Posts Tagged ‘processing’

Simulating The Grandfather Paradox

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First frame from a grandfather paradox simulationSince I watched Stargate Continuum last week, I’ve been thinking more about the Grandfather Paradox, a puzzle that sooner or later crops up in all good time travel-related science fiction.

The Grandfather Paradox revolves around this question: “What would happen if someone went back in time and killed their own grandfather before the grandfather had a chance to have any children?” By killing their grandfather, the time-traveler erases themselves from existence. But if the time traveler is erased from existence, they couldn’t have travelled back in time to kill their grandfather, so therefore they should exist.
Does the time-traveler exist or not? This is the paradox.

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August 4th, 2008 Tags: , , , ,
by Stephen Cass in Time Travel | 9 Comments » | RSS feed | Trackback >