Philosophy Lecture

Join us for a lecture by Phillipe Chuard on The Real Problems With Time Travel

Time travel—and whether it is possible at all—has exercised writers, physicists, philosophers, and the general public, since at least the 18th Century (though there was an explosion of time-travel stories in the early days of the 20th Century, especially in the United States). Lately, one of the biggest challenges thought to undermine the possibility of time travel has had to do with the grandfather paradox (the time-traveller-to-the-past had better not do anything lethally harmful to their own ancestors). Though the solutions to this paradox have been problematic themselves, it’s far from clear how problematic the grandfather paradox in fact is, I’ll suggest. Instead, the real threat to the possibility of time travel comes from the much more mundane issue of whether it is possible to change the past at all, leading to more prevalent and serious contradictions. To make it worse, the best (and only) solution to this more pervasive paradox (positing distinct temporal dimensions) also seems to make time-travel (as we typically conceive of it) impossible. Finally, a surprising source of difficulty concerns the conceptual possibility of time-travel: what exactly we mean when we describe an agent as "traveling in time" (in a substantive and non-metaphorical sense) has turned out to be even more problematic.
Admission is 5$
45 min lecture followed by 15 Q&A

Reach Jack Sezer at 361-443-8694 with any questions