Novikov Self-consistency Principle - Potential Implications For Paradoxes

Potential Implications For Paradoxes

The Novikov Principle is able to circumvent most commonly cited temporal paradoxes which are often alleged to exist should time travel be possible (and are often claimed to make it impossible). A common example of the principle in action is the idea of preventing disasters from happening in the past and the potential paradoxes this may cause (notably the idea that preventing the disaster would remove the motive for the traveller to go back and prevent it and so on). The Novikov self-consistency principle states that a time traveller would not be able to do so. An example is the Titanic sinking; even if there were time travelers on the Titanic, they obviously failed to stop the ship from sinking. The Novikov Principle does not allow a time traveler to change the past in any way at all, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies—for example, a time traveler could rescue people from a disaster, and replace them with realistic corpses if history recorded that bodies of victims had been found. Provided that the rescuees were not known to have survived prior to the date that the time traveler stepped into the time machine (perhaps because they were taken forward in time to a later date, or because their identities were hidden), the time traveler's motivation to travel back in time and save them will be preserved. In this example, it must always have been true that the people were rescued by a time traveler and replaced with realistic corpses, and there would be no "original" history where they were actually killed, since the notion of changing the past is deemed impossible by the self-consistency principle.