So, I've been thinking about time travel...

[conuly]

And I've been thinking about verb tenses. If five years from now I will go back in time and become my own great-grandmother, was I my great-grandmother, or will I be my great-grandmother? The way we view time, the question is only answerable with a lot of yelling and headaches.

We can overlook paradoxes like "If I kill my own grandfather, don't I cease to exist" by claiming parallel universes, but how do we deal with the grammar?

Of course, this is all a moot point since, as of now, there is no time travel, but what if there were a kind of time outside of time? And all the parallel universes that may or may not exist would have their own time, going at their own speeds (one second per second to them, but it might be faster or slower by our perspectives), and time travel would be more like... wandering through the hyperspace of time. The time outside of time.

This all made sense in my head, and I swear I'm not on drugs.

It's sort of like... in that time, everything would go in a neat chronological order, and it wouldn't do that awful "we have no grammar for this!" thing because it would make sense.

This was random. Sorry.

Comments

[hopefulnebula]

Don't tell me you haven't read that chapter in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe... at least I think it's that. One of the Hitchhiker's books.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

That's the first thing I thought of, as well. (Though I can't remember which of the books it was in, because they all run together in my head; I have an omnibus and read the first four straight through.)

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought as well...

[scottrossi.livejournal.com]

i liked this! i am finding out that we don't have the words yet for the advanced concepts that are emerging out of the new discoveries in reality and physics. i think we need to evolve them stat. then again, we can make up all the words we want, but then we also have to grasp the meaning of each word, which is sometimes truly staggering.

[xandiwillflailx.livejournal.com]

umm..i call new verb tense!

[polydad.livejournal.com]

This was random. Sorry.

It wasn't random at all, and I'm *sure* you can grovel better than that.

There is in fact time travel, but only for subatomic particles. No one knows how to reassemble them when they get somewhere, either, so *personal* time travel is still in the "not bloody likely" column. Not that I wouldn't like to go.

This all made sense in my head, and I swear I'm not on drugs.

Made sense to me too, and I'm not on drugs either, other than anti-inflammatories. I'd prefer a good Spanish brandy.

best,

Joel. Happy to share his drugs.

[phoenix-blue.livejournal.com]

If time travel will ever exist, then it has always existed.

*grins*

[rho]

Actually, several of the currently more likely candidates for time travel would allow you to travel forwards in time as far as you wanted, but would only let you go back in time to the time when the time machine was constructed, so that doesn't necessarily follow.

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

-A quote from my story "Fighting Monsters (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sporks5000/32625.html)"

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to use future perfect for that. But... it doesn't really work. Eheu!

[feathered.livejournal.com]

Why not just say "I am my great-grandmother" and be done with it. In an in-depth explanation of the situation you can say something like: "In five years I will go back in time. When there, I'll meet a nice man, we'll have some kids, and they'll have kids, and eventually I will be born. I'll be my own great-grandmother!" It's a "will be" right here because it hasn't happened to present-Connie yet. When future-Connie has done all of this, she will know that she is her own great-grandmother. So then it will be present, except, of course, when she is talking about the act of time-travel itself, which will be past.

I always thought that becoming your own grandparent was an excedingly silly idea. Out of all of the people possible in the world, your child would find the one who would eventually become your father? I often wonder at the statitical probability of that. And anyway, what about the genetics of it? Would you, in essence, be 1/4th cloned?

[rachelkachel]

*head explodes*

I find that if I think about time travel too much, I just get confused. So I tell myself it's impossible and I won't ever have to worry about the applications.

[rho]

Well, essentially all that you're doing is creating a causality loop. The analogy would be to say "is Japan to the east or to the west of Britain?" The conventional answer is that it's to the east, but if you decide to head out to the west instead, you'll still get there and you won't have all that much further to travel. In the same way, it would be perfectly reasonable to talk about your becoming your grandmother as both a past event and a future event. The main difference is that we aren't at all used to time being anything but definite and linear -- but I imagine tyhere must also have been some sort of paradigm shift when people managed to prove that you could reach the orient by going west.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

...help, I have a movie reference stuck in my head...

Has anyone else seen Light Years?

[hopefulnebula]

Don't tell me you haven't read that chapter in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe... at least I think it's that. One of the Hitchhiker's books.

[ladytalon.livejournal.com]

That's the first thing I thought of, as well. (Though I can't remember which of the books it was in, because they all run together in my head; I have an omnibus and read the first four straight through.)

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

That was my first thought as well...

[scottrossi.livejournal.com]

i liked this! i am finding out that we don't have the words yet for the advanced concepts that are emerging out of the new discoveries in reality and physics. i think we need to evolve them stat. then again, we can make up all the words we want, but then we also have to grasp the meaning of each word, which is sometimes truly staggering.

[xandiwillflailx.livejournal.com]

umm..i call new verb tense!

[polydad.livejournal.com]

This was random. Sorry.

It wasn't random at all, and I'm *sure* you can grovel better than that.

There is in fact time travel, but only for subatomic particles. No one knows how to reassemble them when they get somewhere, either, so *personal* time travel is still in the "not bloody likely" column. Not that I wouldn't like to go.

This all made sense in my head, and I swear I'm not on drugs.

Made sense to me too, and I'm not on drugs either, other than anti-inflammatories. I'd prefer a good Spanish brandy.

best,

Joel. Happy to share his drugs.

[phoenix-blue.livejournal.com]

If time travel will ever exist, then it has always existed.

*grins*

[rho]

Actually, several of the currently more likely candidates for time travel would allow you to travel forwards in time as far as you wanted, but would only let you go back in time to the time when the time machine was constructed, so that doesn't necessarily follow.

[sporks5000.livejournal.com]

-A quote from my story "Fighting Monsters (http://www.livejournal.com/users/sporks5000/32625.html)"

[ladyshrew.livejournal.com]

I'm tempted to use future perfect for that. But... it doesn't really work. Eheu!

[feathered.livejournal.com]

Why not just say "I am my great-grandmother" and be done with it. In an in-depth explanation of the situation you can say something like: "In five years I will go back in time. When there, I'll meet a nice man, we'll have some kids, and they'll have kids, and eventually I will be born. I'll be my own great-grandmother!" It's a "will be" right here because it hasn't happened to present-Connie yet. When future-Connie has done all of this, she will know that she is her own great-grandmother. So then it will be present, except, of course, when she is talking about the act of time-travel itself, which will be past.

I always thought that becoming your own grandparent was an excedingly silly idea. Out of all of the people possible in the world, your child would find the one who would eventually become your father? I often wonder at the statitical probability of that. And anyway, what about the genetics of it? Would you, in essence, be 1/4th cloned?

[rachelkachel]

*head explodes*

I find that if I think about time travel too much, I just get confused. So I tell myself it's impossible and I won't ever have to worry about the applications.

[rho]

Well, essentially all that you're doing is creating a causality loop. The analogy would be to say "is Japan to the east or to the west of Britain?" The conventional answer is that it's to the east, but if you decide to head out to the west instead, you'll still get there and you won't have all that much further to travel. In the same way, it would be perfectly reasonable to talk about your becoming your grandmother as both a past event and a future event. The main difference is that we aren't at all used to time being anything but definite and linear -- but I imagine tyhere must also have been some sort of paradigm shift when people managed to prove that you could reach the orient by going west.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

...help, I have a movie reference stuck in my head...

Has anyone else seen Light Years?