Temporal Paradoxes Talk Done: World Safe for Grandfathers

Had a very good time at NASA’s Goddard Space Center doing my talk Temporal Paradoxes.  Nice crowd; lots of good questions.  NASA’s audio-visual support was first rate, as you would expect, and the talk should be up on their site in a bit.  I’ll post a link here when that happens.

I’d like to thank Brent Warner & his colleagues for their warm welcome & all the feedback during the talk.  Brent tells me he particularly liked the quote from an Astounding Science Fiction reader (1933):

“Why pick on grandfather? It seems that the only way to prove that time travel is impossible is to cite a case of killing one’s own grandfather. This incessant murdering of harmless ancestors must stop. Let’s see some wide-awake fan make up some other method of disproving the theory”*

As I say in the talk, if the current literature is on target, the grandfather & other paradoxes are cancelled out by interference by the time machine’s wave function with itself.

Brent & his NASA colleagues were kind enough to provide lunch & a fascinating tool of the facilities:  they manage the Hubble & are working on the James Webb.  Huge rooms with vast devices for subjecting equipment to high G’s, vacuum, heat, noise, vibration, & every other insult that it will need to be able to withstand during launch or in space:  gives one a real sense of just how hard it is to get this stuff to work!

*as quoted by Paul Nahin in his Time Machines: time travel in physics, metaphysics, and science fiction

Temporal Paradoxes Talk Online

I had a lot of fun putting my NASA talk Temporal Paradoxes together.  The feedback I got from the assembled multitude at the Radnor Library last week was extremely helpful, leading to a near complete rework of the talk, in the interests of making it clearer.   Thanks!

The pdf & keynote versions are now online.

Practice Run Thru on Temporal Paradox Talk

I’m doing a practice run thru on my Temporal Paradoxes talk at NASA.

The run thru will be at the Winsor room at the Radnor Memorial Library on March 12 at 2pm.  This is a few hundred feet from the main intersection in Wayne, PA.

The talk is basically the Physics Of Paradox talk, but more focused on the physics than the science fiction (tho in this area it can be hard to tell them apart) & with animations.

Since this is a complete redo of the talk, I’m hoping to get feedback on timing & clarity & focus & such like!

Please come!  And criticize!

Thanks!

— John Ashmead

Temporal Paradoxes Talk at NASA

I’ve been asked to do a talk, Temporal Paradoxes, at NASA.  This will be on the 21st of this month, at 3:30pm.  This is a NASA-fied version of my previous Physics of Paradox talk, meaning more animations & less science fiction, and perhaps a few equations in a grayish font.  Abstract:

ABSTRACT — Einstein’s general relativity is the leading theory of gravity. Simple and elegant, it has passed all available experimental tests including: deflection of light by gravity, precession of orbital apsides, gravitational time dilation (used in GPS), and frame-dragging.

However, general relativity makes a number of counter-intuitive predictions. In particular, trajectories looping around massive, rapidly rotating stars or passing through a wormhole can close on themselves in time, creating closed timelike curves (CTCs).

This creates the possibility of “grandfather” and “bootstrap” paradoxes. Recent work by Greenberger & Svozil, and others, however, questions this conclusion. That work suggests that when quantum mechanical effects are included, the paradoxes become self-canceling, eliminated by destructive interference within the wave function. If the paradoxes are self-canceling, then closed time-like curves are possible. If they are possible, can we create or detect them?

Several authors have suggested that we look for evanescent wormholes with the Large Hadron Collider. If we find them, we may be at the edge of temporal paradox. While the only safe prediction in this area is that there are no safe predictions, we look at the implications of this for general relativity, quantum mechanics, & causality.

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