Interstellar: That annoying Paradox

Christopher Nolan's 2014 grand scale science-fiction story about time and space, and the things that transcend them.
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josephcq wrote:
rhonkt wrote:^Good post.

I feel like I've tried my hardest to understand the whole wormhole thing, but it's just barely beyond my grasp.

Personally I think they could've avoided the issue if they just left the origin of the wormhole as ambiguous.
I am so torn on this topic!! I too which they could have just taken out the 20 seconds where cooper suggests that 'its us.' and even after tars says humans couldn't he insists that eventually they did (did. not do.). But maybe people would have been really pissed after the movie "so just some wormhole showed up and there is no reason or explanation even though they say it's not a naturally occurring phenomenon?" The foreshadowing throughout the film to imply that it is humans makes me feel like it wasn't just some last ditch thought, but that they had this in mind throughout the writing process. But still, we keep trying to figure out how they hell they could have survived to made it.
Exactly how I feel. This is really my only issue with the movie...it's still probably my favorite movie of all-time, but the explanation (over-explanation from Coop) for the wormhole doesn't really sit well with me.

I mean, I've read up on all the various theories about how time isn't linear, the future could've "occurred" without the past, you don't need traditional causality, etc., but I just still can't quite grasp.

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stevearico wrote:Have you had a similar discussion with someone called Stevo1361 on google+ late last year? Because the way you write is familiar. If you have then that's me!
I'm pretty sure it wasn't me, at least I don't remember having any discussions on google+ last year.
stevearico wrote:
JesseM wrote:But the bootstrap paradox is not actually a "paradox" in terms of being logically inconsistent, only in terms of being counterintuitive. Kip Thorne suggests in his work that if time travel turns out to be possible, we might actually expect bootstrap-paradox type situations involving billiard balls as having some real physical likelihood in a scenario where we shoot a billiard ball towards a wormhole. Just consider the third scenario from the diagram I posted here, where the billiard ball's initial trajectory is such that if left undisturbed it won't travel into the wormhole at all, but then its future self comes out and deflects it at just the right angle so it can go into the wormhole and become that same future self.
Fair enough, i don't have an issue with the billiard ball scenario or thought experiments where the future influences the past in a cyclical loop. Where i have an issue with Interstellar and why i don’t think it fits the billiard ball theory is that the wormhole existing is reliant on beings who we are led to believe will die should they not be able to follow the sequence of events which we see unfold.
But beyond just the future influencing the past in a cyclical loop, are you saying that you're OK with some types of scenarios where the nature of the loop is such that, if the past self hadn't gotten that influence from the future, they never would had the opportunity to travel back in time at all? Because that's basically what's happening with the third billiard ball diagram I was referring to--again, the billiard ball is on a trajectory that would cause it to miss the wormhole altogether, and we can make it even more analogous by imagining that directly on its path is a bomb that will destroy it as soon as the billiard ball collides with it, so without any intervention from the future it's doomed just like humanity was in Interstellar. But then its future self pops out of the wormhole and deflects it away from the bomb and into the wormhole, then when it goes through the wormhole it becomes that same future self, in a self-consistent loop which not only explains why it went back in time but also saves it from destruction. So I just want to make sure that you don't have a problem with this, and that the only thing that bothers you is the appearance of the wormhole itself (or the tesseract later in the story) in what "They" would view as the distant past.

Or we could also imagine a different story similar to Interstellar, where in the 21st century humanity is dying, and then suddenly a wormhole appears in our solar system. But let's say that in this story--similar to an earlier draft of the Interstellar script, and also similar to Carl Sagan's novel Contact--this wormhole was built by a long-gone alien civilization billions of years in the past, and it's just one member of a huge network of wormholes connecting many star systems across the galaxy. So imagine humanity uses the wormholes to escape extinction and colonize the galaxy, until finally after centuries of exploring this wormhole network, they discover a wormhole that leads centuries into a past, to a time hundreds of years before the 21st century when humanity discovered the first wormhole. However, this wormhole takes the future humans to a star system far away from Earth, and by training their super-telescopes on Earth, they see there is no wormhole in our solar system at this date. So knowing that humanity is going to need saving in a few hundred years, they find another wormhole nearby (which like all the others was created long ago by aliens) without a time delay between the two mouths, and they physically tow one mouth of this wormhole towards our solar system, while towing the other mouth to the star system that history records was the first one humanity visited. The mouth being towed towards the solar system arrives in the 21st century, just in time for humanity to discover it and escape extinction.

