What is Time Paradox and Parallel Universe in ‘Interstellar’

"Interstellar" presents a visual narrative stripped down to its essence, often comprising solitary space stations, colossal celestial bodies, and endless stretches of darkness, evoking a profound sense of solitude. However, every minute of footage in "Interstellar" costs $976,000, with all its intricacies hidden behind the utmost simplicity. Complexity does not necessarily equate to the richness of content; instead, the restraint in simplification amplifies the philosophical propositions inherent in science fiction, making the plot all the more mind-bending. Not to mention, the film delves into a depiction of a five-dimensional spacetime, far exceeding the cognitive limits of our existence as three-dimensional beings.

Attempting to comprehend the fifth dimension is akin to ants trying to understand a sphere, limited to perceiving it as a two-dimensional circular projection. Furthermore, even if the ants were to realize that the sphere is not simply a flat circle as portrayed in the projection, they would still be unable to conceptualize the sphere itself. Similarly, cube theory needs to elucidate the spacetime relationships in this film. Insisting on applying cube theory would inevitably lead to a time paradox, leaving one perplexed no matter how hard they try to make sense of it.

What is the Time Paradox in 'Interstellar'?

It's worth mentioning that almost any sci-fi film involving time travel can't avoid discussions of the time paradox. Here, we'll analyze the issues related to high-dimensional spacetime relationships depicted in the movie.

When considering time travel through the lens of cube theory, one inevitably falls into a dead loop of time paradox. For instance, Earth's human salvation is facilitated by future humans assisting in the placement of the wormhole. Why can future humans place the wormhole? Because Earth's humans, once saved, evolve into a higher-dimensional civilization. Thinking along these lines, the movie's causal chain becomes a Möbius strip, fundamentally impossible to untangle.

This is because although this is a logically consistent closed loop, limited by our low-dimensional perspective, we can only see the projection of this logical chain, much like how an ant can only perceive the planar projection of a sphere.

Since we consider this an unsolvable dead loop, the time paradox remains for us throughout the movie. The deeper we delve, the more we feel the film is based on a bug. On one hand, this goes against Christopher Nolan's professional ethics as a director; on the other hand, the puzzle is genuinely perplexing. But is all this truly an unsolvable bug?

It's important to note that the director aims to portray a five-dimensional space, not a simple linear time travel. If we consider time in three-dimensional space as an irreversible straight line, then time in four-dimensional space should be a plane, and time in five-dimensional space should be a cuboid state. In other words, time in five-dimensional space can be seen and manipulated, shaping it at will, such as stacking small amounts of time from different directions to form larger units of time or splitting a significant amount of time into smaller blocks and scattering them in different directions.

Given the high-dimensional setting of the entire film, cube theory cannot apply. We must break free from three-dimensional thinking. As for how to break free, the director has already made it clear: Murphy's Law. Murphy's Law is the key to understanding the film's spacetime relationships. "Anything that can happen will happen." This somewhat resembles Fatalism, which can explain the logic of time and space in five dimensions using three-dimensional concepts.

To understand the spacetime relationships in five dimensions, we should not backtrack to know why something happened or its consequences; this leads to an unsolvable dead loop. You only need to know that what has happened was supposed to happen and was bound to happen.

For example, in the scene where young Murph encounters a ghost, Thinking in terms of the Law of causality, it's easy to interpret this as Cooper traveling to the past to convey information to his daughter. However, this is incorrect, as humans cannot change history in any dimension. Although young Murph encounters the future Cooper, this is already part of history. It happened in the past, so it must happen in the future. Therefore, this event was meant to happen.

For future humans, what they do is not to change history but to do what they should do according to history. Future humans can do this because, as higher-dimensional beings, they can see the past and future of lower-dimensional humans, much like screenwriters can know the life trajectory of characters. The screenwriter wants to make a change, so they place a critical event at a certain point, altering the direction of the entire trajectory.

Another example is the threat of the blight in the film, which can be seen as ants currently facing a crisis. The ants can only wait to die if a stream floods the ant nest. At this point, a human discovers the situation and diverts the stream, allowing the ants to move safely. To the ants, this human is a higher-dimensional being. Although the future of the ants has changed, humans have not changed history itself. There is no chronological order or causal relationship in five-dimensional space, so the question of how ants become humans has no meaning in five-dimensional space.

The film does not entertain the notion of a parallel universe.

To unravel the time paradox caused by the Law of causality, many tend to contemplate from the perspective of parallel universes. Parallel universes bear some resemblance to Gnosticism. Jorge Luis Borges, in "The Circular Ruins," posited a view that the universe model extends infinitely like a number axis towards both ends, with the origin point capable of occupying any position.

While the concept of parallel universes can indeed explain the time paradox, in reality, the director of "Interstellar" did not incorporate the existence of parallel universes, nor did the film delve into infinite derivative spacetime. Moreover, considering the film's narrative, future humans have no necessity to save their parallel universe, much like exponentially dividing cells have no reason to reminisce about the parent cell. The story of "Interstellar" unfolds within a single "field," whether in five dimensions or three, all subservient to the same "field."



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