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1. What is Time Travel?
There is a number of rather different scenarios which would seem, intuitively, to
count as time traveland a number of scenarios which, while sharing certain
features with some of the time travel cases, seem nevertheless not to count as
genuine time travel:[1]
Time travel
Doctor. Doctor Who steps into a machine in 2024. Observers outside the machine
see it disappear. Inside the machine, time seems to Doctor Who to pass for ten
minutes. Observers in 1984 (or 3072) see the machine appear out of nowhere.
Doctor Who steps out.[2]
Leap. The time traveller takes hold of a special device (or steps into a machine) and
suddenly disappears; she appears at an earlier (or later) time. Unlike in Doctor, the
time traveller experiences no lapse of time between her departure and arrival: from
her point of view, she instantaneously appears at the destination time.[3]
Putnam. Oscar Smith steps into a machine in 2024. From his point of view, things
proceed much as in Doctor : time seems to Oscar Smith to pass for a while; then he
steps out in 1984. For observers outside the machine, things proceed differently.
Observers of Oscar's arrival in the past see a time machine suddenly appear out of
nowhere and immediately divide into two copies of itself: Oscar Smith steps out of
one; and (through the window) they see inside the other something that looks just
like what they would see if a film of Oscar Smith were played backwards (his hair
gets shorter; food comes out of his mouth and goes back into his lunch box in a
pristine, uneaten state; etc.). Observers of Oscar's departure from the future do not
simply see his time machine disappear after he gets into it: they see it collide with
the apparently backwards-running machine just described, in such a way that both
are simultaneously annihilated.[4]
Gdel. The time traveller steps into an ordinary rocket ship (not a special time
machine) and flies off on a certain course. At no point does she disappear (as in
Leap) or turn back in time (as in Putnam)yet thanks to the overall structure of
spacetime (as conceived in the General Theory of Relativity), the traveller arrives at
a point in the past (or future) of her departure. (Compare the way in which someone
can travel continuously westwards, and arrive to the east of her departure point,
thanks to the overall curved structure of the surface of the earth.)[5]
Einstein. The time traveller steps into an ordinary rocket ship and flies off at high
speed on a round trip. When he returns to Earth, thanks to certain effects predicted
by the Special Theory of Relativity, only a very small amount of time has elapsed for
himhe has aged only a few monthswhile a great deal of time has passed on
Earth: it is now hundreds of years in the future of his time of departure.[6]
Sleep. One is very tired, and falls into a deep sleep. When one awakes twelve hours
later, it seems from one's own point of view that hardly any time has passed.
Coma. One is in a coma for a number of years and then awakes, at which point it
seems from one's own point of view that hardly any time has passed.
Cryogenics. One is cryogenically frozen for hundreds of years. Upon being woken, it
seems from one's own point of view that hardly any time has passed.
Virtual. One enters a highly realistic, interactive virtual reality simulator in which
some past era has been recreated down to the finest detail.
Crystal. One looks into a crystal ball and sees what happened at some past time, or
will happen at some future time. (Imagine that the crystal ball really workslike a
closed-circuit security monitor, except that the vision genuinely comes from some
past or future time. Even so, the person looking at the crystal ball is not thereby a
time traveller.)
Waiting. One enters one's closet and stays there for seven hours. When one
emerges, one has arrived seven hours in the future of one's departure.
Dateline. One departs at 8pm on Monday, flies for fourteen hours, and arrives at
10pm on Monday.
A satisfactory definition of time travel would, at least, need to classify the cases in
the right way. There might be some surprisesperhaps, on the best definition of
time travel, Cryogenics turns out to be time travel after allbut it should certainly
be the case, for example, that Gdel counts as time travel and that Sleep and
Waiting do not.[7]
In fact there is no entirely satisfactory definition of time travel in the literature. The
most popular definition is the one given by Lewis (1976, 1456):
What is time travel? Inevitably, it involves a discrepancy between time and time.
Any traveller departs and then arrives at his destination; the time elapsed from
departure to arrivalis the duration of the journey. But if he is a time traveller, the
separation in time between departure and arrival does not equal the duration of his
journey.How can it be that the same two events, his departure and his arrival, are
separated by two unequal amounts of time?I reply by distinguishing time itself,
external time as I shall also call it, from the personal time of a particular time
traveller: roughly, that which is measured by his wristwatch. His journey takes an
hour of his personal time, let us sayBut the arrival is more than an hour after the
departure in external time, if he travels toward the future; or the arrival is before
the departure in external timeif he travels toward the past.
