Rules for Time Travel

Rule 1: Don't think about it too hard or your head will explode.
Rule 2: I don't know what rule 2 is because Michael J. Fox ate it.

Don't go back in time and shoot your own grandfather.

Create your own rules. Everyone else does! Time travel is like matter traveling the speed of light, or our scientist (who can't find their way across town) creating a Worm Hole. It makes good fiction.

firedrake said:

Don't go back in time and shoot your own grandfather.

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That would cause a paradox

Rules? A Code, if you will? More like guidelines, perhaps:

1. Avoid the paradox (If you change the past, you change the future.)

2. Some folks say your current self and your past self cannot exist in the same place, can't meet each other. (Might be because of the impact on rule 1.)

3. Technology that depends on technology from the future may not work in the past. (You can't use a cell phone if there are no towers. You can't surf the web on your handheld if the web doesn't exist. your digital recorder will work until the batteries die. BUT, exceptions abound.)

As to 1. -- Personally I subscribe to the idea that you can't change the past. If you go back in time, what happened will happen again. You'll just play a part in it (or not) that historians haven't learned about, yet. Lincoln and Kennedy still die, Hitler still lives, and people are still gullible enough to buy pet rocks.

just my 2cts worth.

Ten commandments of Time Travel.

Thou shall not kill.

Thou shall not make babies in the past.

Thou shall not speak to the famous.

Thou shall not go to the precambrian.

Thou shall not do more than observe (miss spelled)

Avoid thy ancestors.

If you kill thy grandfather, (breach of rule 1 and 6) Thou shall make babies with thy grandmother in hopes of becoming thy own grandfather. (breech of rule 2 and 6.)

When dealing with primatives, Do not use thy advanced technological knowlage to make thyself into a god over them.

Thou shall not treat the sick, the weary, the dieing and the inflicted. Unless medical knowlege of the time thou art in is used.

Leave no trace of thy passing.


Some of those are serious. A few I put in as jokes.

Oh! Be careful that if you DO change the past then you'll encounter loads of "Time Waves" in the future

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder_(film)

One thing to remember is that if you do it in the past, it actually happened in the past. It wasn't added onto the past. It's happened all along.


AMC

Some material to consider:

By His Bootstraps - Robert Heinlein short story
Eon - Greg Bear novel
Back to the Future
TimeCop
The City on the Edge of Forever - Star Trek TOS

And this

The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345460944/timetravele07-20?creative=327641&camp=14573&link_code=as1

"...the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

-- Stephen Hawking, Travis, 1992, p. 180

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I think the only rule is write your rules and then be consistent with them.

Some exemplary time travel:

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury -- IMO This is THE time travel story.

Cowl by Neal Asher -- this one's a GREAT example of how to think outside the box when devising one's time travel scheme. Parallel worlds, some more probable than others, and a big ugly monster that sheds time machines and eats time. Nom nom nom. If you travel too far down the probability line away from the main timeline, you can't get back. Anyway. Read it!

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis -- a great book about being careful about changing stuff in the past. (There's another one set in the same universe, 'Doomsday Book' but I haven't read it yet.)

Don't break ANY of the rules! Else you could end up writing a classic story like this:

http://www.scaryforkids.com/a-sound-of-thunder/

One thing to remember is that if you do it in the past, it actually happened in the past. It wasn't added onto the past. It's happened all along.

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If you travel too far down the probability line away from the main timeline, you can't get back.

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If you can't change the past, and you make a change in the past, it becomes not "your" past, or a parallel past. Too many of those changes and you can't get back to your past.

If you do make a change, you won't know what the result of that change will be.

Boy hero actually sinks the winning basket, changing his life forever. Later that night, on the way to the party they would not have had, he gets killed by a drunk driver. Also killed is his "spur of the moment date" for said party, your Mom. oops.

As always, here in fiction land, rules are at the discretion of the all powerful author.

Crazy, Man!

Here's one for your world, Bruce. Running with the inspirations behind "Killing me Softly.." You showed up on a street corner to prevent a mugging/killing. You succeed, Dad doesn't die a horrible death when you were three. Dad dies of cancer when you are 12, but nothing else seems to impacted, in your world, except you and Dad got some Cub Scout time together. EXCEPT:

You were successful, but the ensuing crowd kept Lieberman (that's the right name, isn't it?) from seeing Don McLean. No inspiration, no song. No Roberta Flack hit. No Fugees cover, and who knows how many other wanna bes, gonna bes and never will bes impacted. Oh, and no Grammy for Ms. Roberta. No monster record sales. Who knows which concerts never happened, which opening acts never got their "big break"......

One rule I sort of like is that you can go forwards in time, but you can't go back...that would be interesting.

As far as I'm concerned, the world would be a better place without "Killing Me Softly..."

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popmuze said:

How about if the point is to change the past, specifically, the main character's past?

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If you do that you create a paradox. If you change that, you remove the reason to go to the past in the first place. Which means you don't go, which means you don't change it, which means you have a reason to go .... The universe implodes in an endless spiral.

Well scratch that, when you go into the past you create paradoxa, period. There is no avoiding it. Which is rule 1 of time travel.
Because of that there is rule 2: Thou shalt use some technobabble to explain the paradoxa away.
And rule 3 is: there is no difference between going to the past or the future as long as you also go back to where you came from again. Because there is no preferred timeframe.
Rule 2 is the really important one. You also need to explain away all the possibilities to abuse time travel to solve problems. I.e. the instant army. Go five years into the future and tell yourself you need help in the past. The go five years and ten minutes into the future etc. Bam, instant army of as many yourselves as you need. And the best thing is, they're not even going to be missed since you can bring them back to a second after you took them.

Lhun said:

...
Because of that there is rule 2: Thou shalt use some technobabble to explain the paradoxa away.

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Just quote some old Vulcan proverb:

Only Heisenberg could go to Copenhagen

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I've always said that if you're going to do something, do it in a big way. I recently read "Nul-A Continuum", in which the hero could not only teleport himself through time and space, he could teleport a galaxy from one point in the universe to another, or from the end of time to the beginning of time. It was like all he had to do was twitch his nose or something. If a galaxy was so simple, then he had no trouble teleporting space ships with thousands of crew aboard from point A to point B in either time or space. Ah, I love science fiction!