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 there’s no magic invisible line that divides having from not having any given quality. We know from countless studies that we humans are fractionally conscious some of the time but for the most part we operate on autopilot and our brains merely fabricate “reasons” post hoc so that we can imagine ourselves to be steering the ship rather than, as is really the case, merely passengers on the deck. We thus have neither full consciousness nor free will; nevertheless we babble endlessly about such things because we fail to define terms that conform to our empirical understanding of the basis of our existence.
So it is when it comes to the topic of time travel. Few people ever bother to define what they mean when they use the phrase, and fewer still stop to consider the requirements. Instead, we chatter endlessly about abstractions such as the Grandfather Paradox in which someone travels back in time to kill their antecedent and thus, by so doing, negates their own…