Time Travel & the Bootstrap Paradox Explained

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity tells us that we have got almost complete freedom of movement into the future.

Time travel to the past, on the other hand, throws up a number of paradoxes.

Any time travel paradoxes that do arise are therefore of particular concern to theoretical physicists.

Their line of reasoning has subsequently led many of them to conclude that time travel to the past must be impossible.

While a bootstrap paradox may produce a consistent account of the timeline’s history, one problem associated with this ontological conundrum is an apparent violation of the Law of Causality.

As a result, scientists are presented with an obvious problem in that they are no longer able to say that a past ’cause’ leads to a future ‘event’.

The event may equally have been created in the future before leading to its cause in the past. Instead of time moving from a dead past to an undetermined future, the past, present, and future are, in fact, all equally real at the same time.

Another problem is an apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that systems always flow from a state of order to a state of disorder.

An object or information trapped within a time loop would continue to age and eventually disintegrate.

The movie “Somewhere in Time”provides an example of a bootstrap paradox involving an object, in this case a pocket watch.

An inconsistency that arises is how the pocket watch survives countless time cycles while remaining unaffected by time.

One solution may be to assume that entropy is somehow reversed by time travel