Novikov Self-consistency Principle - Fictional Usage

Fictional Usage

• The movie 12 Monkeys appears to obey Novikov's principle. All attempts by the main character James Cole (played by Bruce Willis) to change the past prove unsuccessful, and in the end his death is witnessed by his own childhood self in exactly the way he had remembered earlier in the movie. Additionally, the scientists in charge of the time travel mission have no interest in attempting to avert the release of the deadly virus which killed most of the human population, and are instead only trying to obtain a pure strain of the original virus, in hopes that it will help them to cure the disease in their own time.

• Something close to this principle is used in season 5 of the TV series Lost. The show's version is often referred to by characters and fans as "Whatever Happened, Happened" (also the title of an episode). It is supported by various implications in-show, chief of which is the fact that, in travelling to the past to prevent the 'future' crashing of their plane, the survivors actually set in motion the chain of events that ultimately caused it. However, the episode "Flashes Before Your Eyes" suggests that minor changes are possible, unlike the totally fixed timeline postulated by Novikov's principle: in this episode Desmond's consciousness time travels back to a point in his past, where he ends up in a bar, where he remembers (from his previous experience of this time) a man named Jimmy Lennon entering and attacking the bartender; in his attempt to warn the bartender, he himself gets attacked instead. Additionally, when Desmond meets a mysterious woman with apparent knowledge of the future (later revealed as Eloise Hawking), she points out a man with red shoes, who moments later is killed by falling scaffolding; when Desmond asks why she didn't try to save the man, she says that "it wouldn't matter. Had I warned him about the scaffolding, tomorrow he'd be hit by a taxi. If I warned him about the taxi, he'd fall in the shower and break his neck. The universe, unfortunately, has a way of course correcting. That man was supposed to die." Again, this suggests that although major events (like the man's death) are unchangeable, minor ones (like the precise cause of his death) can be changed, in violation of Novikov's principle.

• The first-season 2002 TV series Twilight Zone episode "Cradle of Darkness" featured a woman who traveled from the modern day back in time to kill the infant Adolf Hitler to prevent his future atrocities. The woman, posing as the family nurse, disposes of the Hitlers' baby and replaces him with a beggar woman's child so as not to arouse suspicion. This replacement infant is the child who then grows up to become the infamous Adolf Hitler.

• Each episode of the Irwin Allen series The Time Tunnel (less the few set in the future) depicted the time-traveling duo arriving at the scene of an historic tragedy, days or hours before the event, and invariably failing in their attempts to prevent it. This was also true in the 1976 revival pilot, and the similar 1982–83 series, Voyagers!.

• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Time's Arrow", a 500-year-old copy of the android Data's head is unearthed in an excavation near San Francisco on Earth. In the sequence of events that ensues upon investigation, Data is sent back in time to 19th century San Francisco. Later in this time frame, the shock of another temporal event causes his head to be split from his body and remain in the 19th century, while the rest of his body travels forward to the original point in time, when it is re-attached to the 500-year-old head. Thus Data remains, as does the causality of time. However, the series does not consistently obey the Novikov principle in episodes featuring time travel, as episodes like Time Squared and Yesterday's Enterprise show history being changed as a result of time travel.

• While predating Novikov's thesis, the film Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann presents a similar predestination paradox, wherein the title character becomes his own great-great-grandfather thus causing his own existence and time-travel. The same film, however, contains an ontological paradox in that Swann's heirloom necklace which his great-great-grandmother took from his great-great-grandfather (i.e., himself) is never created and is perpetually in the time-loop.

• The events of the first Terminator film appear to respect the self-consistency principle. In the film, a sentient computer called Skynet attempts to exterminate the human race, but faces difficulty in dealing with a human resistance effort led by a man called John Connor. In a last-ditch attempt to win the war, Skynet sends a cybernetic assassin called a Terminator back through time to murder Connor's mother Sarah before he is born, thereby preventing Connor's existence and the success of his future rebellion. Connor sends a soldier named Kyle Reese back to the same time to protect Sarah. Rather than altering history, these time travellers end up creating the timeline as it was meant to be. While on the run from the Terminator, Kyle and Sarah have sex and conceive the child who will become John Connor. Likewise, the Terminator is destroyed in a factory and its remains are claimed by Cyberdyne Systems, the factory's owner. This company uses the Terminator's remains as the basis for a research project that will ultimately result in the creation of the malevolent computer Skynet. (It should be noted, however, that only the first film respects this principle. In the sequels, the main characters are able to significantly alter the timeline. Also, even in the first film Skynet's plan would not really make sense unless it believed that history could be changed, and when Sarah Connor asks Kyle Reese if he's saying the Terminator is from the future, he responds 'One possible future. From your point of view. I don't know tech stuff').

