Re: Countertime beings

Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Sat, 15 Mar 1997 11:48:19 +0000


On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, Hal Finney wrote:

> The harder
> you try to outwit the universe, the harder it would fight back. It seems
> like a pretty implausible way for things to be.

One thing that seems to be skipped over in time travel stories is that
presumably you'd have to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics from
your point of view. So if you went back in time with knowledge of the
future you'd have to introduce new entropy to the system so that the
entropy change was still positive (presumably when summed over all
possible outcomes). This would imply that going back in time to kill your
grandfather would require a massive amount of energy.

Mark

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