Novikov Self-Consistency Principle: Why You (Most Likely) Cannot Use A Time Machine To Change The Past

If we have a time machine, is it possible to go back into the past and change it?

That's a question many people have thought about. It turns out that if there's no parallel universes, the Novikov self-consistency principle should hold and that there is no way to change the past. What has happened cannot be undone. Whatever actions from the future are already accounted for in what has happened.

So, the movie The Terminator agrees with this principle: The terminator going back in time created a consistent loop that would create John Connor who would then get into a situation where a terminator must be sent back in time, and in the process would create John Connor, and so on. However the Terminator 2, 3, and 4 movies deal with changing the past/history, so they are less realistic according to this principle.

Novikov gave a short speech about this idea also.

Some Info About Time Travel

At least two of the big movies coming out in 2009 involve time-travel, so it's a good time to review what we know and don't know about the possibility of the real time-travel to the past. Two informative and easy to understand links are Time Travel and Modern Physics and Rules for Time Travelers.

By the way, we are all traveling through time in the forward direction, so the only unknown time travel is time traveling to the past.

I think the movies Time Crimes (Los cronocrímenes) and Primer are probably closest to the real time travel if it is indeed possible.

ภาพยนตร์สุดเสียวประจำปี: Hard Candy

ผมชอบดูหนังเรื่อง Juno มาก พอรู้ว่านางเอก (Ellen Page) เล่นหนังเรื่อง Hard Candy และได้รีวิวดีก็เลยหามาดู

ดู Hard Candy แล้วหัวใจเต้นแรงมากครับตอนกลางๆเรื่อง ถ้าคุณเป็นผู้ชายคุณคงเข้าใจ

Patrick Wilson ที่เล่นเป็น Nite Owl II ใน Watchmen และ Little Children เล่นด้วยครับ

Who Watches The Watchmen?

The original Latin phrase is Quis custodiet ipso custodes? and its history is interesting by itself. You can find more about it at this page.

However, what I mean in the title is a question of who watches the Watchmen movie. Apparently more than 10 million people, including my wife and I, did in the first few days.

Some observations about the movie:

1. It ROCKS!

2. It was very well adapted from the original 12-issue comic book series which is one of the best comics ever.

3. My wife likes it too.

4. I'm old enough that the beautiful young actress I remember from my youth (Carla Guggino) plays the mother of the female lead in the movie. Carla is actually two years younger than I am. She is also the mother in Spy Kids movies.

5. Human should strive to be Dr. Manhattan in the next few centuries.

6. This movie is not for young children. Way too violent for kids.

7. The director Zack Snyder's other movies include Dawn of the Dead (2004) and 300, both of which I like a lot.

8. The actors who play Rorschach and Nite Owl II are both in another excellent film, Little Children. When I say it's excellent, I mean that it's already excellent even if the beautiful Jennifer Connelly and the beautiful, nude Kate Winslet didn't appear in the movie. If you are older than 25, you might find it excellent too. (Warning, the zone-3 DVD sold in Thailand censors a lot of things, so go with other source for better viewing experience.)

Slumdog Rules!

Didn't I tell you that "Slumdog Millionaire Should Win A Nobel Prize In Movie"?  Since there's no Nobel prize in movie, Slumdog got the next best thing, winning 8 Oscars! 

It won Best Picture, Directing, Music (Song), Music (Score), Film Editing, Sound Mixing, Cinematography, and Writing (Adapted Screenplay.)

If you haven't seen it, you should take a look.  I told my wife it's a chick movie to get her to see it and after she saw it she told me "Ko, it's not a chick movie." Ha ha ha.

My previous predictions didn't work out so well.  In 1991, I thought Beauty and the Beast would win the Best Picture, but The Silence of the Lambs won.  Also, in 1995 I thought Babe would beat Braveheart, but I was wrong.  But imagine a world where Babe beat Braveheart.  Well, I couldn't either, but a man must have some impossible dreams.

Slumdog Millionaire Should Win A Nobel Prize In Movie

I just saw it and urge you to see it if you can.  Here is the plot from IMDB (no spoiler):

A Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums, becomes a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" He is arrested under suspicion of cheating, and while being interrogated, events from his life history are shown which explain why he knows the answers.

Incidentally, another one of my favorite movies, 28 Days Later, is also directed by Danny Boyle.

Papers From The World's Best Movie Studio

Which studio, you might ask? It's Pixar, of course. I have yet to find any of their movies that I didn't like.

Here, you can find many papers describing their amazing technologies.

How Could You Not Listen To Jennifer Connelly?

I have been telling people about the stupidity and the immorality of buying and wearing diamonds for a few years while receiving mostly perplexed looks and polite smiles from the people I tried to convince. Needless to say, I am quite a failure at this.

However, in the movie Blood Diamond, Jennifer Connelly's character summed it up infinitely better than I could have done. She said, "People back home would not buy a diamond if they knew it cost someone their hand."

Wanting and buying diamonds, besides being an example of how we are fooled by brilliantly evil marketing strategy to pay enormous sum of money for artificially-scarce commodity, also provides great incentives for mistreatment of the poor and the children. Child enslavement, mutilation, and murder are done just to bring us some stupid shiny rocks. A good summary of all the various reasons we should stop wanting diamonds can be found in this article and this article.

I also would like to point out that we have the technology to synthesize diamonds atom-by-atom, resulting in better quality gems than any naturally occurring diamonds. (This reminds me that, once upon a time, aluminum was priced more highly than gold, due to the difficulty of extracting pure alumninum from rocks. Now, after appropriate technology was discovered in 1886, aluminum is abundant and cheap enough that we can throw away aluminum foils. I suspect that I will use diamond-based semi-conductors, diamond-powder coated electronic devices, and forever-sharp-diamond-edged knives in a decade or two.)

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P.S. Jennifer Connelly, besides being one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, can actually act, and very well at that. She got an Oscar for her role in A Beautiful Mind. I saw her movies since she was a teenager, and I thought, "Good thing this girl is pretty, she cannot act." I'm very happy to see that I'm completely wrong. Starting in the late 1990's, it became more and more apparent what a good actress she has become. Some of her roles I enjoy include a lesbian college student in Higher Learning, the leading role in Dark City (one of my top ten Sci-fi movies), a political activist in Waking the Dead, and a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream.