Physical Paradox - Causality Paradoxes

Causality Paradoxes

A set of similar paradoxes occurs within the area of physics involving arrow of time and causality. One of these, the grandfather paradox, deals with the peculiar nature of causality in closed time-like loops. In its most crude conception, the paradox involves a person traveling back in time and murdering an ancestor who hadn't yet had a chance to procreate. The speculative nature of time travel to the past means that there is no agreed upon resolution to the paradox, nor is it even clear that there are physically possible solutions to the Einstein equations that would allow for the conditions required for the paradox to be met. Nevertheless, there are two common explanations for possible resolutions for this paradox that take on similar flavor for the explanations of quantum mechanical paradoxes. In the so-called self-consistent solution, reality is constructed in such a way as to deterministically prevent such paradoxes from occurring. This idea makes many free will advocates uncomfortable, though it is very satisfying to many philosophical naturalists. Alternatively, the many worlds idealization or the concept of parallel universes is sometimes conjectured to allow for a continual fracturing of possible worldlines into many different alternative realities. This would mean that any person who traveled back in time would necessarily enter a different parallel universe that would have a different history from the point of the time travel forward.

Another paradox associated with the causality and the one-way nature of time is Loschmidt's paradox which poses the question how can microprocesses that are time-reversible produce a time-irreversible increase in entropy. A partial resolution to this paradox is rigorously provided for by the fluctuation theorem which relies on carefully keeping track of time averaged quantities to show that from a statistical mechanics point of view, entropy is far more likely to increase than to decrease. However, if no assumptions about initial boundary conditions are made, the fluctuation theorem should apply equally well in reverse, predicting that a system currently in a low-entropy state is more likely to have been at a higher-entropy state in the past, in contradiction with what would usually be seen in a reversed film of a nonequilibrium state going to equilibrium. Thus, the overall asymmetry in thermodynamics which is at the heart of Loschmidt's paradox is still not resolved by the fluctuation theorem. Most physicists believe that the thermodynamic arrow of time can only be explained by appealing to low entropy conditions shortly after the big bang, although the explanation for the low entropy of the big bang itself is still debated.