Time Travel - Philosophical Understandings of Time Travel

Philosophical Understandings of Time Travel

Theories of time travel are riddled with questions about causality and paradoxes. Compared to other fundamental concepts in modern physics, time is still not understood very well. Philosophers have been theorizing about the nature of time since the era of the ancient Greek philosophers and earlier. Some philosophers and physicists who study the nature of time also study the possibility of time travel and its logical implications. The probability of paradoxes and their possible solutions are often considered.

For more information on the philosophical considerations of time travel, consult the work of David Lewis or Ted Sider. For more information on physics-related theories of time travel, consider the work of Kurt Gödel (especially his theorized universe) and Lawrence Sklar.

Read more about this topic:  Time Travel

Famous quotes containing the words time and/or travel:

    When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with such applause in the lecture room,
    How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
    Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
    In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
    Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)