This correctly excludes Waitingwhere the length of the journey precisely matches
the separation between arrival and departureand Crystal, where there is no
journey at alland it includes Doctor. It has trouble with Gdel, howeverbecause
when the overall structure of spacetime is as twisted as it is in the sort of case
Gdel imagined, the notion of external time (time itself) loses its grip.
Another definition of time travel that one sometimes encounters in the literature
(Arntzenius, 2006, 602) (Smeenk and Wthrich, 2012, 5, 26) equates time travel
with the existence of CTC's: closed timelike curves. A curve in this context is a line
in spacetime; it is timelike if it could represent the career of a material object; and it
The lack of an adequate definition of time travel does not matter for our purposes
here.[8] It suffices that we have clear cases of (what would count as) time travel
and that these cases give rise to all the problems that we shall wish to discuss.
Some authors (in philosophy, physics and science fiction) consider time travel
scenarios in which there are two temporal dimensions (e.g. Meiland (1974)), and
others consider scenarios in which there are multiple parallel universeseach one
with its own four-dimensional spacetime (e.g. Deutsch and Lockwood (1994)). There
is a question whether travelling to another version of 2001 (i.e. not the very same
version one experienced in the past)a version at a different point on the second
time dimension, or in a different parallel universeis really time travel, or whether
it is more akin to Virtual. In any case, this kind of scenario does not give rise to
many of the problems thrown up by the idea of travelling to the very same past one
experienced in one's younger days. It is these problems that form the primary focus
of the present entry, and so we shall not have much to say about other kinds of
time travel scenario in what follows.
There must be something wrong with this objection, because it would show Einstein
to be logically impossiblewhereas this sort of future-directed time travel has
actually been observed (albeit on a much smaller scalebut that does not affect
the present point) (Hafele and Keating, 1972b,a). The most common response to the
objection is that there is no contradiction because the interval of time traversed by
the time traveller and the duration of her journey are measured with respect to
different frames of reference: there is thus no reason why they should coincide. A
similar point applies to the discrepancy between the time elapsed since the time
traveller's birth and her age upon arrival. There is no more of a contradiction here
than in the fact that Melbourne is both 800 kilometres away from Sydneyalong the
main highwayand 1200 kilometres awayalong the coast road.[10]
This means that time travellers can do less than we might have hoped: they cannot
right the wrongs of history; they cannot even stir a speck of dust on a certain day in
the past if, on that day, the speck was in fact unmoved. But this does not mean that
time travellers must be entirely powerless in the past: while they cannot do
anything that did not actually happen, they can (in principle) do anything that did
happen. Time travellers cannot change the past: they cannot make it different from
the way it wasbut they can participate in it: they can be amongst the people who
did make the past the way it was.[12]
does not: that it involves avoiding the pastleaving it untouched while travelling to
a different version of the past in which things proceed differently.
The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the wellknown paradoxes it entails. The classic example is What if you go back into the
past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?So complex and
hopeless are the paradoxesthat the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that
results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible.
(Asimov, 2003, 2767)
travel into one's pastwould seem to give rise to all sorts of logical problems, if you
were able to change history. For example, what would happen if you killed your
parents before you were born. It might be that one could avoid such paradoxes by
some modification of the concept of free will. But this will not be necessary if what I
call the chronology protection conjecture is correct: The laws of physics prevent
closed timelike curves from appearing. (Hawking, 1992, 604)[13]
If time travel was logically possible then the time traveller could return to the past
and in a suicidal rage destroy his time machine before it was completed and murder
his younger self. But if this was so a necessary condition for the time trip to have
occurred at all is removed, and we should then conclude that the time trip did not
occur. Hence if the time trip did occur, then it did not occur. Hence it did not occur,
and it is necessary that it did not occur. To reply, as it is standardly done, that our
time traveller cannot change the past in this way, is a petitio principii. Why is it that
the time traveller is constrained in this way? What mysterious force stills his sudden
suicidal rage? (Smith, 1985, 58)
The idea is that backwards time travel is impossible because if it occurred, time
travellers would attempt to do things such as kill their younger selves (or their
grandfathers etc.). We know that doing these thingsindeed, changing the past in
any wayis impossible. But were there time travel, there would then be nothing left
to stop these things happening. If we let things get to the stage where the time
traveller is facing Grandfather with a loaded weapon, then there is nothing left to
prevent the impossible from occurring. So we must draw the line earlier: it must be
impossible for someone to get into this situation at all; that is, backwards time
travel must be impossible.