So in this story, just like in Interstellar, humanity would have gone extinct if not for the intervention of our future selves. But in this case, the intervention is that our future selves brought a preexisting wormhole into our solar system, not that they actually created a new wormhole (or a new tesseract, since it's that rather than a conventional wormhole that enables time travel in Interstellar) in their own past that wouldn't have existed without their intervention. So would the story above seem OK to you, and it's just the creation of new spacetime shortcuts in the past that bothers you?

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Love it - this reminds me of the conversations had after Donnie Darko LOL

You really do have to let go of the notion of beginnings and middles and endings to work with the loop, which works perfectly when you accept the another dimension without linear notion of time - similarly to how you never remember the start of a dream, just arrive in the midst of it, without the requisite to have a beginning everything just is and nobody need ask why :) I'm sorry if that doesn't make any sense, I think Kip himself stated somewhere that we probably can't even conceptualize other dimensional beings because our brains and minds made up of various atoms exist in our dimensionality and so we're sort of drawing a picture of a 3D cube on a flat piece of paper. True Detective has a fantastic (and entertaining) way of looking at it.

There's a post on aintitcool by Copernicus that hits some other issues which I thought were bigger leaps than the time loop but I'll leave that to you if you want to find it ( I respect people who just want to enjoy works and not get too critical, it is a beautiful film ) - probably the smartest thing about the loop (and I haven't re-watched it since IMAX so my accuracy may be a little off) but doesn't coop try to send back the letters S T A Y, which also corresponds to coordinates for NASA? Even trying to break the loop he confirms it - everything can only unfold the way it has already, something apparent from the tesseract.

Also in regards to a linear logical explanation for how to get to the wormhole without the wormhole in the first place (if you don't want to buy into the other dimensional reality of time) it's a big universe and a long time - if there aren't other sentient beings perhaps eventually we either don't perish, or we perish and life evolves once more and has better luck? ( That might be a reckless statement, I've no notion of how many cracks you'd get at evolution before the sun exploded or whatever horrific thing the science textbooks said would happen....)

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@JesseM, Sorry for the late reply, i've been busy and didn't have my computer for a few months. I think it's allowed me to let these ideas brew in my noggin for a while and see what it spurts out.

“that you're OK with some types of scenarios where the nature of the loop is such that, if the past self hadn't gotten that influence from the future, they never would had the opportunity to travel back in time at all?” Some scenarios i’m ok with, just not ones where the object will be destroyed without intervention from it’s future self.

“But then its future self pops out of the wormhole and deflects it away from the bomb and into the wormhole, then when it goes through the wormhole it becomes that same future self, in a self-consistent loop which not only explains why it went back in time but also saves it from destruction.” Can you explain how this is theoretically possible? We don’t see such events in nature and as i understood it, this scenario would contradict Novikovs theory. As in that theory, the possible trajectories which the billiard ball can take that will lead to a cyclical loop are ones which are NOT reliant….i just had an epiphany...

So if you accept the original billiard ball theory then you must accept our altered theory of the ball being on a trajectory of destruction still being able to influence itself into a cyclical loop?

But i don’t really accept the billiard ball theory. How do we see this theoretically? Is it to do with relativity? That perception of space and time is relative to the observer, dependant on either variant? Therefore time is variable, reversible, non-linear….EPIPHANIES ABOUND.

“So would the story above seem OK to you, and it's just the creation of new spacetime shortcuts in the past that bothers you?” I don't know anymore!!! I JUST DON’T KNOW!

Edit: i've been pondering my epiphanies for a week now. And i'm now back to square one, thinking that in-line with novikov's theory(?), these events where the billiard ball would be eradicated without influence from it's future self would stopped by some inherent law from travelling back in time. Pure conjecture of course but aren't all thought experiments?

