Tensors, Time Travel, Tenet, and Twelve Monkeys

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April 26, 2021

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Or that time Gödel gave Einstein a birthday gift that made him
doubt his own theories

In the 1940s, two of the greatest minds of that time, Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel,
found themselves both working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A
friendship developed, and the two men took for a habit to walk together. Einstein once
remarked that he went to his office “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt
Gödel”. No one really knows what they talked about during these walks, but presumably,

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it was physics, because Gödel was soon up to speed with Einstein's theory of General
Relativity, and on his 70th birthday Gödel gifted him a solution to the Einstein Field
Equations that contained Closed timelike curves, effectively inventing non-fictional time
travel, and made Einstein doubt his own theories.

But what does that mean? To understand how Gödel's solution actually offers a real,
tangible mechanism for time travel, we need to take a closer look at the Theory of
Relativity.

From Getty Images

Special Relativity
The idea of time travel existed before Einstein presented his theory in 1905, but
surprisingly, not by a lot. See, for most of history, the pace at which the world changed
was so slow, that one could not expect to see any noticeable development within the span
of human life.

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 Egyptian art, from Wikipedia. Left ca 1802–1640 BC, right ca 98–117 AD. About 1,600 years apart.
Notice the similarities in style.

It wasn’t really until the 1700s that people started to think about the past as something
you could visit, just like you would another country. In 1895 H G Wells published The
Time Machine, which handles time travel in the way we are familiar with today, and from
there on the idea has become an increasingly popular trope in sci-fi.

However, Wells never really explain how his time machine works in practice. The details
are kept vague and there is no reason to conclude that time travel is anything but a
fictional plot device.

Special Relativity changed all of that. It started out as a way to explain why light has the
same speed for everyone but ended up with the concept of spacetime, where time and
space are on equal footing. This unification of time and space might just allow for
movement backward in time, but to understand why we need to know more about
relativity.

The Lorentz transformations

The idea of relativity came to Einstein as a solution to the problem of the constancy of the
speed of light. In the late 1800s, very precise measurements indicated that all observers
measured the same speed of light, which of course sounds preposterous the first time one
hears about it. Imagine seeing a train passing by with velocity v. Someone on the train

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turns on a flashlight in the direction he is traveling in. Now, it seems like if he measures
the speed of the light traveling from the flashlight to c, someone standing still on the
platform would measure it to c+v. Remarkably, this is not the case, but rather, the person
on the platform will also measure the speed to c.

This can only be true if time somehow moved slower for the person on the train. But, it
gets weirder. Imagine the person on the platform also switches on a flashlight. Then he
would measure the speed of that light to c, but the person on the train will also measure
the speed to c, which would indicate that the speed moves slower for the person on the
platform!

Let’s do a thought experiment similar to the one Einstein did to derive the exact
formulation.

A light bulb is placed on a moving train. It emits a small pulse which is reflected in the
ceiling. The time it takes for it to return is measured by two observers. Observer A think
that the light has traveled the length

in time tA (Pythagorean theorem). Whereas observer B thinks it has traveled 2h in time

tB. Since both think that light has the same speed and length that A measure is clearly
longer, tA and tB has to be different, meaning that time moves slower for observer B in

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this frame.

Working out the details and the Lorentz transformations

appear (using units where the speed of light c = 1 for
brevity):

Now, this indicates that whenever something travels, it is

subjected to strange shrinking and slowing of time, called
length contraction and time dilation.

Spacetime
A few years later, in 1908, one of Einsteins' teachers, Hermann Minkowski, invented the
concept of spacetime, which explains the strange phenomena of Einstein's theory in an
arguably more intuitive way.

The idea of spacetime is that time and space are connected much in the same way that two
spatial dimensions are connected. So, for example, say we are in the xy-plane and see a
stick with ends at points (0,0) and (2,0), and will thus conclude that the stick is 2m in the
x-direction and 0m in the y-direction. Another observer that is rotated 45⁰ will instead see
the stick's ends at (0,0) and (1.4, 1.4) and will thus conclude that the stick is 1.4m in the x-
direction and 1.4m in the y-direction. Coordinate systems are a human invention and
there is no “natural” coordinate system of the universe, so each of the observers is equally
right in their assessment. However, they will both agree on the length of the stick.

