Okay everybody — major, major Game of Thrones spoilers here.
For the last five seasons of Game of Thrones, we’ve understood the show to be a linear
storyline. One thing leads to another thing, to another thing — you get the idea.
But in the past few episodes, that’s totally changed. In his training with the Three Eyed
Raven, Bran Stark has learned how to travel through time in dreamlike visions.
And that makes Game of Thrones one of a whole lot of works of fiction that have experimented
with time travel. Scientists have debunked the idea that we’d
ever be able to travel into the past. But that hasn’t stopped physicists from theorizing
how it would work, logically, without creating a paradox.
This is sort of the internet's go-to explainer on how time travel works in fiction.
My name is Harrison Densmore and I'm a graphic designer and writer. I created this infographic
about 7 years ago. You can generally break down time travel in
movies into one of three different styles. There’s the multiverse timeline, the dynamic
timeline, and the fixed timeline. In a multiverse timeline, there are an infinite
number of parallel universes. Any time travel immediately creates a new timeline, and the
traveler can do just about anything — only that timeline is affected.
Kill your grandfather, and you’ll have just created a new universe where you don’t exist.
This is what you see with Terminator 2 and 3, Rick and Morty, Doctor Who, and the 2009
Star Trek. Then there’s what he calls the dynamic timeline,
where altered events in the past have a real impact on the present.
Go back and try to kill your grandfather here, and you create a paradox, a logical contradiction.
If you time-traveled to kill your grandfather, you wouldn’t exist in the future to travel
back in time to kill your grandfather. And you can see the idea of a dynamic timeline
presented in Back to the Future. It doesn’t really make sense, because the
traveler is returning to a present day that he wouldn’t actually exist in.
Then there’s the fixed timeline. In a fixed timeline, when a person travels
back in time, they can’t change the future that they just left. This is the version you
see in the Prisoner of Azkaban, or 12 Monkeys. Everything that they do just confirms the
present that they left. Try to kill your grandfather here, and you’ll inevitably fail. You can’t
change the past. And it seems like this is how Game of Thrones
interprets the idea. It all starts with this moment right here,
when Bran is watching a young version of his late father:
“Father!” Because Ned Stark turns around seemingly in
response to Bran’s voice, it seems like Bran might be able to change the past.
So when the Raven says this: "The past is already written. The ink is dry."
It sounds like he’s not telling the truth. Clearly if Bran was able to get his father
to react to his voice, then it seems like he has the power to change the past, right?
But what happens to Hodor dispels this idea. When Bran takes control of Hodor’s body
in the present while also observing him in the past, he creates a psychic link between
past and present that destroys Hodor’s mind. So, Bran created Hodor as we've always known
him on the show. That could mean Bran can affect the past,
but only in ways that lead to outcomes we already see in the present.
Bran’s powers seem to operate in what's called a “closed timelike curve” in mathematical
physics. What that means is that all time travel is consistent with its starting point
— every change he creates is already true in his present world. That’s different from
Back to the Future, where actions in the past produce a new, different future.
The Game of Thrones approach to the theory follows something called the Novikov self-consistency
principle. It’s a physics conjecture that assumes a
single timeline, stating that if there is an event that would cause a paradox, then
the probability of that event is zero. In 1990, the Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich
Novikov teamed up with researchers from Caltech to write a paper in which they argued that
there are no unresolvable paradoxes in the singular timeline framework. That means that
no matter what a theoretical time traveler does, they could never succeed to create a
situation that doesn’t work logically — they would never be able to succeed in killing
their grandfather, for example. And that is basically what appears to be happening
in Game of Thrones. It seems like Bran can interact with past,
but only in ways that confirm the existing present reality. Unfortunately for Bran, that
means that he can’t change any of the bad things that have happened to him.
But it opens up the possibility that he could be the source behind a lot of major events.
The internet already has a lot of theories. He could turn out to be the voices in the
Mad King’s head — or partly responsible for the creation of the Wall itself.
And that could make him the most important character in the whole story — for all we
know, he could be orchestrating everything we’ve seen in the show so far.