Hawking uses a variation of the “grandfather paradox” to show why time travel can give cosmologists nightmares.
On Stephen Hawking’s (1942 CE) new show, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, Dr. Hawking suggests a new time paradox. He calls it the mad scientist paradox. I will give you a brief outline of it.
- A scientist creates a wormhole.
- It peers one minute in the past.
- He sees himself through it.
- He uses a gun to shoot himself.
- He kills himself before he shot the gun.
Who killed him? Would he even be dead? This is certainly something I do not have a resolution for. Hawking’s answer is that it is impossible to travel back in time because nature can not have paradoxes such as this and the grandfather paradox.
Watch the video dsc.discovery.com
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One response to “Stephen Hawking’s Universe: Mad Scientist Paradox”
RE Prof Hawking’s Mad scientist,
sorry wrong link in last post – should be…
https://sites.google.com/site/abriefhistoryoftimelessness/advanced-timelessness/prof-hawking-s-mad-scientist-paradox
I just read your comments, so i wrote this piece (thanks for the inspiration)
I think this is what would actually happen…
https://sites.google.com/site/abriefhistoryoftimelessness/basic-timelessness/the-past-and-future-exposed
(i haven’t checked it through – just finished it, will do later)
no need for time, or paradoxes…
This is part of a site i have set up to find a publisher for my book ‘A Brief History of Timelessness’ (working title)
main site
https://sites.google.com/site/abriefhistoryoftimelessness/home
any comments welcome
matt welcome
london.
Stephen Hawkins ‘Suicidal Mad scientist’ explained without time.
Professor Hawkins Mad scientist paradox.
Professor Hawking’s Mad scientist scenario is described on his web site as follows. (happy to remove quote if asked)
“I don’t like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it’s true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he’s built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past.
Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He’s now dead. So who fired the shot? It’s a paradox. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.
This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe – that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can’t make themselves impossible. If they could then there’d be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I’m sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html#ixzz1I6Ag8BBK
I think this can be re-explained timelessly as follows…
First let’s see if we can at least create a scenario that looks like the one described…
We can do this using known physics, as in the diagram above.
First the mad scientist sets up near a suitable space warping mass.
At his feet lies a gun. (it is already assembled, because I’m not a very good artist).
Just standing there, light reflects of the scene, and ‘images’ of the scientist and gun are created and flee the scene at the speed of light.
These images circulate the super dense mass, appearing ‘straight ahead’ of the scientist – we can put a window in front of the scientist and call it a portal if we wish.
Now the scientist can stoop down , pick up the gun, and aim it at his own image – while the image is still of himself standing over the gun!
We can note here that the nature of such heavily warped space is very bizarre – looking through it, it appears ‘straight’ , and we could even push a ‘straight’ metal rod ahead of the scientist and it would follow the path of the light, and return to prod the scientist from behind – ‘straight’ but straight in warped space.
Looking at his own image of his gun less self the scientist aims and fires.
The bullet, follows the warped space, straight, and around, the mass. The bullet passes not through ‘time’ in any sense (as discussed elsewhere the idea of time is not really proven) – but through the images ! of the scientist.
This means the bullet goes around the dense mass in the opposite direction to the images, and then hits the scientist on his left side in the case illustrated.
(What is odd here is that because of the looped space, the bullet is able to cut through the images ‘from the last, to the first’ (see diagram).)
The only bizarre factors needed here are the understanding that warped space is both warped but seems straight (to anything within it), and an understanding that the strong gravitational field will also ‘slow down change’ for anything within it. There is no need for time to exist, or be dilated for the above to make sense.
So all that happens it the scientist sees ‘out of sync’ images of himself, and shoots at them. Whether the images are there or not makes no difference to the bullet that whizzes through them in the opposite direction (the bullet doesn’t ‘experience going back in time’ just because it is going through images in a back to front way). Then the bullet hits the scientist , ‘a while’ after it leaves the gun- to use time based terms.
What is odd to consider is that the bullet first ‘hits’ the image of the scientist standing over the gun. Then the image of him stooping to reach it, then the image of him aiming , then the image of him firing, then… the image of whatever he did next – say dropping the gun… and lastly , not the ‘image’ of whatever he is doing – but his body itself.
So there’s no mystery here, and no time travel etc. Just an odd path of images, and a bullet.
He could save himself a few trillion Euros and a trip to a black hole, if he just copied myth busters TV show and constructed a near circular tube of pipe and fired the gun into it. The effect, a bullet going round in a circle and hitting the shooter is just the same as the les glamorous example above.
If you make this circle very large, the you could fire a gun into it, and thrown the gun away… managing to shoot yourself, when you weren’t even holding a gun. Odd, but nothing that suggest time exists, or that ‘temporal’ paradoxes have to be dodged.