressionable young members of the family like yourself. So grieved by his brother’s death, your actual grandfather took his brother’s name and lived the rest of his days under that identity. You’ve actually not killed your grandfather at all, you’ve killed your great-uncle.
Determined to kill your grandfather, you make another attempt at the funeral, only the police — there to comfort the grieving family and suspicious the murderer may be in attendance — pounce and arrest you before you can do the deed. You’re sentenced to life in prison, despite your name not appearing in any birth records (because you haven’t been born yet), and you spend the rest of your days behind bars. Meanwhile, your grandfather grows old, has children, and then grandchildren; including a younger version of you, who will one day grow up, go back in time and fail to kill his grandfather.
3. Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment solution:-
Before discussing it’s relation to Grandfather Paradox, let’s discuss what Schrödinger’s cat thought-experiment is all about.
In Schrodinger’s imaginary experiment, you place a cat in a box with a tiny bit of radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, it triggers a Geiger counter which causes a poison or explosion to be released that kills the cat. Now, the decay of the radioactive substance is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This means that the atom starts in a combined state of “going to decay” and “not going to decay”. If we apply the observer-driven idea to this case, there is no conscious observer present (everything is in a sealed box), so the whole system stays as a combination of the two possibilities. The cat ends up both dead and alive at the same time.
Now, as soon as the time-traveler was about to kill his grandfather, “somehow” the realities got split into two different scenarios, in one his grandfather ends up dead and in other his grandfather ends up alive, thus being able to produce his assassin grandson. To note, that “somehow” might sound absurd, but we can’t absolutely rule out this quantum-entanglement-possibility.
All these three cases provide a “linear chain of event” explanation and thus it avoids the paradox.
Summing up:-
Thus Grandfather Paradox could be generalized as inconsistencies emerged through changing the past which prevents that event to occur in the first place.
Some of its variants are Hitler Paradox, in which a time-traveler travels back in time to murder Adolf Hitler before he can instigate World War II and the Holocaust. But as there wasn’t any Adolf Hitler present, there wouldn’t be any history of World War II and Holocaust, thus the time-traveler wouldn’t be motivated to go back and kill him.
Epilogue:-
If you enjoyed the concept and want to live in it, do watch “Dark”, A german Netflix original show which is based on genre Sci-Fi Mystery Thriller which beautifully takes into account various examples of Paradoxes.
This article is 2nd part of a Trilogy series. Do read the final part, based on “Predestination paradox & Free Will.”
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