In order to defend the possibility of time travel in the face of this argument we need
to show that time travel is not a sure route to doing the impossible. So, given that a
time traveller has gone to the past and is facing Grandfather, what could stop her
killing Grandfather? Some science fiction authors resort to the idea of chaperones or
time guardians who prevent time travellers from changing the pastor to
mysterious forces of logic. But it is hard to take these ideas seriouslyand more
importantly, it is hard to make them work in detail when we remember that
changing the past is impossible. (The chaperone is acting to ensure that the past
remains as it wasbut the only reason it ever was that way is because of his very
actions.)[14] Fortunately there is a better responsealso to be found in the science
fiction literature, and brought to the attention of philosophers by Lewis (1976). What
would stop the time traveller doing the impossible? She would fail for some
commonplace reason, as Lewis (1976, 150) puts it. Her gun might jam, a noise
might distract her, she might slip on a banana peel, etc. Nothing more than such
ordinary occurrences is required to stop the time traveller killing Grandfather. Hence
backwards time travel does not entail the occurrence of impossible eventsand so
the above objection is defused.
Note the difference between this version of the Grandfather paradox and the
version considered above. In the earlier version, the contradiction happens if Tim
kills Grandfather. The solution was to say that Tim can go into the past without
killing Grandfatherhence time travel does not entail a contradiction. In the new
version, the contradiction happens as soon as Tim gets to the past. Of course Tim
does not kill Grandfatherbut we still have a contradiction anyway: for he both can
do it, and cannot do it. As Lewis puts it:
Could a time traveler change the past? It seems not: the events of a past moment
could no more change than numbers could. Yet it seems that he would be as able as
anyone to do things that would change the past if he did them. If a time traveler
visiting the past both could and couldn't do something that would change it, then
there cannot possibly be such a time traveler. (Lewis, 1976, 149)
Lewis's own solution to this problem has been widely accepted.[15] It turns on the
idea that to say that something can happen is to say that its occurrence is
compossible with certain facts, where context determines (more or less) which facts
are the relevant ones. Tim's killing Grandfather in 1921 is compossible with the
facts about his weapon, training, state of mind, and so on. It is not compossible with
further facts, such as the fact that Grandfather did not die in 1921. Thus Tim can
kill Grandfather is true in one sense (relative to one set of facts) and false in
another sense (relative to another set of facts)but there is no single sense in
which it is both true and false. So there is no contradiction heremerely an
equivocation.
Think about correlated events in general. Whenever we see two things frequently
occurring together, this is because one of them causes the other, or some third
thing causes both. Horwich calls this the Principle of V-Correlation:
if events of type A and B are associated with one another, then either there is
always a chain of events between themor else we find an earlier event of type C
that links up with A and B by two such chains of events. What we do not see isan
inverse forkin which A and B are connected only with a characteristic subsequent
event, but no preceding one. (Horwich, 1987, 978)
For example, suppose that two students turn up to class wearing the same outfits.
That could just be a coincidence (i.e. there is no common cause, and no direct
causal link between the two events). If it happens every week for the whole
semester, it is possible that it is a coincidence, but this is extremely unlikely.
Normally, we see this sort of extensive correlation only if either there is a common
cause (e.g. both students have product endorsement deals with the same clothing
company, or both slavishly copy the same fashion blog) or a direct causal link (e.g.
one student is copying the other).
Now consider the time traveller setting off to kill her younger self. As discussed, no
contradiction need ensuethis is prevented not by chaperones or mysterious
forces, but by a run of ordinary occurrences in which the trigger falls off the time
traveller's gun, a gust of wind pushes her bullet off course, she slips on a banana
peel, and so on. But now consider this run of ordinary occurrences. Whenever the
time traveller contemplates auto-infanticide, someone nearby will drop a banana
peel ready for her to slip on, or a bird will begin to fly so that it will be in the path of
the time traveller's bullet by the time she fires, and so on. In general, there will be a
correlation between auto-infanticide attempts and foiling occurrences such as the
presence of banana peelsand this correlation will be of the type that does not
involve a direct causal connection between the correlated events or a common
cause of both. But extensive correlations of this sort are, as we saw, extremely rare
so backwards time travel will happen about as often as you will see two people
wear the same outfits to class every day of semester, without there being any
causal connection between what one wears and what the other wears.
If time travel were ever to occur, we should see extensive uncaused correlations.
It is extremely unlikely that we should ever see extensive uncaused correlations.
Therefore time travel is extremely unlikely to occur.
The conclusion is not that time travel is impossible, but that we should treat it the
way we treat the possibility of, say, tossing a fair coin and getting heads one
thousand times in a row. As Price (1996, 278 n.7) puts itin the context of
endorsing Horwich's conclusion: the hypothesis of time travel can be made to
imply propositions of arbitrarily low probability. This is not a classical reductio, but it
is as close as science ever gets.