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Hi, everyone. I love this movie. Great forum as well. Is it plausible that the human race did become extinct from the blight, however humans were somehow able to transcend into 4th dimensional beings? I read a few things on the Web that some believe when you die, you leave you physical body to inter a higher dimension. Perhaps this is what happened, especially when a whole race became extinct. Eventually, our future selves (spirtual beings) became 5th dimensional and were able to save mankind by first creating the worm hole. I know this is a little far fetched but seems to solve the parodox problem. In the movie they say the worm hole was put there 48 years ago. Who knows if NASA would have even continued without that worm hole, with all the earth's problems. Please let me know what you think of this theory.

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Riskmaster wrote:Is it plausible that the human race did become extinct from the blight, however humans were somehow able to transcend into 4th dimensional beings?
We are already 4D. Three spatial dimensions and one temporal.
Riskmaster wrote:I read a few things on the Web that some believe when you die, you leave you physical body to inter a higher dimension. Perhaps this is what happened, especially when a whole race became extinct. Eventually, our future selves (spirtual beings) became 5th dimensional and were able to save mankind by first creating the worm hole.
There is no evidence in any of the film's background material to support any of this.
Riskmaster wrote:I know this is a little far fetched but seems to solve the parodox problem. In the movie they say the worm hole was put there 48 years ago. Who knows if NASA would have even continued without that worm hole, with all the earth's problems. Please let me know what you think of this theory.
There is no paradox problem to solve. This is the 17th time I've posted this answer (the other 16 were on Reddit):

Future humanity created the wormhole and Tesseract to allow present humanity to survive and beget future humanity. Repeat ad infinitum.

"But that doesn't make any se--"

Only from a strictly linear 4D perspective of time. Interstellar is a movie about higher dimensions, where time works in seemingly paradoxical ways. The events listed above are logically consistent, and form a closed timelike curve consistent with Kip Thorne's work on wormholes.

Every multiple-timeline "theory" about the movie requires inferring who-knows-how-many events that are never shown or referenced in the film or any of its supporting material. None of the "theories" agree either, requiring different numbers of contradictory timelines. Finally, none of the film's writers or producers support this "theory" seeing as Kip Thorne models it as a closed timelike curve in The Science of Interstellar.

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Thanks for the reply, Stoifics42. I guess my post may help the ones who still insist that there is that annoying paradox. I think about how young Murph called them ghosts, used the word poltergeist, and how Cooper said there were no such things as ghost and later said we are ghost for our children. Just seemed like it could have all been a clue about what happens after we die. It could also tie into the love trascends time and space talk. Maybe the ones who truly love, can ascend to a higher dimension. Oh, well ...it's all fun to think about, even if the writers may have meant something different.

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Future humanity created the wormhole and Tesseract to allow present humanity to survive and beget future humanity. Repeat ad infinitum.

"But that doesn't make any se--"

Only from a strictly linear 4D perspective of time. Interstellar is a movie about higher dimensions, where time works in seemingly paradoxical ways. The events listed above are logically consistent, and form a closed timelike curve consistent with Kip Thorne's work on wormholes.

Every multiple-timeline "theory" about the movie requires inferring who-knows-how-many events that are never shown or referenced in the film or any of its supporting material. None of the "theories" agree either, requiring different numbers of contradictory timelines. Finally, none of the film's writers or producers support this "theory" seeing as Kip Thorne models it as a closed timelike curve in The Science of Interstellar.
"where time works in seemingly paradoxical ways...events are logically consistent". They are paradoxical and they are not logically consistent...in my eyes.

"Every multiple-timeline "theory"". Because multiple timelines or universes are the only theories that make logical and scientific sense with what we see in the movie. Even Jessies quite well thought out thought experiments linked to Thornes work is yet to actually run through how what we see in the movie is scientifically or logically possible. As i said in my last post, as far as i can work out Novikov's self consistency theory would prevent these events from taking place.

I do need to get this book of Kip Thornes to see if it can release my mind from this torment.

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Holy shit you guys. Ever looked at M.C. Escher's work?

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I just looked him up per your recommendation. I recognized 3 of his works right away! I didn't recall the name of the artist or that they were by the same person. Very cool. His work was obviously influential on Inception as well with all the talk of 'paradoxical architecture' and stuff.

edit: fascinating. The 'penrose stairs' we first described by Lionel Penrose, and MC Escher was the first to do a visual artistic interpretation of them.

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