Paradox of Time Travel In a TV programme "Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking" on Discovery Channel, Stephen Hawking described the following paradoxical condition:
"Suppose you have somehow built a time machine. Now you open up a kit containing parts of a revolver. You assemble all the parts and then load the revolver with bullets. Now you go into the past, 5 minutes back (the time when you have actually not set up your revolver) via the time machine and you shoot yourself (the man that belongs to your past who was kind of going to assemble the revolver) using the same revolver." Here comes the twist. First of all, if the revolver has actually not been assembled, then with what have you killed yourself, and the second part is, "is it really possible to kill yourself in the past, if a time machine would have existed?" This is in fact known as *grandfather's paradox*. By definition, it is described as follows: "Suppose a time traveller goes back in time and kills his grandfather before his grandfather met his grandmother. As a result, the time traveller is never born. But, if he was never born, then he is unable to travel through time and kill his grandfather, which means the traveller would then be born after all, and thus we arrive at a contradiction and are ‘stuck’ in this ‘loop’. It was first described by the science fiction writer Nathaniel Schachner in his short story Ancestral Voices and by René Barjavel in his 1943 book Le Voyageur Imprudent (Future Times Three). K R IRS 1623 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoqjvjhh_pGnxhTDLUmHyRGdrA6%2BfP05RX6snK7M%3D9tt1A%40mail.gmail.com.
