

All You Zombies— The most craziest of the time travel paradoxes - reazalun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94

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andyn
People here might also enjoy the film "Primer"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_>(film)

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huhtenberg
Bump. What an incredible movie.

It's even more amazing considering that the guy who plays Aaron (one of two
main characters) also wrote the script, directed, edited and produced the
movie, and also composed the music ... drumroll .. all on a budget of _seven
thousand dollars_ !

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baddox
The same budget as Rodriguez' El Mariachi, but with FAR greater quality
(although you could argue that El Mariachi is better at story-telling). Of
course, things could've gotten a lot cheaper since El Mariachi.

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akd
not "could have," "did" get a lot cheaper. Most of El Mariachi's costs were
actual film and processing; nowadays you can rent a camera for a week for $500
which will give you film quality.

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baddox
I'm 85% sure Primer was shot on film.

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tom_rath
Oh, hell! Don't ruin the story with a page of spoilers, folks.

It's a really nifty one to read.

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wallflower
Complicated paradoxes like these make me appreciate simple ones like:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder>

After I saw Donnie Darko, I had to spend most of the night and early morning
reading the theories which was fun. Great movie.

I recall Biff from Back to the Future saying in an interview he had no idea
what was going on in the last film of the trilogy.

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zandorg
Ah, I read By His Bootstraps when I was like 16. I devoured tons of Heinlein
novels, and various short story anthologies. It amuses me when I see a new
sci-fi film and they're making out like "We had to research our science
fiction to make this original film" when in fact the short fiction is far more
gratifying than watered-down movies.

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msg
I'm in the middle of To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis. It is the
most hilariousest of the time travel paradoxes, at least that I've ever read.
It won a Hugo and was nominated for a Nebula.

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maxklein
This is not unusual. It only works because you are assuming that time has the
properties of space, but you do not want to give it ALL the properties of
space!

If you give time a property of space (the moving up and down), then do not
select the properties you want to apply.

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unalone
Huh! I never read Heinlein - I thought he was a preetty bland writer
stylistically. But that's a pretty excellent concept for a story.

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Prrometheus
All I remember about that story is feeling like I'd been punched in the brain
at the end.

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eru
It's not even a paradox. It's entirely consistent - but kind of boot-strapped.

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cdr
This is one of those things that gets posted to Reddit every couple of months.

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boredguy8
If you haven't read Stephenson's "Anathem", do.

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Allocator2008
These are fun ideas. Of course, temporal paradoxes are a red herring I think.
If one takes the Everett-Wheeler many worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics seriously, there is no problem. If I go back in time and impregnate
my own mother, this happens in an E-W parallel world, causing no paradox with
respect to the world wherefrom I originated. The only "rule" I think is that
whatever I do travelling back in time along parallel worlds is I musn't
increase entropy "back in time" to the extent that the "net increase in
entropy" across all worlds is negative. However, since time travel probably is
an infrequent occurance, the entropic effect is likely negligible, so,
basically there ends up being no way I can harm the laws of physics, etc. thru
my time traveling. So in brief, to one and all I say, happy time travelling!!
:-)

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wmf
Yeah, the many-worlds interpretation really takes the fun out of things. (But
what _was_ Fraa Jad up to?)

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trezor
I'd love to order this one, but amazon.co.uk only seem to have it bundled with
5 other books, second hand, for the neat price of £170.

I see from wikipedia I can get the full text for free from online, but when
I'm reading books, I prefer to have a proper book, and I'm not that keen on
printing out a shitload of pages.

Online link for the lazy but interested:
<http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~mfedder/zombies.html>

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reazalun
Try here: <http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=1186838200>

Just USD 7.35. It's a secondhand book, published in 1959!

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MaysonL
Golly, that was a good year: All You Zombies, _plus_ Flowers for Algernon
_plus_ Casey Agonistes!

