Let me just preface this by saying I've always been very skeptical of time travel, especially to the past for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to cover here. My intuition tells me that my thoughts below are in someway flawed even if time travel is possible, but I'd still like to know how far the rabbit hole goes and see what you guys think.
So just as a little refresher as to how quantum theory was discovered and why it works, I'm gonna go all the way back to the infamous double slit experiment. In case you're not aware of it, this experiment to my knowledge was done to show the difference when either electrons or light waves are shot through a screen with two slits to show an image on a normal screen behind it. This is the kind of thing that's not so easy to explain without some kind of visual representation, though, so I recommend you just check out this youtube video explaining it and I'll start where this thing leaves off.
Pretty cool, right? Well I think that may not be all there is to it. See there was another experiment done where they tried putting the measuring device between the two screens instead of in front of both of them, reasoning that once the electron had made up its mind to be a wave it couldn't collapse into a particle since it had already gone through the slits. The electron decided, however, that it was way too much of a rebel and collapsed into a particle anyway. Thug life, get on its level. That is INSANE. That's like me deciding to fly to Florida for summer vacation or something, only to decide that I had actually driven all the way to California after I had already gotten there. I think this kind of thing is worth exploring, even if its not really traveling to the past so much as suddenly and drastically changing it with observation at the quantum level. How this kind of thing could be exploited to actually change our past is beyond me, though, I really don't have much of a clue.
I think this would also get past the dreaded Grandfather Paradox since quantum mechanics is more about multiple probabilities rather than the one certainty that relativity is known for creating along with loads of paradoxes. This is getting into the multiple worlds theory, though, I just thought it was interesting. Anyhow, I look forward to seeing what you guys think of this and if I'm totally off base or not.
So just as a little refresher as to how quantum theory was discovered and why it works, I'm gonna go all the way back to the infamous double slit experiment. In case you're not aware of it, this experiment to my knowledge was done to show the difference when either electrons or light waves are shot through a screen with two slits to show an image on a normal screen behind it. This is the kind of thing that's not so easy to explain without some kind of visual representation, though, so I recommend you just check out this youtube video explaining it and I'll start where this thing leaves off.
Pretty cool, right? Well I think that may not be all there is to it. See there was another experiment done where they tried putting the measuring device between the two screens instead of in front of both of them, reasoning that once the electron had made up its mind to be a wave it couldn't collapse into a particle since it had already gone through the slits. The electron decided, however, that it was way too much of a rebel and collapsed into a particle anyway. Thug life, get on its level. That is INSANE. That's like me deciding to fly to Florida for summer vacation or something, only to decide that I had actually driven all the way to California after I had already gotten there. I think this kind of thing is worth exploring, even if its not really traveling to the past so much as suddenly and drastically changing it with observation at the quantum level. How this kind of thing could be exploited to actually change our past is beyond me, though, I really don't have much of a clue.
I think this would also get past the dreaded Grandfather Paradox since quantum mechanics is more about multiple probabilities rather than the one certainty that relativity is known for creating along with loads of paradoxes. This is getting into the multiple worlds theory, though, I just thought it was interesting. Anyhow, I look forward to seeing what you guys think of this and if I'm totally off base or not.