Now, the normal way of thinking about time is that it is fundamentally separated from the
space dimensions and that this type of rotation is not possible in the xt-plane. However,
this turns out to be wrong (as verified by many experiments), and it is very much possible
to rotate in the xt-plane, and this is what gives rise to time dilation, length contraction,
and the constancy of light speed. The rotation is performed when changing velocity. Much
in the same way the rotation angle in the xy-plane is tan-¹(x/y), the angle is now tanh-
¹(x/t), the difference being that a rotation in the xt-plane is actually a hyperbolic rotation.

Hyperbolic rotations are a little crazy compared to ordinary rotations, this is what it looks
like (rightmost diagram):

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6/26
By just looking at the Lorentz diagram we can deduce most of the effects of special
relativity. For example, the constancy of the speed of light. Light is obviously at a 45⁰
angle in both frames since the axis is contracting around just this line.

We can also get a feeling for why we can never go faster than the speed of light.

Imagine that you push a train using a force F. As you do so you are changing the
hyperbolic angle, but even if you change it to infinity, the speed is going to remain below
the light speed.

Imagine that you push a train using a force F1, it accelerates at a rate a1. Inside of the
train, there is another train that someone is pushing with force F2. To them the
acceleration is a2, but since they are using the squished Lorentz transformed coordinate
system, that a2 seems smaller to you. Now, you can either say that since time and space
change inside of moving objects, so is the acceleration that is caused by F2, or you can say
that the mass of the object has changed, as in E = mc².

Since this means that we can travel around between the two 45⁰ light lines on either side
but not beyond it,

we usually say that we can move inside the light cone.

Length contraction and time dilation can be seen by just

placing a stick in the diagram and measure it in the
different coordinate systems.

Simultaneity is not a thing in relativity, as can be seen by

marking two points that are simultaneous in one frame,
and see that they are not so in another.

Simultaneity also has this interesting property, that even

though two observers cannot agree upon the order of two events, they can agree that one
event that is after another in at least one frame, cannot affect the event before.

That is, as long as it does not travel faster than light. This means that the Lorentz
transformations imply that we live in a causal universe.

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Say we have two events A and B.

In the orange frame, A is slightly ahead of B,

but since B is outside of the light cone, A
cannot affect B. Let’s say, hypothetically,
that we could send a superluminal signal
from A to B, effectively changing B, what
would that mean in the purple frame?

As can be seen above, in the purple frame,

event B occurs at t=0, but A occurs at about
t=2. In this frame, we have effectively sent a
signal backward in time. Notice the nuance,
the Lorentz transforms do not imply that
everything is ordered before and after on a
global level since one person's time might be From Wikipedia
another person's space. Rather, the
peculiar behavior of the Lorentz
transformations and the hyperbolic
geometry entails that our universe is
causal.

Proper time
Btw, the rotations done by the Lorentz transformations do not preserve length in the
ordinary sense, but rather a sort of “spacetime length” called proper time. It is calculated
as:

The proper time between two events on the light cone is always zero (do the calculation to
make sure). If we make the change in each direction with respect to proper time, we get
something called the four-velocity, which can be thought of as the spacetime version of
velocity.

An ordinary rotation in space can be done by members of the rotation group SO(3), but
since time and space have different signs in spacetime the rotation group of spacetime is
instead SO(1,3).

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General Relativity
But, what is all the fuss about time travel, haven’t we just proven that we cannot go faster
than light, making that scenario forbidden?

Well, it turns out that the universe is a bit more complicated than that. It is true that we
cannot send a signal beyond the light cone. But, what if the light cone itself tilted? It turns
out that mass can do this. The mass has the effect of curving spacetime and in the process,
the light cones are also curved.

Exactly how spacetime is curved by mass is governed by the Einstein equation

T is called the stress-energy-momentum

tensor and is a more general way of
describing the mass density (sort of)that
takes into account things like E = mc²,
and that momentum is different in different frames. It can be written as a 4x4 matrix. The
top-left element of this matrix is the ordinary mass we are all used to. R is called the Ricci
tensor. It can also be written as a 4x4 matrix. Each element in the Ricci tensor gives a
value just how much spacetime is curving in that direction.

What is curvature? It is sort of a measure of how far something is from being flat/straight.
So for example, a straight line has curvature zero and a circle of radius r has curvature
1/r. Thus, we can get the curvature at any point of a bent line by inscribing a circle in it.

In the 4 dimensions of spacetime, things get a bit more complicated and we need to
specify the curvature in directions tt, tx, ty, tz, xt, xx, xy… etc, all in all 16 components.

