A little theory about time travel

These days, I’ve been reading more and writing less. One of the best books I read at the end of last year was Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, and I’ve spending the the most part of this year thinking about time and the nature of time travel.

One of the things I keep on having flashbacks to is when a friend and I were chatting about the party that Stephen Hawking threw for time travellers. He prepared the balloons, the champagne, the welcome banner. He waited. Then, after it was over, he sent out the invitations. It was a perfect experiment. If time travel is possible, someone from the future would have received the invitation and come back to attend.

Nobody came.

The room was empty. The champagne went undrunk. Hawking took the silence as evidence that time travel to the past is most likely impossible. His Chronology Protection Conjecture had already argued that the laws of physics conspire to prevent time travel. That the universe protects its own history. Sounds like a logical lock on the door.

My friend and I never got to finish our conversation. But I’ve been thinking about it more and more recently.

What if the lock isn't logical at all? What if the universe isn't protecting its history the way a library protects its books, with rules and careful management, but biologically, the way a body protects itself?

What if it protects itself the way white blood cells attack anything foreign without thinking or knowing or even caring about your intentions are, or how carefully you've prepared for it? We keep building time travel stories around the fear of changing things. The grandfather problem. The butterfly effect. What you owe to a timeline you've wandered into uninvited.

But what if it’s as simple as an indifferent ‘you don't belong here. And so you don't stay.’

Maybe that’s why we've never met a time traveller. Not because it's impossible, but because they can't stay long enough to make their presence known.