Recently, I watched Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, the sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A certain scene really made me scratch my head and I wanted to share it with you all. In the finale of the movie (spoiler alert), Bill and Ted are facing off with the main antagonist, the evil Chuck De Nomolos (see picture). In order to win, Bill and Ted use time travel… in the future. Basically, Bill would say somehing like “After we win, I’ll remember to go back in time and hang a sandbag from the rafters,” and at that moment a sandbag falls on Chuck’s head. They do this a few more times in different ways and ultimately win the fight.
The part that makes me scratch my head is that their time travelling allowed them to win the fight, but in order to time travel then they would have to win the fight in the first place. It’s very confusing. As it turns out, this is actually a well known paradox called the Bootstrap Paradox. The most common way of explaining it goes something like this.
Imagine you are a time traveller, and you’re also a huge fan of Shakespeare. You go back in time to meet Shakespeare, and you bring with you a copy of Hamlet. The thing is, you go back in time to before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Then you give him your copy of Hamlet, and you leave. Shakespeare goes on to read it, copy it down word for word, and publish it as his own work. That brings us to the paradox. Where did Hamlet actually come from in this scenario? Who wrote it? It’s pretty mindbending stuff, but I thought it would be interesting to share. Let me know what you think.
I'm guessing that it would still be attributed to Shakespeare, or at least the original timeline's. After all, he's the one who wrote it, even if the new timeline has it established that he copied Hamlet from...himself. The "Bootstrap" part of the Bootstrap Paradox is pretty interesting though--is that trying to refer back to the saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" that gets thrown around so much these days? Since while people tend to use it as meaning that they worked hard on their own to be successful as they are, the action itself is impossible and was originally meant to be used sarcastically.
ReplyDeleteTime travel always helps boggle the mind. My guess would be that time travel would create a completely new track of time separate from that that the time traveler came from. So in your scenario, my guess is that Shakespeare still wrote Hamlet, but it was the Shakespeare that is separate from the one you are giving Hamlet to because he is from a completely different path of time. This would essentially create the original Shakespeare, but then also another Shakespeare from a different period of time. That's just my guess though.
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