The Bootstrap Paradox: What If The Past Created Itself?

Einstein's general relativity is the most tested theory of gravity we have. In over a century, not one experiment has broken it. And buried inside its equations is a path that loops back through time. Physicists call it a closed timelike curve; a route through space and time that bends around and meets its own beginning. It has been sitting in the mathematics since nineteen forty-nine, and it does something that should be impossible. It lets an object exist with no origin at all. Carry a sheet of Beethoven's music back to a young Beethoven, who copies it and publishes it as his own, and the music we know has no composer anywhere in the loop. This is the bootstrap paradox, and the strangest part is that the people who understand the equations best have never been able to rule it out. In this calming long-form documentary, we trace the full story from Kurt Gödel handing Einstein a rotating universe for his seventieth birthday in nineteen forty-nine, to the spinning cylinders of Frank Tipler and the closed timelike curves hidden inside Roy Kerr's rotating black holes, to the wormhole time machines Kip Thorne worked out for Carl Sagan, and finally to J. Richard Gott and Li-Xin Li's proposal that the universe gave birth to itself. We walk through the Novikov self-consistency principle and its origin-less objects, Stephen Hawking's chronology protection conjecture and the party he threw for time travelers who never came, David Deutsch's quantum dissolution of the grandfather paradox, the 2014 University of Queensland experiment that simulated a time loop with entangled photons, and the proof by Scott Aaronson and John Watrous that a computer wired to such a loop could crack nearly every hard problem in mathematics at once. This is not a simple explanation. This is the story of the music that no one wrote, and the possibility that the universe itself had no first cause, that it holds itself up by leaning on nothing but its own consistency. Subscribe and settle in. Sources: Gödel, K. (1949). "An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations of Gravitation." Reviews of Modern Physics, 21, 447. Heinlein, R. A. (as Anson MacDonald) (1941). "By His Bootstraps." Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941. Tipler, F. J. (1974). "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation." Physical Review D, 9, 2203. Morris, M. S., Thorne, K. S., & Yurtsever, U. (1988). "Wormholes, Time Machines, and the Weak Energy Condition." Physical Review Letters, 61, 1446. Friedman, J., Morris, M. S., Novikov, I. D., et al. (1990). "Cauchy Problem in Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves." Physical Review D, 42, 1915. Deutsch, D. (1991). "Quantum Mechanics Near Closed Timelike Lines." Physical Review D, 44, 3197. Hawking, S. W. (1992). "Chronology Protection Conjecture." Physical Review D, 46, 603. Ringbauer, M., Broome, M. A., Myers, C. R., White, A. G., & Ralph, T. C. (2014). "Experimental Simulation of Closed Timelike Curves." Nature Communications, 5, 4145. Aaronson, S., & Watrous, J. (2009). "Closed Timelike Curves Make Quantum and Classical Computing Equivalent." Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 465, 631. arXiv:0808.2669 Gott, J. R., & Li, L.-X. (1998). "Can the Universe Create Itself?" Physical Review D, 58, 023501. arXiv:astro-ph/9712344 #BootstrapParadox #TimeTravel #ClosedTimelikeCurves #Gödel #GeneralRelativity #SleepDocumentary #SpaceDocumentary #Physics