In a previous post I talked about a little thought experiment which presents an alternative view of time travel – that it is not a way of moving through space, but rather a matter of consciousness.

The key question was “what would be the consequence of ‘travelling’ back in time”. The conundrum of meeting yourself aside – You would exist in that time for which you already know the future. This my theory went:

The further we are able to determine what has happened (through knowledge) the more accurate we will be able to predict and thereby determine the future. This would be the equivalent on a conscious level of having perceived the future and then travelled back in time.

The reason I am bringing this up again is because I just found a quote which reminds me of this thought. Here goes:

Pierre Simon Laplace’s demon (from Philosophical Essays on Probabilities (1814):

An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.