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Is Time Travel Possible?
Why speculating about time travel is no different from wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin
Although readers or viewers of Good Omens will know that there really is an answer to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (only one, because the only dancing angel is Aziraphale) no one knows how many millions of hours were wasted by medieval theologians debating this utterly pointless topic. We humans have a penchant for spinning our wheels intellectually, digging ourselves into theoretical bear-pits from which we rarely if ever emerge.
Whereas in the old days people saw angels and worried about angelic dance groups, today we’re more sophisticated: we see UFOs and babble endlessly about time travel.
Another fascinating aspect of humanity is our general inability to define in any meaningful way what we intend by the words we use. We happily throw around grandiose terms like Free Will and Consciousness without any real conception of what these words could possibly mean. We compound this error by imagining them to be all-or-nothing, so that we either have “free will” or we don’t; we either have “consciousness” or we don’t.
In reality, once we’ve attempted to define such nebulous concepts, we generally find that…
