Board Thread:Planning/@comment-1743498-20140110005413/@comment-5135903-20140209192103

I should probably point out that solutions to time travel paradoxes are not just the subject of whimsical speculation. They can betested out mathematically using current theories. We don't need try time travel to the past in practice (if it's possible) to find out what would happen (though physicists would probably want to do it anyway to back up their theories with evidence). For example, here is the paper in which the Novikov self-consistency principle is presented: (3397Kb).

Any uncertainty about the outcomes of these situations is usually due to the incompleteness of our theories (such as the struggle to reconcile relatiity and quantum physics, and the huge discrepancy between the observed value of the cosmological constant, and the value predicted by quantum physics). That's where places like CERN come in, using tools such as the famous Large Hadron Collider to prove or discount competing hypotheses.