Member-only story
The Real Reason Time Travel Is Impossible
Forget paradoxes, it’s actually much simpler than that
Like many children of the Eighties, I consumed plenty of pop culture takes on time travel. But one thing that always frustrated me was the storytellers’ apparent indifference to the question how time travel was possible at all. Examples ranged from Terminator’s complete silence to Back to the Future’s “flux capacitor,” an admission that something physics-y was happening, even if no one knew what it was.
Perhaps 2004's Primer came closest to tackling the underlying mechanics, but its relative obscurity and reputation for difficulty testify to the fact that, when it comes to time travel, audiences have always been a lot less interested in the how than the what-ifs. Time travel is a fun plot device, but that’s about it.
Fast forward twenty years or so. I’m now a stay-at-home father of three with a lot of time to ruminate on philosophical matters as I vacuum carpets, sweep floors, wash dishes, and fold laundry. And maybe it was the nature of so many of these domestic duties, duties that basically involve battling the forces of entropy, that led me to realize that time travel has nothing to do with going anywhere, and everything to do with returning the universe to some previous configuration.