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Tales of time travel

Time travel is not only one of the most intriguing and curious concepts that humans have come across, but also one of the most complicated and confusing. I first came across the concept in H.G Wells' "The Time Machine", a science fiction novel.

Since then, I have read various other books and watched movies that deal with time travel. I remain just as much, if not more, curious about time travel.

Anyone who has read up a little on time travel and other related issues will surely have come across some of the paradoxes that arise from this concept. One of the most common one is the "Grandfather Paradox". Let me explain this to you.

Suppose you travel back in time to a year when your grandfather was still a young man, before he he has had kids (your father or mother, uncles, aunts). Now let us say that you shoot your grandfather and he dies. Because he has not yet had kids, it would not be possible for your father or mother to exist and therefore, you wouldn't exist either, so you couldn't have shot him in the first place.



Got that? It is such paradoxes and complications that make time travel even more interesting (no, not the idea of shooting my grandfather).

I would suggest watching films like "The Terminator" and "Back to the Future" or reading books like "Timeline", etc to understand this slippery subject. This would be level 1 in time travel. Films like "Primer", "Time crimes" (Spanish, but dubbed into English) would fall into the next levels.

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