The curvature can be calculated from something called the metric. The metric is a
function that tells you how to calculate distances. For example, say that you are hiking in
a country with many mountain ranges going in the east-west direction.

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Say you are at A and want to go to the village over the mountains at B. Because you have
to transverse all the mountains to get to B the distance there is actually twice as long as to
C, even though the distances look the same on the map. We can write this as ds²= dx² +
2dy², where s is the distance. This can also be written as:

With g as:

g is the metric. To get the curvature from the metric, we need to do some fairly complex
derivatives, luckily there are computers for that.

Λ is called the cosmological constant and it is associated with, among other things, the
expansion rate of the universe.

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So in the end, we have:

Some intricate derivatives of g = generalized mass of the system.

If we put in the mass on the right-hand side, and some boundary

conditions, we have a differential equation of g. Solve this, and we get a
map of how spacetime behaves. For Earth, or any planet, we get the
Schwarzschild solution:

As can be seen, if r increase = the dt² part increases, which means that time moves faster
the further from Earth's center we get. Plugging in the numbers we get:

Earths mass: 5.97219*10²⁴ kg

Earth radius: 6.371 * 10⁶ m
G: 6.67408*10-¹¹ m³kg-¹s-²
c: 3*10⁸ ms-¹

So, time moves 0.00000007% slower on earth than in space, or 0.0219 seconds per year.
On the surface of the sun, it’s more like 66.4 seconds.

Gödel metric
So, Schwarzschild is one solution to the Einstein Field Equations, but depending on the
stress-energy-momentum tensor and the boundary conditions there are many more.
Gödel came up with:

But what does this metric represent? It turns out that it is a dust solution. If we imagine
the universe as consisting of a uniform dust cloud of mass density ρ, then the stress-
energy-momentum tensor is just made up of the four-momentum density of this dust. So,
(mass density) times (four-velocity):

Using einsteinpy, a python lib for general relativity, to check this just to make sure:

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If we move along with the dust we of course see no momentum or stress but just the mass,
so that T has only one element at the top left. This is of course equal to the four-velocity of
the dust being u = (1,0,0,0).

The covariant vectors are then:

and then we get the Ricci tensor above.

The 1/2gR part is counteracted by the cosmological

constant. Putting it together:

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Moving to cylindrical coordinates may provide some additional insight:

This means that we have a cylindrical rotation with angular velocity ω. In fact, the Gödel
metric describes a universe of rotating dust. The frame used is sitting on one of the dust
particles.

Let’s draw the light cones. The distances on light lines are always zero, so we can calculate
them by using the metric. Solve:

and for simplicity, let’s fix z and r so that dz=0 and dr=0. Then we can
solve for t as a function of φ:

If we plot this in a tφ-diagram, as we are slowly increasing r we get:

The light cone is tilting in the φ direction. Putting it all together:

As can be seen, this metric exhibits closed timelike curves (CTCs) and would as such
permit time travel.

It’s just that, how can it? Time travel is well known to be riddled with paradoxes, let’s
have a look at a few of them.

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 From
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170
635/g%C3%B6dels-solutions-to-einsteins-
relativity-equations-and-their-consequences

Temporal Paradoxes

The grandfather paradox

Say you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has any children. Then you
weren’t born, so you couldn’t go back to kill your grandfather. Then you were born and
actually went back and killed him, and so on and so on.

In other words: Something prevents itself from existing.

Bootstrap paradox
Also called causal loop. Say you go back in time to 1904 and give Einstein a book on
relativity. It turns out that Einstein had never thought about it, and was quite comfortable
at the patent office in Bern, but he sends it in for publication, and the rest is history. Now,
who invented relativity?

In other words: Something creates itself.

Fermi paradox
Why has no one seen a time traveler yet? Why haven’t they visited us?

Solutions
There are a few possible explanations.

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 1. General relativity is wrong. There are some reasons to suspect that GR is at
least incomplete since gravity is not quantized like the rest of the forces. On the
other hand, it is not clear how quantizing gravity would change the Gödel metric to
prohibit time travel (some of the other proposed time travel mechanics such as
wormholes might be fixed this way though, but the Gödel metric is singularity free).
Also, GR is very well tested and seems to be working rather flawlessly as is. There
are even some physicists that insist that gravity is different from the other forces
and doesn’t need to be quantized.
2. The universe is inherently inconsistent. This would be pretty weird, and
perhaps also fun, but so far nothing points in this direction.
3. Time travel is permitted but not possible in practice, since the universe
does not rotate/rotate too slow, or is expanding too fast for us to exploit the Gödel
metric.
4. Time travel is permitted and possible in practice, but very hard to achieve.

