читать дальшеEverybody knows what a grandfather paradox is. It is a thought experiment that has to do with time travel. If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before your father is even born, what happens then?
First step of he logical chain: if your grandfather is dead before your father is born, you are not born, so the present where you have traveled from should no longer have you in the first place.
Second step of the logical chain: if the present you have travelled from no longer has you, you should not be able to travel from it to the past and kill your grandfather.
Third logical step: if your grandfather is alive in the past, there is no logical reason for the present not to include you.
Therefore the time-traveller finds himself in an logical loop as obvious as infinite. However, this loop is based on several assumptions. First: events of the past influence the events of the present. Second: only a single past or present can exist simultaneously. Only then does the paradox hold true. Several possible ways to avoid the paradox exist, all break either the first or the second assumption. One of those is the theory of several timelines, which allows several timelines to exist simultaneously. Following that theory, time traveller by affecting the past moves himself into another timeline. That way the traveller disappears from the first timeline the moment he commits the act that separates two timelines.
However. There is one particular set of circumstances that is as extremely unlikely to occur as it is relevant to the concept of the White Room. Same person from two timelines commits an action that switches them to the timeline of the other one at the same time. What occurs then?