9.5 Special Provisions (Relativity and FTL Travel)
Description
This article is from the Relativity and FTL Travel FAQ, by Jason W. Hinson jason@physicsguy.com with numerous contributions by others.
9.5 Special Provisions (Relativity and FTL Travel)
Thus far, we have seen that the second problem is not easily gotten
around using any FTL concept. However, we have also insisted during our
arguments that none of these FTL concepts include "special provisions". The
specific provisions we were referring to will be discussed here. Basically,
these are ideas which allow one to bypass the second problem in some way,
and the ideas are generally not specific to any one form of FTL travel. They
don't require that you bend space-time in some way or that you travel in
some other universe or that you be made of some specific form of matter when
you do your FTL traveling. What they do require is for the universe itself
to have some particular property(ies) which, in conjunction with whatever
form of FTL travel you use, will prevent unsolvable paradoxes.
There are four basic types of provisions, but we can express the
general idea behind them all before we look at each one specifically. Recall
that in producing the unsolvable paradox in our "FTL bullet" example, there
was a series of events listed, each of which had to occur to produced the
paradox. The provisions simply require that at least one of these events be
prevented from occurring. With the first and second provisions we will
discuss, no restrictions necessarily have to be placed on the actual FTL
travel, and any of the events (even those not directly dealing with the FTL
travel) can be the "disallowed" event. The other two provisions place
restrictions on the actual FTL travel in certain cases in order to prevent
the unsolvable paradox.
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