I will focus on 3 and 4 in this article. I find them very intriguing because it’s not
immediately obvious how they solve the paradoxes. I mean, sure, they offer a good
explanation as to why we haven’t seen any time travelers (Fermi paradox), but they don’t
seem to solve the grandfather or bootstrap paradoxes. Say we live in a universe where
time travel is permitted by the laws of physics, but we are saved from paradoxes by mere
chance since the universe is expanding just a little too fast for us to actually use the
opportunity, does this not still mean that the laws of physics are inconsistent?

Especially 4 does absolutely not seem to solve anything.

I would argue that 3 and 4 solve the paradoxes, because the problem is not with time
travel but rather our intuition, and I think that a good way to explore this is by looking at
solutions that people have come up with in movies.

Temporal Paradox Solutions in Movies

There are two broad categories of solutions to temporal paradoxes.

1. Multiple timelines.
When you go back, you create a new timeline. In movies, this is usually done in one of two
ways.

1.1: Simple reset:

Groundhog Day
Edge of Tomorrow
Source Code
Naken
Run Lola Run

1.2: Different endpoints:

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 Primer
The Butterfly Effect
Back to the Future
Looper
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
The Time Machine

This solves the grandfather paradox because the time traveler does not necessarily need to
go back in the new timeline.

The time traveler goes back and kills himself before he invents the time machine. It is perfectly
consistent for the “Main character, timeline 2” to never go back.

Nevertheless, a lot of these type of movies enforces some sort of rule that ensures that the
main character goes back also in the new timeline. This is mostly used as a plot device and
not so much to solve any paradoxes. For example in Back to the Future and The Time
Machine.

What’s happening to the timelines when the main character has left is usually not
explained.

In physics, this solution is mostly associated with Quantum Time Travel and the Many
Worlds interpretation of QM. It is discussed in detail by one of the founders of Quantum
Informatics, David Deutsch.

2. One timeline.
What has happened has happened and it is impossible to change, even if we go back in
time. In movies, this is exemplified by:

12 Monkeys
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Predestination
Time Lapse
The Time Traveler’s Wife

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 Cronocrimenes
Tenet
Triangle

The main character goes back and influences the path of the side character.

In physics, this solution is mostly associated with General Relativity, the Gödel metric,
and Wormholes.

Since this article is about GR and the Gödel metric I will only consider 2 here.

I should mention that there exists a third category of time travel movies. This category
does not need to deal with any paradoxes since it only concerns travel forward in time.
Examples:

Timetrap
Planet of the Apes.

Grandfather paradox: Case studies (Spoilers)

I think that 12 Monkeys (1995) is an especially good example of a consistent temporal
paradox solution movie.

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Even some of the characters in the movie are aware of the limitations of time travel. The
main protagonist is not sent back to change the past, as the past cannot be changed.
Instead, he is sent back to gather the information that might help people in the future. He
even says so himself:

Cole: Five billion people died in 1996 and 1997. Almost the entire population of the
world. Only about 1% of us survived.

Some doctor: Are you going to save us, Mr. Cole?

Cole: How can I save you? This has already happened. I can’t save you, nobody can. I’m
simply trying to gather information about the virus.

For those who haven’t seen it, here’s a short rundown of the plot: (paraphrased from
Wikipedia):

A deadly virus, released in 1996, wipes out almost all of humanity, forcing survivors to
live underground. A group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys is believed to
have released the virus.

In 2035, James Cole is sent back in time to find the original virus to help scientists
develop a cure. Meanwhile, Cole is troubled by dreams involving a foot chase and
shooting at an airport.

Cole gets into various shenanigans in the past and befriends a psychologist named
Railly.

In the end, Cole figures out that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys is a red herring and
manages to identify the real perpetrator at an airport. Cole disguises himself in a wig
and sunglasses and proceed to try to murder the perpetrator before he releases the
virus, but is shot down by police.

As Cole lies dying in Railly’s arms, Railly suddenly begins to scan the crowd around her.
Railly finally makes eye contact with a small boy — the young James Cole witnessing
the scene of his own death, which will replay in his dreams for years to come.

