What does it mean in simple terms the 2014 scientific discoveries about time travel?

Like it says, “time travel SIMULATION.” It doesn’t say that it is “SCIENTIFIC.”

@kritiper: I guess it is, but what could it mean if it was true?

I’m a little disappointed that Scientific American would publish such speculative folly.

@Darth_Algar I gave up on Scientific American years ago.

It’s still impossible.

@luigirovatti It would mean that a inevitable time paradox would kill it, sooner or later. Render it impossible and of no use whatsoever.

This isn’t actually an article about time travel. It is in fact an excursion around quantum entanglement, a subject equally as weird.

Time travel into the past to kill your grandfather is BS that for some reason is particularly hard for most people to think about and get how BS it is, because people understand falling forward in time, and there being one universe and one timeline. And science fiction has sloppily offered various poorly-thought-out other “time travel” models which don’t make sense and aren’t self-consistent, but almost no one seriously thinks through how they don’t make sense, leading to crazy conjectures.

@Zaku: So, fpr example, “Zero Eacape” or “Steins Gate” are realistic enough?

@luigirovatti I haven’t played either. I just read about them on Wikipedia. It sounds to me like the authors are making an effort to think about time travel in them.

But it also sounds like they both have elements of changing the past and having it affect the future. I tend to think that’s very unlikely to be a possible thing at all. And, if it it possible, it suggests to me that there is not just one timeline, but probably there is an infinite variety of timelines, and I think that rather undermines the focus of a story as if there were only one timeline, and as if it were particularly significant what happens in one of them. And even if I try to make sense of the usual fictional suggestion that there IS one super-significant perspective / timeline to care about, the fact that there exists technology where people can go back and cut off entire timelines from ever having existed, seems like mega-narcissism to me, and also seems like any story you might tell about such a situation is ultimately doomed to future meddlers deciding to go back before your story and make THAT never have happened, making the universe and reading about its stories seem extra-pointless to me.