Another sciencey thread. I'm thinking about the plot for a Doctor Who fanfic, and part of the plot revolves around the fact that seperate areas of space and time have been linked to a single corridor which sustaines itself because of the Novikov self-consistency principle - owing to the fact that this corridor is centrally contingent to the events of a paradox. Is this logic correct, or feasable? The corridor required a huge amount to sustain it for just a second - long enough to create a paradox by transmitting meaningful information from one end to the other and thus altering the events of the present. I'll elaborate if you wish...
The Novikov self-consistency theory prohibits temporal paradoxes, it would not sustain one. In essence, a time paradox would, in the absence of quantum physics, oscillate between two or more states. Say event A precedes event B. B sends back information that causes ~A (not A) ~A leads to ~B, so the information sent by B to cause ~A ceases to exist therefore ~B leads to A then A leads to B and the cycle repeats However, with quantum physics, there is always a probability, however small, that A will lead to B', a separate state of B that does not perpetuate the time loop. This breaks the paradox, preventing it from establishing (remember, we are viewing this from outside of time, so "eventually" is meaningless). The Novikov theory therefore would prevent any kind of time paradox, so you would not want to use in in a time paradox story. However, it could result in some VERY interesting random events to avoid a time paradox!
Well, good job is that it's a Doctor Who fanfic, so real science is not that important - but I think at least acknowledging actual science is important. So, the Novrikov principle prevents paradoxes. Howabout this; The plot revolves around the Doctor encountering a race who have sent a huge device back in time so that by the time it returns in the present, it has created a super-genetically enhanced race of clones created using the DNA of the original race recombined to perfection. The paradox comes into it because the new race replaces the DNA in the device with their own, meaning the events are altered by the replacement in the timeline of better and better races - eventually ending in a "God Gene" which has the power to "break the paradox" (shameless Deus Ex Machina...I know) and control time and space. This corridor I speak of is quite literally a corridor, like one in a hospital or school, with one time and place at one end, and another time and place at another, as if time and space have been folded together. The idea of the plot is that because the Doctor intervened, only one generation of super-races ever existed and he prevented the paradox from happening. Would the Novrikov principle apply if, all along, this corridor in time and space had actually served to prevent the paradox in some bizarre plot twist?
Since nobody has actually done any time travelling (at least as far as we know), you can write whatever you like and break any time travel theory you like too. Just because someone comes up with a theoretical principle that a lot of people accept, until someone proves it, it is still just a theory, regardless of how many people believe it to be either true or even likely to be true. After all, you are writing a story where a bloke gets in police call box that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and uses it to travel through time and space, so stretching the truth a bit in such circumstances is hardly a problem. Frankly David Tennant's acting stretches credibility more than any of the science featuring in an episode of Doctor Who might. Al
