New Orbit Magazine Online: Issue 03, June 2018

Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov came up with a possible solution to the paradox in the
mid-1980s. He surmised that, even in a world in which we can travel into the past and seemingly interact
with it, if an event exists that would cause any change to history whatsoever, then the probability of
that event is zero. Because history has already happened, it even comprises your supposed role within
it, and it is therefore impossible to create temporal paradoxes.
In practicality, this means that on my journey back in time, I would lose my nerve and choose not to
throw my grandfather off a cliff, or I’d get lost on the way and miss my only chance, or something would
distract me at the last minute. Maybe after throwing my victim off a cliff, I'd uncover a family conspiracy
in that the man I knew to be my grandfather was never part of my biological genealogy after all, and my
real grandfather was anonymous, alive and well elsewhere in the 1930s. It might even mean that we are
never able to discover or harness time travel – if there were no travellers from 2018 in the 1930s, then
it’s not possible that someone from 2018 could place themselves in the 1930s, because they never did.
Either way, there is nothing I could do to kill my grandfather before his fathering my own father. I
know this because, due to the fact that I am alive, I didn’t kill my grandfather before his fathering my
father.
We don’t know the intricacies of the laws of causality when applied to anything but our
traditional conception of the arrow of time. It is entirely possible that the creation of paradoxes,
causal loops, or significant disruption in the cause > effect relationship would lead to a
disintegration of a timeline, the formation of a temporal black hole, or some other way for the
world as we know it to fall out of space and time. In fact, this seems more likely than our current
semantic solutions or some hopeful theoretical loophole in the small print of physics.
Numbers and mathematical phenomena
existed long before humans (or any other
intelligent species) understood them. Though
humankind adorned the fundamental logic of
the universe with language to discuss it, and
took it to logical extremes in purely theoretical
games and equations, the laws pre-date us, and
would operate the same whether we figured
them out or not.
The same is true of causality. The rules already
exist, across the universe, and even if we don’t
know them, they cannot be broken. Perhaps by
experimenting with logic and entropy-reversing
technology, we will one day be able to
understand those laws as intimately as we
understand that 2+2=4, and why.
Perhaps, though, we’ll meet a fate like the one
we shiver about in Hitler and the Rabbit.
Kaonan Micadei, John Peterson,
Alexandre Souza, Roberto Sarthour,
Ivan Oliveira, Gabriel Landi, Tiago
Batalhão, Roberto Serra, and Eric
Lutz. Reversing the Thermodynamic
Arrow of Time Using Quantum
Correlations. CUL. November 09,
2017. Accessed May 8, 2018.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03323.
Emerging Technology from the
ArXiv. Physicists Have Demonstrated
How to Reverse of the Arrow of Time.
MIT Technology Review. January
08, 2018. Accessed May 8, 2018.
https://www.technologyreview.com
/s/609788/physicists-demonstratehow-to-reverse-of-the-arrow-of-time/.
Time Dilation Calculator. E=mc^2
Explained with Worked Examples.
Accessed May 4, 2018.
http://www.emc2-
explained.info/Dilation-
Calc/#.WwYFD0iFPIX..