Prof.

Stoneham Y2264685

Time Travel Project

Philosophy of Time Travel

Word count: 3932

Introduction

The possibility of travelling backwards in time has occupied the minds

of Science Fiction writers and their audiences for well over a century, but

only in the relatively recent past have the potential mechanisms and conse-

quences of this most fantastical of ideas been seriously studied in the fields

of Physics and Philosophy. In the course of this essay I shall be focussing

not on the methods by which it might be possible to travel through time,

but on the implications that doing so would have for the traveller and for

the world in which we live.

What Properties Does Time Possess?

Early in the Twentieth Century, as a consequence of the Special Theory of

Relativity, physicists were forced to abandon the idea that there exists a

universal ’now’. Since then it has been accepted that a distinction can be

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made between the time that one experiences as it passes (which, for the

sake of convenience, can be indicated by the time on your wristwatch[6])

and the time that passes as experienced by others1 . I will refer to the indi-

vidual wristwatch time as ’Personal Time’ and, for comparison, the time

as measured by the Shepherd Gate clock at the Royal Greenwich Observa-

tory in London as ’External Time’2 .

In rejecting the idea of a universal ’now’ we are embracing a relational

view of time, in which the passing of time is measured in terms of the

precedence of events that occur within it. If we accept that objects travel-

ling at different velocities will experience these events at different times

(and, potentially, in a different order) relative to other frames, then we can

say that these frames exist either in the past or in the future relative to each

other.

For this to be true, the external past, present and future must, in some

capacity, all simultaneously exist . This view is known in the philosophy

of time as ’Eternalism’[7]. By this view, time is regarded as a dimension,

1
This is not a distinction that most of us will have to worry about on a day-to-day basis
(unless you are an astronaut or a fighter pilot) but nevertheless, I think that everyone
understands it
2
I want to be careful here not to suggest that this is in anyway a ’universal’ time as,
according to Relativity Theory, there is no preferred reference frame from which such a
time could be determined. However, this particular frame is useful as the external frame
most useful to us is that of the laboratory-which, in this case, is the entire Earth-and this
particular clock has been a fairly accurate indicator of the time in the Earth’s reference
frame for the past century and a half.

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similar in many ways to the three spacial dimensions, in which objects are

located and extended. This means that objects possess parts that extend

through spatial and temporal dimensions. Lewis refers to each ’part’ of an

object as a ’stage’, which has a location in both space and time[6].

Another name this theory of time goes by is ’Block Theory’[7], because it

models the entirety of space-time as a single four-dimensional block into

which everything that ever was, is, and will be, is placed according to the

locations of its various stages3 .

If we deny that the precedence of events is universally constant then we

have to deny a concept which, prima facie, seems fundamental to our per-

ception of time: that events possess the properties of ’pastness’, ’present-

ness’ and ’futureness’. In the block model of the universe, events are lo-

cated on the space-time manifold by their relation to other events in a par-

ticular reference frame; a property that designates an object’s being in the

future serves no function, as it doesn’t specify a relation to anything else in

the block. It is correct to say that an event will likely occur one week from
3
A problem I have with this model is that the language used to describe this ’Block
Universe’ seems to imply a four-dimensional reference frame from which this block is
’observed’. Without a helpful deity to fill the role of ’universal observer’, it’s difficult to
get one’s head around the concept. Nevertheless, the concept of ’time as a fourth dimen-
sion’ is one I suspect most people have a problem with imagining (let alone trying to
imagine what it means to ’move’ through four-dimensional space), and the idea of using
a deity to perform a similar observational function to this is not a new one.

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today, since this doesn’t bestow a property of ’futureness’ to the event,

only a relation to another position in space-time. The rejection of these

properties of events in favour of relations to other events is known as ’B-

Theory’ (as opposed to ’A-Theory’ in which events in time are defined by

these properties) after the name given to the complete series of these rela-

tions by McTaggart in his 1908 paper, The Unreality of Time[8]. McTaggart

also rejected A-Theory, but claimed that since B-Theory only establishes

fixed relations between events and doesn’t take into account the ’flow’ of

time, it too was insufficient to describe it. Thus, he claims, time itself is not

real.

While I won’t go as far as McTaggart and posit the unreality of time, his

objection to B-Theory raises an important point. In this block theory there

is no suggestion of a ’now’ that turns future events into present events

into past events. This block of space-time could exist with all its events

mapped out, but without some kind of ’flow’, it remains just that: static.

