John d barrow - The Infinite Book

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conclusion to draw from this is that if I tried to go back and kill my infant self then, for some reason, I would fail. Perhaps I would trip at the last minute, The usual arguments do not establish that time travel is impossible, but only that if it were possible, certain actions could not be performed/ (Proc. Phil Science Assocn., 2, 91 (1984)) Another distinguished philosopher who swam against the tide, and argued for the rationality of time travel in the face of the Grandmother Paradoxes, was David Lewis. In 1976, he wrote in his review 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel', Amer. Phil Quarterly 13, 15 (1976) that 'Time travel, I maintain, is possible. The paradoxes of time travel are oddities, not impossibilities. They prove only this much, which few would have doubted: that a possible world where time travel took place would be a most strange world, different in fundamental ways from the world we think is ours.' 38.

F. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, F. Ungar Publ. Co., 1964, pp. 270-1.

39.

On first meeting his political rival, Senator John McCain, in 2000.

40.

The legendary image of an army of monkeys typing letters at random and eventually producing the works of Shakespeare seems to have gradually been constructed over a long period of time. Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels (1782) tells of a professor of the Grand Academy of Lagado who aims to generate a catalogue of all scientific knowledge by having his students continuously generate random strings of letters by means of a mechanical printing device. The first mechanical typewriter was patented in 1714. The monkeys turn up in 1909 in a version of the scenario written by the French mathematician Emile Borel in his book on probability, Elements de la theorie des prohabilites (Paris, 1909), where he suggests that the randomly typing monkeys would eventually produce every book in Frances Bibliotheque Nationale. Arthur Eddington takes up the analogy in his book The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1928), where he changes the library (p. 72): 'If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible


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