Gregory Bateson Quotes

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

History is rooted in the future

Reason was nowhere, time was an immovable object nailed high on the wall, except where the world kept shop.

To know truly is to know by causes.

People who think about time travel stories sometimes think that going back in time would be fun because you would have all the information you needed to be much more astute than the people there, when the truth is of course you wouldn't.

Travel at faster than the speed of light certainly can have dramatic implications that are difficult to understand, such as time travel.

Coincidence is logical.

Time travel offends our sense of cause and effect - but maybe the universe doesn't insist on cause and effect.

Time travel is such a magic concept.

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy, and I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a 'crank.'

Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

… theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

Trust me: you make a movie about time travel, and you know for a fact humans will never travel through time. The paradoxes that come up just from trying to tell a story with time travel really illuminates the fact that it's impossible. It will never happen. We can barely get through a movie that involves time travel.

I think time travel is really tricky. But if there's a logic and a complete and well-thought-through paradigm for it, I think it can be really interesting. Some of my favorite time-travel movies just make me think and, you know, the 'what if' question becomes a big one.

Everything has a cause.

Wizard's Ninth Rule A contradiction can not exist in reality. Not in part, nor in whole.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

I want you to buy this pit bull. This will protect your valuables.' I don't own anything very valuable. If I buy the pit bull, that would be the most valuable thing I own. I'd have to buy something to protect it then.

The past is a kind of future that has already happened.

Now I know which came first - the chicken not the egg.