In order to reintroduce dynamism to the system, we need to reintroduce

an ’arrow’ that defines the ’motion’ of time through the block.

An obvious candidate here is cause and effect: in our current universe

an effect always follows its cause. Behind the present moment is a wall

of causal forces pushing it forward through the block so that all of their

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effects become realised. Although it is tempting to say that this is what

causes time’s flow, I am going to retreat from this option for the purposes

of this essay for the reason that, in a universe that lacks a consistent prece-

dence of events, the statement that a cause always precedes its effect starts

to look a little more shaky4 .

There are several physical processes that can add a direction to the flow

of time, but in some way or another, they are all different aspects of the

Arrow of Thermodynamic Entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics

says that, for an isolated system that isn’t already in equilibrium, entropy

will tend to increase over time[3]. We can thus refer to the direction of

time as the one for which the entropy of the universe increases. This isn’t a

perfect system by any means-not least as it raises the proposal of measur-

ing the entropy of the entire universe! It is, however, generally accepted[2]

that even though it is a statistical law5 , over a large enough sample it is an

incredibly useful predictive tool. Although this goes some way to provid-

ing us with an objective arrow of time, it doesn’t necessarily explain why

there seems to exist some fundamental difference between the past and

the future.
4
This becomes even more of a problem in a universe that allows backwards time travel
5
There is no physical reason, for instance, why a pond couldn’t radiate waves towards
a centre point and use the accumulated energy of the waves to spit out a stone, but it’s
just incredibly unlikely that such an occurrence would ever happen.

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A major difference, of course, is that we can have knowledge of events

that have occurred in the past. We can store information about the past

in our memories and recall it whenever we wish; the same is not true of

the future. It makes sense that there would be some sort of ’Psychological’

arrow related to this difference between the knowability of the past and

the veiled nature of the future that causes us to perceive time as passing6 .

Furthermore, we are all aware of the unchangeability of the past-’no use

crying over spilled milk’-and like to think that we have the ability to direct

the course of events in the future. This is another fundamental perceived

difference between the two: the necessity of the past versus the contin-

gency of the future[10]. The future is not entirely contingent of course-

there are still certain features of the future that must be realised-but the

most important part about the model of time that I am shaping is that if

there is one fundamental feature of the past, it is that it is unchangeable;

that once a choice has been made or an action taken, it could not have been

otherwise[4]. I will use the term ’now-necessary’ to describe an event or ac-

tion that, due to its having occurred, is now a necessary feature of the past.

For example, if a glass of milk was spilled yesterday, it is now-necessary

that that milk was spilled at that point on the space-time manifold.
6
It is interesting to note how we perceive ourselves looking into the unknown future
with the past behind us, while other cultures (the Chinese, for example) picture us facing
into the past, which we can see, while the future comes from behind us.

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The Problem with Time Travel

A ’Closed Timelike Curve’ (CTC) is a theoretical construct on a space-time

manifold, suggested as a solution to certain equations in Einstein’s The-

ory of General Relativity. They have been described as whirlpools in the

river of time[9] and could suggest a way that an object could travel to

an arbitrary point in external time while still obeying the natural laws of

physics and without reliance on a device capable of superluminal travel

(for the purposes of this essay I will only be concentrating on backwards

time travel, wherein an object travels into the past relative to external time,

since travelling to a time in the future is far less problematic, and hence

less interesting). The precise nature of these theoretical objects is beyond

the scope if this essay, although they will be referred to. The term ’Time-

Travel Region’ (TTR) will be used to describe a region of space-time that

contains a CTC.

Suppose we now add the possibility of a TTR capable of allowing a hu-

man being to travel into the past to the model of time outlined above.

Immediately we have a problem: the causal asymmetry of time is broken!

If a time traveller (hereafter referred to as ’the Traveller’) appears from the

future then the future is no longer contingent; the universe must arrange

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itself so that, at the very minimum, at some point the Traveller steps into a

time machine and sends himself to whatever date he arrives, at whatever

time, and at whichever place. We can extent this to say that as soon as the

Traveller appears, all facts about his personal past-a set of facts about the

external future relative to the time of his arrival-become now-necessary.

This can be better formalised using the ’Transfer of Necessity Principle’

(TNP)[10]:

If p is now-necessary, and necessarily (p → q), then q is now-necessary.