The perpetrator escapes and releases the virus. Everything has played out just the way
it always was.

One thing this movie shares with every other one timeline movie is:

1. Time travel has some sort of limitation. It is either hard, expensive, prone to error,
or it is only possible to go to a small set of moments in time.
2. The characters lack some information that is brought to light in the end, and this
hinders them from changing history and rather make them part of what made
history the way it was.

The unsatisfactoriness of policing mechanisms

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Now, the way time travel is handled in 12 Monkeys is certainly consistent, but it leaves us
unsatisfied in a way. It’s just a little bit too convenient. Coles younger self actually saw his
older, time-traveling self die when he tried to shoot the perpetrator, something that could
mess up the consistency had it not been for the fact that he, conveniently, had disguised
himself in a wig and glasses. Or, had he figured out that Army of the Twelve Monkeys was
innocent just a little earlier, that might have allowed him to stop the catastrophe.

It works in the movie because there, time travel is hard and information is scarce. Him
being disguised and not recognizing himself, although convenient, still feels like it’s in the
realm of plausibility. But still, this solution seems to be more of a coincidence that solves
this particular case, but not time travel paradoxes in general. Obviously, in the movie, the
screenwriter and director can control that Cole does not know enough to change the
timeline, but what about the real universe?

It feels like we need to explain how this cosmic policing mechanism works before we can
accept it.

In Tenet (2020), a lot of the backward scenes are chaotic and fast, the protagonist is
rather disoriented and not in a position to make decisions to change the past.

In Time Lapse (2014), the characters decide that they better try to keep the timeline
consistent, because who knows what would happen otherwise, and just use it for profit
and not trying to experiment with paradoxes. But, who made them this rise averse?

Likewise, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Hermione tells
Harry: Awful things happen to wizards who meddle with time.

In The Time Machine (2002), the main character invents the time machine to save his
fiancee but every time he saves her, she dies of something else.

Do we need an intelligent being that keeps track of possible inconsistencies and act to
prevent them, or could the system be made automatic?

The absurdity of it all has led some philosophers to conclude that time travel is
impossible.

Grandfather paradox solved

Does this remind you of something? To me, it echos the problem people have had with the
theory of evolution ever since it was first conceived by Charles Darwin.

It just seems way too convenient that the Curuba flower is just the right length for the
beak of the Sword-billed hummingbird.

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 From Wikipedia

Or that earth is literally swarming with trees that just so happen to produce delicious
fruit.

How can something as complex as humans or ecosystems emerge without the need for an
intelligent agent?

To the ancient people, it must have seemed like a very unsatisfactory answer that this
could just happen by itself, so they invented other explanations. Nevertheless, today we
know that evolution does indeed “happen by itself”, and that it is our intuition that is at
fault, not evolution. This should come as no surprise, as our intuition is tuned to the
normal human conditions of ~100 years, whereas evolution takes place on a scale of
millions of years.

In the same way, it is not time travel that is the problem, but rather our intuition.

I find it easier to get a grasp on the problem by making a drawing.

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This is what would happen if you go back in time and just have a nice chat with your
young grandfather. The lines are not persons, but rather causal chains.

Now, draw the same figure if you kill your grandfather before he has any children.

It is trivially obvious that we cannot draw such a figure, and what’s more: We don’t really
feel that we need a contrived policing mechanism to prevent this from happening, this
type of geometrical figure just does not exist, and that’s all there is to it.

Say we write a program that can draw paintings with lines at random, even if we run such
a program for an infinite amount of time, it will never ever produce the “kill grandfather”-
figure.

So the reason we wont go back to kill our grandfathers is the same reason we wont draw an
undrawable geometrical figure.

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 “Impossible” figure by M C Escher. It is
possible to draw in 2 dimensions but not in 3
(without cheating). From Wikipedia.

Free will
Why does this also feel so unnatural to us, why is it not directly obvious? My guess is that
it’s our perception of free will that is the culprit. It feels like we should be able to go back
and do whatever because we think that’s what we can do in the present. However, we
cannot kill our grandpas (or anyone else) in the present either, unless the exactly right
chain of reactions will take place, from photons hitting our retinas, activating electrons in
our brain, and in the end, moving electrons to our limbs making them move. A decision
that would go against the billiard balls in our brain would violate, among others, the
conservation of energy, and we would be able to build a perpetual motion machine.

