A Story of Time Travel

　　There was a story that I read, about time traveling, and I thought it demonstrate the time paradox perfectly. Basically, everyone in the story was one person. The person gave birth to herself and magically falls in love with himself and found out that she has to become a he to survive, and then he helped himself to go back time, fall in love with herself and kidnapped herself to put herself back at the beginning, then the story continues with him being a bartender at last. I found that a very intriguing story. This made me think of another type of novels that I read in Chinese.
　　The novels are somewhat similar to Narnia, going through something to another world, however, there are differences, and rarely did I see a person going to another world without suicide or death in general. The other world can sometime be another world completely different than what the main character originally lives, or the main character somehow got back in time.
　　Now, the novel’s main character would normally die and his or her soul magically travels back in time, more in the history, but that is not what I will be talking about. I will try to summarize how different methods can be used to “deliver” the soul into the past or future or completely different world.
　　The first and most common method would be got shocked by lightning and somehow the “soul” manages to escape from the body and somehow adhere to another body from the past whom just died not long ago or is very ill. I will not say that soul may not exist, and the ill person and dead person’s body may not be functional since they are either very ill or dead. The point I was trying to get across is lightning’s energy is nothing compared to the energy we can measure in the universe, and one thing for sure, the energy we can measure in universe only lead to disasters and destruction. Therefore, the lightning strike theory is very unreliable to me. Some similar ideas around being killed and transferred to another world or past or future are: being hit by a car, being killed (the main character usually have weird occupation such as killer), jumping from a tall building (the main character usually are upset from a break-up or some things like that), and even natural death sometime brings the person back to his childhood to start all over again.
　　The second one is more interesting and has a very slight chance of occurring, although not observed: the travel through wormholes. The traditional theory is wormholes can occur in any time at any place, but the chance of occurring is very small, it is almost negligible. Also, wormholes tend to have an alteration of the space and time therefore is considered linked to another universe at some point. The novelist used this idea and enhanced them into new kinds of travel methods. In these cases, the main characters usually travel with their body instead of only their souls are transferred. As well as the unpredictable ways of travelling, the most bizarre way I have ever seen was in a Japanese animation, the boy traveled through space into a completely different world by flushing a toilet and he went into the toilet only to find out that it was a completely different world. Assuming it does exist, the only possible explanation is there is a wormhole in the toilet causing him to travel to another world.
　　The third one is the most unrealistic method, sleeping. The person falls into sleep, and the next thing he/she knows is that he/she wakes up at a totally different world or time in another person’s body. This is widely used to write about tragedy whereas the person dies from the other world only to found out that he/she wakes up in his/her own world. As well as weird looped life stories, tragic in another world and found someone exactly like him/her in the real world. The likelihood of this kind of travel in time and dimension as I see it is very minimal. I think this is more on the psychology side than astronomy or physics since the process of dream is similar although we don’t normally remember.
　　These are some of the most interesting time travel/universe travel methods I found, and as well as logically acceptable to me.

　　Written by: Oct 16th, 2011
　　Edited by: Oct 25th, 2011

　　References：

　　http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/grandfather_paradox.html

　　http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec18.html

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