In other words:

If it is now-necessary that a set of events, E, occurred at an earlier stage of

the Traveller’s personal timeline, and necessarily we can define E as all of

the events that are simultaneously in the Traveller’s past and in the exter-

nal future, then it is now-necessary that E occurs in the external future.

The Paradoxes of Time Travel

The most famous consequence of a non-contingent future created by time

travel is the so called ’Grandfather Paradox’, in which a man travels into

the past with the intention of killing his own Grandfather at a stage that

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occurs before his Father is conceived. The Traveller must fail in his mis-

sion because the conception of his Father is a now-necessary event at the

stage of his departure, as are all of the events affected by the actions of

his Grandfather that occurred after the time of the attempted assassina-

tion. The paradox arises because, when the Traveller arrives at his desti-

nation time and place, his is, at least in appearances, a free agent who is

completely capable of killing whomever he pleases, Grandfather or not. In

essence the paradox lies in the idea that he both can (because he has the

intent and, the story goes, the opportunity) and cannot succeed in his mis-

sion (as his Grandfather lives past this stage in his own personal timeline

then, by TNP, it is now-necessary that his Grandfather lives past this point

in external time as well).

There are many versions of this paradox but they all raise a similar prob-

lem: there appear to be incontrovertible constraints upon the actions that

can be undertaken by any traveller to the past. In a way this solves the

paradox: by using TNP to deny that the Traveller can kill his Grandfather,

we seem to beat the paradox by averting it. The problem we are left with, if

we take this route, is to explain by which mechanism the Traveller’s failure

is ensured.

Given the almost infinite complexity of a global system like the above case

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(especially when free will is included!), whilst acknowledging the general

constraints imposed upon a time traveller, I will focus on some far simpler

systems.

Consider a TTR consisting of two portals sitting next to each other. Any-

thing placed into the left portal exits through the right portal one minute

earlier. Of course, when and if an object exits through the right portal, it

becomes now-necessary that a numerically identical object (i.e., the same

object at an earlier stage) is placed into the left portal one minute later. This

is the constraint applied to this system by TNP.

Immediately we can identifiy some effects of this constraint:

1. If an object emerges from the right portal, the appropriate object

MUST be placed into the left portal. There is no possible world that

conforms to the situation described7 in which an object emerges from

the right portal but no object is then put into the left portal.

2. It is impossible to put the object that emerges from the right portal

back into the left portal one minute later, as this object does not con-

stitute an earlier stage of the object that emerged.

7
There are infinite possible worlds in which an object emerges from the right portal
but no object is placed into the left portal one minute later, but in those worlds, the TTR
cannot behave as described.

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Suppose we now set up a black-and-white camera in front of the right

portal and set it to take a photograph of whatever comes out. We then

put the negative of this image into the left portal one minute later (the

same constraints defined above still apply). Of course it’s this negative

that emerges from the right portal, which the camera duly captures, and

one minute later the negative of this negative is placed into the left portal.

Surely this creates an impossible situation: How can a photograph be a

negative of itself?

If we assume that the photograph that emerges from the right portal is a

solid shade of grey, then we can represent the colour of the photograph

as a continuous function, f(x), from 0 (solid white) to 1 (solid black). If

we then set this function against two axes: ’The colour of the photograph

that emerges’ against ’The colour of the photograph that we will put into

the portal’, there will be a point on the graph where f(x)=x, i.e., where the

’negative’ of the colour is the same as the colour itself. Whatever shade

of grey is represented by x is the colour that the photograph emerging

from the portal will be. The point on the graph where f(x)=x is called a

’fixed point’ of the system, and this system has only one. It represents an

alignment of all of the variable properties of the system (which is defined

by the boundary of the TTR) such that it is consistent with the global space-

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time in which it is embedded. In other words, local systems must abide

by global constraints such as temporal, logical and physical necessity. A

system that breaks any of the constraints imposed upon it has no fixed

points and is thus impossible to realise.