Smith (1997) attacks both premisses of Horwich's argument. Against the first
premise, he argues that backwards time travel, in itself, does not entail extensive
uncaused correlations. Rather, when we look more closely, we see that time travel
scenarios involving extensive uncaused correlations always build in prior
coincidences which are themselves highly unlikely. Against the second premise, he
argues that, from the fact that we have never seen extensive uncaused correlations,
it does not follow that we never shall. This is not inductive scepticism: let us assume
(contra the inductive sceptic) that in the absence of any specific reason for thinking
things should be different in the future, we are entitled to assume they will continue
being the same; still we cannot dismiss a specific reason for thinking the future will
be a certain way simply on the basis that things have never been that way in the
past. You might reassure an anxious friend that the sun will certainly rise tomorrow
because it always has in the pastbut you cannot similarly refute an astronomer
who claims to have discovered a specific reason for thinking that the earth will stop
rotating overnight.
Sider (2002, 11920) endorses Smith's second objection. Dowe (2003) criticises
Smith's first objection, but agrees with the second, concluding overall that time
travel has not been shown to be improbable. Ismael (2003) reaches a similar
conclusion. On the other side of the debate, Riggs (1997, 52) reaches a conclusion
similar to Horwich's: Lewis's account may do for a once only attempt, but is
untenable as a general explanation of [the time traveller's] continual lack of success
if he keeps on trying [to kill Grandfather]. Goddu (2007) criticises Smith's first
objection to Horwich. Further contributions to the debate include Arntzenius (2006)
and Smeenk and Wthrich (2012, 2.2). For a different argument to the same
conclusion as Horwich'sthat time travel is improbablesee Ney (2000).
3. Causation
Backwards time travel scenarios give rise to interesting issues concerning
causation. In this section we examine two such issues.
The bilking procedure requires repeated manipulation of event A. Thus, it cannot get
under way in cases in which A is either unrepeatable or unmanipulable.
Furthermore, the procedure requires us to know whether or not B has occurred, prior
to manipulating Aand thus, it cannot get under way in cases in which it cannot be
known whether or not B has occurred until after the occurrence or nonoccurrence of
A (Dummett, 1964). These three loopholes allow room for many claims of
backwards causation that cannot be touched by the bilking argument, because the
bilking procedure cannot be performed at all. But what about those cases in which it
can be performed? If the procedure succeedsthat is, A and B are decorrelated
then the claim that A causes B is refuted, or at least weakened (depending upon the
details of the case). But if the bilking attempt fails, it does not follow that it must be
B that is the cause of A, rather than vice versa. Depending upon the situation, that
B causes A might become a viable alternative to the hypothesis that A causes B
but there is no reason to think that this alternative must always be the superior one.
For example, suppose that I see a photo of you in a paper dated well before your
birth, accompanied by a report of your arrival from the future. I now try to bilk your
upcoming time tripbut I slip on a banana peel while rushing to push you away
from your time machine, my time travel horror stories only inspire you further, and
so on. Or again, suppose that I know that you were not in Sydney yesterday. I now
try to get you to go there in your time machinebut first I am struck by lightning,
then I fall down a manhole, and so on. What does all this prove? Surely not that your
arrival in the past causes your departure from the future. Depending upon the
details of the case, it seems that we might well be entitled to describe it as
involving backwards time travel and backwards causation. At least, if we are not so
entitled, this must be because of other facts about the case: it would not follow
simply from the repeated coincidental failures of my bilking attempts.
One might think that causal loops are impossibleand hence that insofar as
backwards time travel entails such loops, it too is impossible.[20] There are two
issues to consider here. First, does backwards time travel entail causal loops? Lewis
(1976, 148) raises the question whether there must be causal loops whenever there
is backwards causation; in response to the question, he says simply I am not sure.
Mellor (1998, 131) appears to claim a positive answer to the question.[21] Hanley
(2004, 130) defends a negative answer by telling a time travel story in which there
is backwards time travel and backwards causation, but no causal loops.[22] Monton
(2009) criticises Hanley's counterexample, but also defends a negative answer via
different counterexamples.