We tend to think that even if we do not do an action, we still could if we wanted, but that’s
an illusion. It’s just that, in a world with no closed time like loops, it’s not as obvious.

I think that were we to live in a universe where time travel was easy and common, our
perception of free will would be vastly different, and we would not consider time
paradoxes at all. Rather, we would constantly be visited by travelers from the future, none
of which would or could change anything, and that would be the most natural thing in the
world for us.

Perhaps our whole perception of free will is an artifact of us living in a world with no, or
few closed time-like loops.

On the same note, it must have been very strange for Railly when Bruce Willis tells her
that they are in the past and that the past cannot be changed. But where exactly is he
from? The future, the present? Perhaps someone has visited him from his future telling

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him that he cannot change anything since he lives in the past. Following this to its
inevitable conclusion leads to the idea that every point in time is in the past, or rather:
The present, and the flow if time is not a thing.

Bootstrap paradox resolved

Drawing the bootstrap paradox:

The two world lines to the left represent what we are used to, perhaps one is James Clerk
Maxwell inventing his theory of Electromagnetism. The one to the right represents our
example from before, where we go back in time and teach Einstein about Relativity. Now,
it seems very strange to us that something as complex as Relativity could be drawn in the
middle of the paper like this, without having a causal connection to some simpler ideas
further down. We are used to a picture where we start out with low complexity at the
bottom, and as we move up the entropy and also the complexity increase. First simple life
forms, then more complex. First simple ideas, then more complex. But, there is actually
nothing that says that we cannot have complexity at the beginning of the universe, it is
certainly not inconsistent, it’s just that it doesn’t seem to be the case in our universe. If
someone found a fossilized multicellular organism from the beginning of the universe,
before any single-cell organism, it would be unexpected, but not inconsistent.

Conclusion

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So in conclusion, time paradoxes are not paradoxes at all. We don’t have to worry about
us going back and killing our grandfathers because we won't, just like we won't do all the
other myriad of things that we can imagine doing, we can only do the things that we
actually do, no more and no less, and that was always the case. So don’t worry if things did
not go the way you wanted, it was not your fault, it was always the case that you would
end up right here, reading this article.

We think there are temporal paradoxes because we live in a universe where spacetime is
mostly flat SO(1,3), which makes time travel practically impossible, or at least very rare,
so we have evolved to view the world as strictly causal.

The existence of free will, and the flow of time are nothing more than misconceptions,
something that only a species living in mostly flat SO(1,3) spacetime would indulge in.

Why do we remember the past but not the future?

Except for the SO(1,3) signature of spacetime, another thing that enforces the illusion of
the flow of time is that we remember the past but not the future. Why do we do that?

The answer is entropy. The universe has one side with low and one with high entropy.
This means that our brain can reliably assume its own state in one direction but not the
other. Since the past is low entropy, the brain can guess its starting state in that direction,
and draw conclusions about what has happened to it since, by inspecting its current state.
It can however not draw any conclusions about the future by inspecting its current state
since it cannot be sure of what it will look like in the future. Because of high entropy, there
are simply too many alternatives.

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 I know what plates look like when they leave the factory, so I can “remember” that this must have
been dropped. I cannot, however, “remember” if it will be glued together, or thrown into the
trash, or remodeled into something else, or any of the other myriad of possibilities. Picture from
Unsplash.

Withal, it’s not all black and white, sometimes it can be hard to draw conclusions about
the past from the current state. The events in the past might have left vague marks, such
as when memories are incompletely written, and we misremember. Likewise, the future is
not totally opaque and we can make qualified guesses about it. In the same way,
memories about the past are also guesses about what has happened, even though they feel
like fact.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology

So, why is one end of the universe so low in entropy? No one knows, but Roger Penrose
has an interesting idea with his conformal cyclic cosmology. The idea is that far in the
future (about 10¹⁰⁶ years from now), once all black holes have evaporated, the universe
will consist of nothing but photons and other massless bosons. Since these all travel at the
speed of light, they cannot experience time. This means that the size and age of the
universe become inconsequential, something called invariant under conformal
transformations. So, even though this universe is ancient and enormous, for all practical
purposes it could be super small and young. It can also be calculated to have very low
entropy. Now we have conditions that seem very similar to the ones close to the big bang.
So, in a way, we have a start of a new universe, something Penrose calls an Aeon, and this
process will continue for all eternity, generating an endless chain of universes.

References

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