Consider now a third system in which there is a gap between the two por-

tals and the time difference between entering the left portal and exiting

the right portal has been reduced to a second or so. If we were to take a

billiard ball and roll it between the two portals, we would expect the ball

to enter the TTR, continue to move in a straight line between the two por-

tals, and exit the TTR on the other side. This particular evolution is a fixed

point for this system. It it, however, equally likely that as the ball enters

the TTR, another billiard ball emerges from the right portal, knocks the

first ball into the left portal, and is itself rebounded such that it exits the

TTR in the same place that the first ball would have exited had it continued

through the TTR unassailed. This evolution is a second fixed point for this

system. If we were to obscure the entire TTR from view and send in the

first billiard ball, we would know where the ball would exit, since any de-

viation from the ’original’ trajectory would break conservation laws, but

we would have no way of knowing beforehand which of these two sce-

narios was going to play out. To further confuse the matter, it would be

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entirely feasible to alter the system, while retaining consistency, such that

the ball spends different amounts of time within the TTR depending on

which fixed point the system was configured in. To reiterate, once the ball

enters the TTR there is no way of knowing how long it would take to exit

it (among the times allowed by the various fixed points of the system) as

there are no deterministic forces at work. Of course, once the ball does exit

the TTR and the evolution of the system is retroactively calculated, it be-

comes now-necessary that the system did evolve in that way. Moreover, if

the information of how the system evolved were to be sent back in time to

before the ball entered the TTR, it would, due to TNP, be now-necessary

that the system evolved in that exact same way.

It seems, then, that to discover the fixed points of a system, and hence the

constraints on it, all one needs to do is evaluate every possible dynamical

evolution of a system and weed out the ones that lead to inconsistencies[5]!

But how could this happen for a system as complex as our universe, if we

discount the ideas of outright determinism or some kind of ”pre-arranged

divine harmony”[4]? Furthermore, once the constraints for a particular

system are discovered, how could they be enforced?

A proposed answer is that, as the motions of planets are a reaction to the

shape of the space-time manifold on which they are embedded, so might

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the constraints on TTRs simply be a reaction to the unique arrangement of

the space-time within them[1]. This kind of answer, which seems similar to

the deterministic answer I am trying to avoid, is difficult to reconcile with

systems involving more than one fixed point, whose evolutions are impos-

sible to calculate beforehand. The reason I am trying to avoid deterministic

solutions, however, is that they aren’t interesting. It could, however, turn

out to be the most elegant solution to the paradoxes created by time travel

so it’s one to bear in mind while considering other possibilities.

Another way to look at constraints is to compare them to physical laws[1].

It could be argued that a TTR is constrained by a particular set of laws

that operates on CTCs, similar to how the trajectory of a projectile is con-

fined to a particular path, given a set of initial conditions, governed for

the most part by various laws of motion. A problem with this comparison

is that, if the initial conditions of the latter system are known, they can be

used (with reasonable accuracy) to predict the path taken by the projectile.

Moreover, the laws of motion can be used to describe many systems pos-

sessing a huge range of initial conditions. Perhaps then, the constraints

applied to TTRs are more like quantum mechanical laws. For example,

in quantum mechanics, the individual evolutions of a system can be cal-

culated but there is no determinate way of evaluating which path it will

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actually take. Furthermore, quantum mechanical laws also apply a form of

constraint upon the states that can be constructed (Exclusion Principle, for

example8 ). Another parallel with quantum mechanics is the importance

that information about the system plays in determining its evolution. It

is an established phenomenon in quantum mechanical systems that the

probability density of a wavefunction ’collapses’ (depending on your in-

terpretation) into a definite state when it is observed. In a similar way,

receiving information about the evolution of a TTR before starting an ex-

periment will ’collapse’ the evolution of the system into the exact path

predicted.

In a paper by Greenberger and Svozil entitled ’Quantum Theory Looks at

Time Travel’[4], the authors consider a quantum mechanical system in which

a feedback loop is introduced which returns information of a particle’s

path from a time t2 to an earlier time t1. Mathematically evolving the sys-

tem, they discover that the effect of the feedback loop on the system is

exactly as stated above: bringing information about the future evolution

of the system to the past ”wipes out the alternate possible future, thus

guaranteeing the future that has already happened”. They conclude that,

at least according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the Traveller, upon

8
Admittedly these laws are built up from an impressive array of mathematical proofs,
but I would argue that a related system of mathematics based on TTRs doesn’t exist to
nearly the same level of maturity.

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reaching the past, ”would only see those alternatives consistent with the

world [he] left behind.”