• In Roswell That Ends Well, episode 19 of season 3 of the series Futurama, the protagonist Fry returns to the past and accidentally kills his young grandfather in an attempt to protect him from harm. Fry visits his young grandmother whom he'd been introduced to earlier as his grandfather's fiancee, and convincing himself that she can't actually be his grandmother as he is still alive, allows himself to be seduced by her. The explanation at the end of the show is that Fry has become his own grandfather. By the laws of genetic relatedness, one might find a paradox here, in that Fry being his own grandfather means his father is both 50% related to him (since he is Fry's father) and 62.5% related to him (since Fry's father is also his son and the son of Fry's grandmother, who's by virtue of being Fry's grandmother, is 25% related to Fry). However, these laws are probabilistic and Fry being his own grandfather is not necessarily a violation of Novikov's principle. This is illustrated on this episode's page on InfoSphere. The reason is that while Fry may have obtained 50% of his SNPs from his father, his grandmother might have been similar enough to him (his grandfather) that his father is 62.5% related to him. Regardless, it's clear that Fry's just very inbred.

• In The Final Countdown, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, based at Pearl Harbor, is sent back in time from 1980 to December 6, 1941. Aboard is a civilian consultant from one of the companies which contributed to the design of the ship. One of the ship's officers, a historian, is lost and presumed dead while transporting a rescued senator and his secretary to a small island for safety in advance of the coming battle; according to history, the pair and his chief of staff were believed to have been killed by the Japanese. The senator dies trying to escape the island. Just as the ship's complement prepare to go into battle the next morning to stop the Japanese attack, the ship returns to 1980 – their minor involvement having had no net effect on history. Back in port, the consultant meets his reclusive boss who helped design the ship – he and his wife are the pilot and the senator's secretary who assumed false names during the war.

• Throughout the plot of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, two unexplained events that greatly affect the plot are later seen to be caused by the protagonists using a time-turner, a small hourglass allowing its user to travel back in time. Hermione Granger uses the time-turner to go back in time and do a different lesson than the current Hermione is doing and thus appears to be in multiple places at once. In the same book, Harry Potter saved himself from a Dementor attack, realizing at the last moment that his savior was not his father as he had initially thought, but was in fact, himself.

• Novikov is alluded to by name in the comic Nth Man: The Ultimate Ninja. One of the characters is Colonel Vavara Novikova (Russian surnames having masculine and feminine forms), who accompanies the protagonist and antagonist back in time to their birth so that they can be delivered to the orphanage where their story begins.

• In the book (and later the film) The Time Traveler's Wife, the main character's mother is killed in a car crash while he is young. He escapes injury by time travelling out of the car. Although he frequently revisits the scene and time of the accident throughout his life, he can never alter the outcome as to do so would remove his desire to be there.

• In Season 4 episode 2 of the TV series Eureka The Novikov Self Consistency Principle is explicitly mentioned to justify the many similarities between the "alternative timeline" experienced by the protagonists and their "original timeline". In the brief discussion the character Dr. Henry Deacon (Joe Morton), using the analogy of ripples in a pond, explains that the further one travels from the point where the timeline is changed the less noticeable are the effects of that change. This is not however an accurate depiction of the principle, since the principle actually forbids any changes to the timeline.

• In The Time Machine (2002), the protagonist invented a time machine in order to go back and save his sweetheart, only to find that he couldn't do it, as that would remove his reason to invent the time machine. Again, this is not exactly the principle, as he changes the method of her death.

• The xkcd comic strip "Kill Hitler" shows a time-traveler setting off to kill Hitler; later he says, "He was in some kind of bunker. 1945 was loud." While this may be an example of the self-consistency principle, it is not entirely clear whether the original time-line was one in which Hitler died in the bunker, or whether the traveler succeeded in changing history. The response of the person he reports back to is not decisive.