The Holy Grail of Time Travel Theories

Last week I was browsing the message boards for the time travel group on Goodreads, and someone made a reference to something called the "bootstrap paradox." Now I’m very familiar with the "grandfather paradox" which questions whether someone can travel back in time and kill his or her ancestor if in doing so the time traveler wipes out his or her own existence and could therefore never have traveled back in time to begin with. So how is it that I had never heard about this other perplexing paradox of time travel? After all, I’ve been a time travel fanatic since I was in junior high school so many decades ago.

I decided to do a quick internet search, and it turns out the "bootstrap paradox" is not as foreign to me as I first thought. I just never knew that it had a name. In a nutshell, this paradox poses the question of whether an object can exist without having ever been created. For example, a time traveler goes to the past and leaves an object or information that is carried forward to the present and becomes the very object/information that was initially brought back in time in the first place.

SPOILER ALERT!!! One of my favorite examples of this is found in the book “The Anubis Gates” by Tim Powers in which the time traveler (who has extensively studied the writings of a poet by the name of William Ashbless) hopes to meet the poet that he has so long admired only to become Ashbless himself. Once he settles into his new identity, he goes on to write his famous poems from memory. To which the frustrated reader asks, "Who wrote the bloody poems to begin with?"

Personally, I’m not a big fan of either of the aforementioned time travel paradoxes even though I have read several books or watched movies/television shows in which these paradoxes were incorporated in a way that was not only plausible but also mind-blowingly entertaining. In the course of my recent studies I came across yet another theory that perfectly encapsulates my own ideas of time travel. It’s as if I have discovered the Holy Grail of time travel ideologies. It is called the "Novikov self-consistency principle," and it goes like this:

"The only possible time lines are those that are entirely self-consistent. Therefore, anything that a time traveler does in the past must have been part of history all along, and the time traveler can never do anything to prevent the trip back in time from happening, since this would represent an inconsistency." [Wikipedia]

Eureka! I don’t know who this Novikov is, but he is a genius. I finally feel strangely validated, knowing that there are others out there that think the same way I do. Does this make me a Novikovian, or just an extreme geek? It doesn’t matter because now I have a decades-old theory from a Russian physicist to aid me as I seek to eradicate the faulty paradoxes that plague time travel literature. Let the battle begin!