What this means for the murderous Traveller is that the odds of him actu-

ally managing to kill his Grandfather are literally zero9 . This means that

however unlikely the events that lead to his failure, their sum-total proba-

bility will be one. Somehow, the Traveller will fail. A question that remains

is: how limiting are the constraints of this situation on the actions that the

Traveller can take?

For example, if at some earlier point in his life, the Traveller’s Grandfather

had sat him down and explained in detail about the day he was nearly

shot by a man who looked suspiciously like the Traveller, but fortunately

the man slipped on a banana skin as he was about to pull the trigger, then

it seems quite likely that this will be the means of the Traveller’s failure.

If, on the other hand, the Traveller never knew anything about his Grand-

father’s past, then it almost seems as though he is free to fail in any way

he pleases. He isn’t, of course, totally free, since the failed assassination

attempt is now-necessary to have failed in a particular way at a particu-

9
There are some caveats here; for example, the traveller could emerge in the past and
gun down the man that he thinks is his Grandfather, but in this case there must be a
problem with the story: either the man is not really his Grandfather, or he is resurrected
somehow, or the Traveller hasn’t really gone into the past and thus isn’t subject to its
constraints.

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lar place at a particular time. However, if the information about the fail-

ure isn’t brought back to the past, then the system can feature many fixed

points and the Traveller’s actions are no more constrained than any other

person in the world who is unwittingly acting to bring about a particular

future while thinking they are acting freely10 .

In such a world, can anyone really be said to be acting freely? Ultimately,

in most situations in which a traveller comes to the past with informa-

tion about the future, everyone else is immediately subject to a set of con-

straints that serve to make of those facts consistent between the personal

and external timelines. In other, more specific, situations a person may

have to act in a very particular way in order to make sure that a now-

necessary event takes place. That person will likely claim that they per-

form all of their actions freely and will not have any knowledge of the con-

straints placed upon them by the existence of the Traveller. The question

is: do these people indeed possess free will in their actions even though it

is now-necessary that they couldn’t have acted in any other way? Not ac-

cording to the ’Principle of Alternate Possibilities’ (PAP), which states that:

’If you cannot do otherwise when you do an act, you do not act freely.’[10]

In this case, the moment the Traveller arrives in the past, people’s free
10
That is, unless the Traveller has considered the necessity of the past, in which case he
will be aware from the start that he is doomed to fail somehow

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will is severely constrained, and in many cases, completely removed from

them. Yet they still feel as though they possess it. This position has been

attacked by many people holding a deterministic view of the universe[10],

but the specific details are beyond the scope of this essay.

Conclusion: Is Time Travel Possible?

There are many reasons to dislike the consequences of allowing the possi-

bility of backwards time travel (I haven’t even covered Ontological para-

doxes which, frustratingly, result in even more oddities, though admit-

tedly less serious ones than raised by the continuity paradoxes) but is this

reason enough to declare it impossible? There are many different ways to

declare an idea impossible but only one way to make it acceptable: phys-

ically speaking, there are no particular problems-time travel is perfectly

acceptable by many theories. Logically speaking, as long we stay away

from paradoxes (which I contend is probably possible, if you don’t mind

giving up your free will!) then we should be all right. I could go on, but

with a topic with so many abstractions and so much left to consider, I am

forced to echo the words of Frank Arntzenius: ”The only serious proof of

the possibility of time travel would be a demonstration of its actuality.”[1]

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References

[1] F. Arntzenius. Time travel and modern physics. http://plato.

stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys, December 2009.

[2] C. Callender. Thermodynamic asymmetry in time. http://plato.

stanford.edu/entries/time-thermo, August 2006.

[3] D. Falk. In Search of Time. McClelland and Stewart Ltd, 2008.

[4] D. Greenberger and K. Svozil. Quantum theory looks at time travel,

June 2005.

[5] D. Kutach. Time travel and consistency constraints. Philosophy of

Science, 70(5):1098–1113, 2003.

[6] D. Lewis. The paradoxes of time travel. American Philosophical Quar-

terly, 13:145–152, 1976.

[7] N. Markosian. Time. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/

time, February 2008.

[8] J. McTaggart. The Unreality of Time. Oxford University Press, 1908.

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[9] J. Minkel. Borrowed time: Interview with michio kaku.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?

id=borrowed-time-interview-w, November 2003.

[10] L. Zagzebski. Foreknowledge and free will. http://plato.

stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge, March

2008.

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