Time travel is often used in fiction to varying degrees of success. It is often the case the time travel stories become confusing for the audience and too much of a burden for the writer to keep track of.
With such a perfectly fictional concept as time travel each story is left on its own to figure out what the time travel rules in their story will be. As such, nearly no two time travel stories agree on the basic rules. This causes each story to have to explain the rules to the audience because those rules will definitely be different. There is not agreed upon base to use as a shorthand for how time travel is supposed to work.
But what if there was? Was if it was possible for a writer to use time travel in a story and the audience already know exactly what the rules were and didn’t need them explained again. What if a writer didn’t have to come up with a bunch of half baked and ill conceived rules that contradict each other.
So, to help out all other writers out there, here are the three rules of time travel you should use in your story. If you understand these rules and apply them consistently you won’t have to explain how time travel works to the audience, you won’t have to worry about contradicting yourself, and the rules have drama built into them.
1: Random is RANDOM!!! A common time travel trope is the traveler gets the lottery numbers from the future and goes back in time to win. But will this work? That would be the same as a scientist measuring the position of an electron and then going back in time to measure something else and then saying the he knows with certainty both properties. But physics doesn’t work that way. He’s not allowed to know both states of the electron. Similarly, if the mechanism used to generate lottery numbers is really random, then it should be impossible to use numbers from the future to win. Going back in time means the random event or interaction has a brand new chance to throw the dice and get a different outcome.
Now think about how many things in life are actually kind of random. Not just at the micro scale but at the macro scale. An election night that was so close just a few people randomly voting the other way or staying home could mean a different person wins. A baby was a boy but after time travel the parents have a girl instead.
2: The time traveler is non contingent. What this means is that the time traveler is not tethered to the past or the future. From the point of view of the universe they just popped into existence from a random fluctuation of the quantum field. If the time traveler goes back in time to kill their grandfather, or even their own younger self NOTHING happens to the time traveler. There are no magic tentacles of time stuff reaching out to connect the time traveler to anything. The time traveler is a free agent.
3: There is not going back to the future. This rule is a consequence of rule number 1. It is almost the same rule but needs to be stated separately so the writer and the audience really feel the impact. If all random interactions are random and get another chance and can get a new outcome, it means that after time travel, you can never get back to the future that is in exactly the same state as before. That future the time traveler came from is GONE. It’s not there anymore. It was erased. Destroyed. Wiped away. It never existed. It never happened. The only echo of it is in the time traveler’s memory. After time travel an entirely new future will have to work itself out and will certainly have differences from before. If a person goes back in time to before they were conceived it means they will likely not be conceived. And even if they are with the same parents and the same DNA, that child will still be a completely different person. A genetic twin, but will grow up to have a different personality and memories.
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