Second, are causal loops impossible, or in some other way objectionable? One
objection is that causal loops are inexplicable. There have been two main kinds of
response to this objection. One is to agree but deny that this is a problem. Lewis
(1976, 149) accepts that a loop (as a whole) would be inexplicablebut thinks that
this inexplicability (like that of the Big Bang or the decay of a tritium atom) is
merely strange, not impossible. In a similar vein, Meyer (2012, 263) argues that if
someone asked for an explanation of a loop (as a whole), the blame would fall on
the person asking the question, not on our inability to answer it. The second kind
of response (Hanley, 2004, 5) is to deny that (all) causal loops are inexplicable. A
second objection to causal loops, due to Mellor (1998, ch.12), is that in such loops
the chances of events would fail to be related to their frequencies in accordance
with the law of large numbers. Berkovitz (2001) and Dowe (2001) both argue that
Mellor's objection fails to establish the impossibility of causal loops.[23]
The first thing that we need to do is set up the various metaphysical positions
whose relationships with time travel will then be discussed. Consider two
metaphysical questions:
It is natural to combine three-dimensionalism with presentism and fourdimensionalism with the block universe viewbut other combinations of views are
certainly possible.
Gdel (1990b) argues from the possibility of time travel (more precisely, from the
existence of solutions to the field equations of General Relativity in which there
exist CTC's) to the B-theory: that is, to the conclusion that there is no objective flow
or passage of time and no objective now. Gdel begins by reviewing an argument
from Special Relativity to the B-theory: because the notion of simultaneity becomes
a relative one in Special Relativity, there is no room for the idea of an objective
succession of nows. He then notes that this argument is disrupted in the context
of General Relativity, because in models of the latter theory to date, the presence of
matter does allow recovery of an objectively distinguished series of nows. Gdel
then proposes a new model (Gdel, 1990a) in which no such recovery is possible.
(This is the model that contains CTC's.) Finally, he addresses the issue of how one
can infer anything about the nonexistence of an objective flow of time in our
universe from the existence of a merely possible universe in which there is no
objectively distinguished series of nows. His main response is that while it would
not be straightforwardly contradictory to suppose that the existence of an objective
flow of time depends on the particular, contingent arrangement and motion of
matter in the world, this would nevertheless be unsatisfactory. Responses to Gdel
have been of two main kinds. Some have objected to the claim that there is no
objective flow of time in his model universe (e.g. Savitt (2005); see also Savitt
(1994)). Others have objected to the attempt to transfer conclusions about that
model universe to our own universe (e.g. Earman (1995, 197200); for a partial
response to Earman see Belot (2005, 3.4)).[27]
A fundamental requirement for the possibility of time travel is the existence of the
destination of the journey. That is, a journey into the past or the future would have
to presuppose that the past or future were somehow real. (Grey, 1999, 56)
Dowe (2000, 4425) responds that the destination does not have to exist at the
time of departure: it only has to exist at the time of arrivaland this is quite
compatible with non-eternalist views. And Keller and Nelson (2001, 338) argue that
time travel is compatible with presentism:
Sider (2005) responds that there is still a problem reconciling presentism with time
travel conceived in Lewis's way: that conception of time travel requires that
personal time is similar to external timebut presentists have trouble allowing this.
Further contributions to the debate whether presentismand other versions of the
A-theoryare compatible with time travel include Monton (2003) and Daniels
(2012) on the side of compatibility, and Miller (2005), Slater (2005), Miller (2008)
and Hales (2010) on the side of incompatibility.
(simpliciter): there are only temporally relativised properties such as thin at time t.
In that case, while Bill at t1 and Bill at t2 are the very same entityBill is wholly
present at each timethere is no single property that this one entity both possesses
and fails to possess: Bill possesses the property thin at t1 and lacks the property
thin at t2.[29]
Now consider the case of a time traveller Ben who encounters his younger self at
time t. Suppose that the younger self is thin and the older self not so. The fourdimensionalist can accommodate this scenario easily. Just as before, what we have
are two different three-dimensional parts of the same four-dimensional entity, one
of which possesses the property thin and the other of which does not. The threedimensionalist, however, faces a problem. Even if we relativise properties to times,
we still get the contradiction that Ben possesses the property thin at t and also
lacks that very same property.[30] There are several possible options for the threedimensionalist here. One is to relativise properties not to external times but to
personal times (Horwich, 1975, 4345); another is to relativise properties to spatial
locations as well as to times (or simply to spacetime points). Sider (2001, 1016)
criticises both options (and others besides), concluding that time travel is
incompatible with three-dimensionalism. Markosian (2004) responds to Sider's
argument;[31] Miller (2006) also responds to Sider and argues for the compatibility
of time travel and endurantism; Gilmore (2007) seeks to weaken the case against
endurantism by constructing analogous arguments against perdurantism. Simon
(2005) finds problems with Sider's arguments, but presents different arguments for
the same conclusion; Effingham and Robson (2007) and Benovsky (2011) also offer
new arguments for this conclusion.[32]
after the creation of the CTC, but travel to a time earlier than the time at which the
CTC is created is not possible.[36]
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