Quantum Leap: The Trouble with Time Travel

Named one of the ten hottest Sina Weibo topics in 2011, "Palace" is a popular Chinese TV series involving a girl who died of electric shock and traveled back to the past, taking millions of viewers on a romantic yet exciting adventure. Unfortunately, the show was more influential than anybody imagined it would be. On March 1, two 12-year-old girls committed suicide hoping to travel back in time and make a movie with the emperors.

Without making light of the tragedy, we can't help but wonder if the girls were misled by the faulty logic underpinning the plot in “Palace.” Perhaps China’s efforts to take time travel off the airwaves was a sound decision (though some media outlets, like the Huffington Post, have wondered whether this story is being shamelessly used to back up that decision).

For now, we clearly have no clue whether those two girls succeeded in their plans. In case they have not, we'd like to take this opportunity to remind everybody about the difficulties of time-traveling to the past. Time-traveling to the future is a different concept and will not be discussed here, though we will tip our hat to the guy who developed a very impressive theory that has contributed to our understanding of time travel.

Before we begin, let’s take a moment to examine the premises of time travel. The fundamental assumption for time travel in any form would be the existence of time. If time does not exist, then traveling in time would be a weird concept or maybe need to be renamed – maybe just “travel.” For our purposes, let’s say time does exist.

According to Wikipedia, “Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is known as a time machine.” (If you believe time travel is achievable without a machine, then concentrate hard – you might hypnotize yourself and go back any minute now. If you do, please come back and tell us how it went. Those who prefer their mechanical means of temporal travel, keep on reading.)

Before we construct our machine, let’s consider some hypothetical scenarios we might run into. Otherwise we could really waste a lot of … well, time. One major problem with backward time travel is the possibility of setting into motion a series of actions that prevent the future traveler (i.e. yourself) from existing. That is, if you do something in the past that prevents you from existing, then you will never have existed and thus never could have accomplished time travel – a violation of causality, if you wish. If traveling back in time allows you to do that, it would create a logical fallacy.

Others suggest it’s possible to travel only as far back as the point when the time machine you’re using started to exist. That would make it difficult to travel very far back in time if your machine were manufactured only recently; leaping back to the Qing dynasty would be impossible, unless they somehow also had a similar machine back then. However, just because no one has achieved it yet or discovered a century-old time machine yet doesn't mean it's impossible – just highly unlikely.

And scientifically speaking, there’s little evidence that backward time traveling has anything to do with being shocked, killed or any other kind of near-death experience. There are a number of great movies that involve time travel, showing all sorts of methods: super speed, sleeping/dreaming or something more scientific, like a sentient supercomputer or a souped-up DeLorean. But we encourage all of you to take these methods with a grain of salt.

To sum up, traveling back in time is not easy. Traveling forward, however, is quite doable. To illustrate this, we’ve traveled several weeks into the future since learning of these girls’ unfortunate death to post this blog. See? Easy.

Now here’s a question you can answer regardless of whether you actually believe in time travel: If you could travel back to any time in Beijing, which time period would you choose?

Photos: Clock-desktop.com, Comicvine.com, Friedpost.com, Media.tumblr.com, Listal.com

Comments

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The trouble with "time travel" in the sense of moving outside the present moment (whether backward or forward) is that it is IMPOSSIBLE. We are living in this moment and there is no possible way to change this. This idea of time travel is purely imaginative and flows entirely against the natural(already proven) laws of the universe.

It does make for an entertaining movie theme, however.

Max, you are naive enough to thinka girl died trying to follow what happened in the story or also are part of the peopaganda...?