Major Gazer

The grandfather paradox isn't actually a paradox at all

May 23, 2026·11 min
Episode Description from the Publisher

The grandfather paradox isn’t proof time travel is impossible — it’s proof that backward time travel plus unconstrained free will breaks logic. General relativity actually allows closed timelike curves (Gödel’s rotating-universe solution, plus Kip Thorne’s traversable wormhole work), and physicists have two clean “outs”: Novikov self-consistency (your past actions were always part of history, like Thorne’s wormhole billiard-ball math) or Deutsch’s many-worlds branching (Avengers: Endgame vibes, not Back to the Future). Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture is basically the skeptical counterpunch: maybe nature blocks time machines in practice, but nobody can prove it without quantum gravity.

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