this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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This was my mostly comical thought. You know how people always say they'd go back and off Hitler? But somehow it never happened so either time travel doesn't exist, or they just always fail. We're just getting to see that in real time.
(That said, this fucker definitely changed the future so it's probably not that.)
Time travel is possible. Changing the future however, isn't.
It has to do with wave function collapse. The cat is both alive and dead until its observed, at which point the wave function collapses to reveal which it is.
So let's say you go back in time and successfully kill Hitler. Well you're now observing that outcome from a tangent timeline. In our timeline, that wavefront has already collapsed. There's no takesies backsies. Its immutable.
If you can go back and try again, your just creating new wave funtion collapses, not changing the ones that already occurred.
Its like re-rolling a dice because you didn't like the outcome. You can re-roll as much as you want, it doesn't erase that first roll; its still there, imprinted on the quantum foam of the multi verse.
I've always preferred the "creates a new timeline" explanation because it nicely negates the grandfather paradox. And you're still changing the future, just the future of a different timeline.