Time Travel

[Skimmel_98 at yahoo.com]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C1177
From: Skimmel_98
Subject: Time Travel
Reply To: [Yahoo! #1176] Re: Vancouver / Time Travel
Date: 5/1/00 12:20 pm  (ET)

All authors of time travel stories must have worked out an answer to
the Grandfather Paradox.

To summarize for those unfamiliar with the term:

Suppose you went back in time to visit your grandfather when he was a
young boy. Suppose further that you killed him. Because he is a young
boy, your father would never have existed and hence you would have never
existed. Because you never existed, you couldn't have travelled back in
time in the first place.

Science Fiction writers have three general solutions to the Grandfather
Paradox. Solution #1) You can not interact with the past. When you
are there you are a phantom who can only observe. So you couldn't have
killed your grandfather. Solution #2) Alternate realities or parallel
universes. You can kill your grandfather but it triggers the beginning
of an alternate universe in which you don't exist. Solution #3 (and the
one preferred by physicists) You can only travel forward in time. The
past is immutable and unchanging.

The fourth solution is to ignore the problem completely by saying,
"OK. Its impossible but that isn't as much fun so we're going to do
it anyway."

My greatest fear relative to Harry Potter is that it is really a giant
time travel story. Consider what a cheap answer it would be if the reason
Voldemort couldn't kill Harry is because Harry is his grandfather.