EXPLORE THE MAIN THEORY OF DARK- THE BOOTSTRAP PARADOX -By Avik Dubey

“A Paradox of time travel that occurs when a future event is the cause of past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event. Both events then exist in spacetime, but their origin cannot be determined”.

                                                 

When you hear of time, you often think of this intangible concept advancing single-fold into the future. The idea that time keeps passing outside of our control is almost self-evident with the circular motion of the moon around the earth, and the earth around the sun. The tools with which we measure time have become so sophisticated and duration is now recorded with such precision that one can hardly doubt the reality that the time is constantly advancing. Yet beyond our universe, the concept of time doesn’t exist since time is inextricably linked to space and none can exist without the other. But is time really this arrow we have come to associate causation with or is it all a subjective process in the mind? The arguments in support of a non-fundamental concept of time also maintain the position that causation itself is a subjective perspective inherent in our temporal agency. What if I told you that the differentiation between past, present and future is simply our minds playing tricks on us or perhaps our mind trying to impose its limitations on time. The concept of time flowing from past to future simply doesn’t exist according to the block- universe. For the currently accepted concept of time flow to exist, space and time would have to be independent fundamental structures. In this case, events can be pinpointed in various locations in space and we could say those things happened over time. But according to the special theory of relativity, this idea of independent space and time is abandoned for a much more cohesive independent spacetime.

One of the major consequences from this seemingly counter-intuitive 4-dimensional structure is that nothing changes over time since the past, present, and future are already accounted for in the block-universe. This four dimensional conception of reality highlights all events across spacetime with the same import. In this system, the past is no more important than the present is from the future. This insight renders time effectively as one of the required coordinates to specify an object’s location in spacetime . From this new framework, an event in spacetime is already comprised of both time and place and the whole fabric of spacetime can be understood as a collection of infinite number of events. Simply put, both the past and the future are all coexisting within spacetime. Another alternative idea that has often been entertained is that, perhaps, spacetime is not fundamental and thus emerges from some lower structure. Of course, such an idea would have to overlook the implications of the block-universe. Time does not flow just as space does not flow, time simply is. Imagine travelling from Kolkata to Chennai, you do not say that Chennai doesn’t exist because you are not there yet. You know that Chennai is a location in spacetime whether you are there or not. The same idea can be applied to time where the past and future are also there whether you have access to them or not. So the future is not going to happened, it is already there.

In physics, this concept can be understood using the Minkowski spacetime diagram. Physicists employ world-lines to represent a point in space using a line in spacetime. This idea takes advantage of cones to simplify the visualization. A present event on this spacetime is shown as the base of a cone which resulted from the contraction (at the speed of light) of the radius of a circle (or sphere in a 3-D space). The entire history of this particular worldline in spacetime can be translated into an expanding and contracting cross-sectional 3-D spheres in space resulting in a 4-D light cone. These events are viewed as the intersection of light with spatial planes. Einstein, himself, in a letter to the family of his long-time friend Michele Besso, expressed his doubt about the distinction between past, present, and future: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Mind you, time itself, is not what is in question here but rather the passage or flow of time. Einstein’s curiosity about simultaneity and his quest to resolve inconsistencies between Maxwell’s constancy of the speed of light and Newton’s absolute space and time, to a great extent, compelled the theory of relativity. One of the current subtle misconception is that change is a manifestation of time but if you really think about it, is it not just as logical to infer that time may be our conception of change? If this is the case, then change is a tangible occurrence of reality than time. But how could there be change without the passage of time, you may ask?

We trust that time is linear. We believe yesterday, today and tomorrow are consecutive and flow unidirectional but what if they are all connected in a never-ending loop. Generations after generations we evolve and get better of our previous mistakes, meaning the Future is being influenced by the past but what if the past is also influenced by the future. We always fantasize about time-travelling. Though time-travelling is still an imaginary concept, time-travelling brings along many paradoxes that may alter the whole vision of the world we believe up to. One such paradox we are going to study now is the “Bootstrap Paradox”. Suppose one fine day you were walking towards home from school when you saw a middle-aged man lying down. You got near him and he said, “Take this book and read.” Moments after, he passed away. You got home and opened the book. It has shocking content. The book explains the whole process of building a time machine. You laugh at first but the thought haunts that it was the last request of a deceased person. You follow the whole instruction on the book and finally after 15 years you were able to build the time machine. To test the machine, you traveled 15 years back and got so amazed that you have time-traveled, you had a cardiac arrest. At final moments, you can see a boy running towards you. You give him the book. Yes...the boy is young-you. You passed yourself the book. You may ask-what’s Bootstrap Paradox here? Consider the object “Book” here. At first, it came from the future, which enabled you to build a time machine, and using that machine you traveled back and finally passed the book yourself.

                                      

Thus the book turned out to have no true origin. It hadn’t been written or published by any author. It is simply traveled back to the past from the future; the cycle repeated and got stuck in an endless cycle. Thus it is what we refer to as the Bootstrap paradox. Where is the beginning? When is the beginning? Is there a beginning at all? An object, idea, or thought if traveled back to the past from the future, without having a true origin and gets stuck on an endless cycle, it is referred to as Bootstrap Paradox. Bootstrap paradox is based on the fact that Future influence past. Maybe a time-traveled of present generation traveled back to past and met with an “ordinary Isaac Newton and he shared with him all the scientific breakthroughs he made over time and thus as Sir Isaac Newton was aware of all of his discoveries and theories, he made them public one by one, thus owing all the credits. Needless to say, it’s just an example but the point is these kinds of stuff are absolutely possible if time-travel exists. Just pause and think if “Betting” are made on basis of known outcome, what if the “wars” are being influenced by a time-traveler getting side with the winning team, what if the “Global Pandemics” were known and country is led into prevention beforehand, what if.... Just think. Now we have seen events which are made to occur in the past as in the Future we know the events. Can we possibly try its negation?

That is, to prevent an event that occurred in the past. Now this theory is very interesting as preventing an event means that event didn’t happen but we already knew in the future that the event happened. How can then this be possible? To support this idea, the multi-verse theory comes in nature. Like every change of event that already occurred in the past creates “another branch” and it acts as s parallel universe happening without that event. So, as we understood, the Bootstrap Paradox can exist for an idea thought, or a non-living object. Does it apply to “living organisms” also? A married couple Sourav & Ritu have a daughter Kohima, Small sweet family. Eventually, Kohima grew up and married a man. They had a baby girl as a child. But that unfortunate night, the night that beautiful girl was born, she was stolen by a “time traveller” and human-trafficked her. The girl grew up in an orphanage. In time she became a grown-up girl and married a man. And they had a baby girl. Okay, another sweet family, right? Oh, I forgot to mention that the orphaned girl is named Ritu. She married Sourav and their baby is named Kohima. A turn out Ritu’s daughter is Kohima whose daughter is Ritu again. They are both mothers as well as daughters of one another. Or in another words, they are their own grand-daughter or their own grand-mother. This “mother-daughter relation” is stuck in an endless loop, and this “relationship” didn’t have any true origin, i.e., they both are mutually dependent on their existence. Or in other words, they themselves are responsible for their own existence. And this is an “Bootstrap Paradox”.