Spoil Sports

Discovery Magazine's blog Cosmic Variance sure likes to ruin good fiction and movie "science". Last week they had a post on the (real, honest to God) Rules for Time Travelers thereby undermining all the shenanigans in the latest Star Trek, not to mention the classic Marty McFly story in Back to the Future.

Here are the first two:

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough.

Link to all 10+1 rules. Just don't try to break those laws or the Paradox Police will get you.