Rules for Time Travelers | Sean Carroll - 3 views
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anonymous on 27 Apr 14Summary: Physicist Sean Carroll applies real science to fictional science to lay down to rules for time travelers in fiction in this post on his blog. He proposes 11 rules, starting with the number 0: "There are no paradoxes," "Traveling into the future is easy," Traveling into the past is hard," "Traveling through time is like traveling through space," "Things that travel together age, age together," "Black holes are not time machines," "If something happened, it happened," "There is no meta-time," "You can't travel back to before the time machine was built," and "Unless you got to a parallel universe." The last one is a sort of exception to all the other rules. The final rule follows the parallel universe rule that even if you go to a parallel universe, "your old universe is still there." Evaluation: First, Sean Carroll is a well-credentialed physicist who is able to bridge science and popular culture in this information packed and fun essay. He backs up each of his points with references to what we often see in time travel movies/stories as well as scientific theories and facts explained in more depth in the other sources. Yet, he does so in a way that is readable and comprehensible for the average reader. If students are engaged in interdisciplinary work, such as evaluating the scientific validity of a sci-fi story, Carroll provides excellent evidence and serves as an example of what such analysis might look like. This list could also serve a s rubric by which students analyze texts that involve time travel.