I'd say there are two forms of time travel that avoid paradoxes: first is the Novikov self-consistency principle where all your actions in the past were a part of history all along and it's impossible to "change" anything, and the second is the theory where each trip to the past creates a new parallel universe that…

It depends what you mean by "break from reality" I suppose, usually it seems to me that phrase is used to refer to some kind of long-term change that removes a person's ability to think or speak ways that make sense to the rest of us, not to brief strange mental experiences—you don't usually see dreams or drug trips…

Someday we may have a fairly detailed map of the distribution of matter throughout the entire observable universe, like a more wide-ranging version of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey, which would IMO justify a post with a title like this. But the NASA site says this is a map of the entire infrared sky, which probably…

Well, he did live to see the Blade Runner movie in progress. And I wouldn't say he had a "break from reality", more of a mystical/visionary experience, same as a lot of people have had (including some other successful artists I can think of, like Grant Morrison). He remained able to discuss the experience critically…

I don't think Tolkien promised the role to Lee exactly, the sites I read just said he gave Lee his "blessing" to play the role, which I would think mean he'd approve if Lee was cast. And this was when Lee was much younger, from what I remember of the DVD extras, Lee agreed that at his age the role of Gandalf would be…

I'm not a musician, but my guess is they were making some kind of technical distinction between "plucking" and some other form of playing (strumming?)

A lot of anti-Nazis at the time had little interest in defending the Jews, however.

The very fact that he makes it so obvious to those in the know by picking only people RDJ has been associated with probably means it's just a fairly clever hoaxer who wants to be internet famous, kind of like the celebrity gossip version of John Titor.

It's probably not worth thinking a terrible movie like this any thought but it seems like there are some basic plot holes here. Can he communicate by writing? If so why doesn't he type stuff into a Stephen Hawking style voice synthesizer? He could even learn sign language if that's "allowed" by the curse.

If it doesn't involve death, then most copies of you will just see "boring" statistics rather than weird ones. But if all copies are killed who don't see "special" statistics which are unlikely from a third-person point of view, the idea is that from a first-person view you can only experience those worlds where you…

Isn't it true that everything is tied to quantum particles? Just think of the butterfly effect, which says that two parallel histories which have starting conditions with only tiny differences will end up diverging significantly if the system you're looking at is chaotic (which would include the weather, and probably…

From the perspective of any external observers, if there are a bunch of people playing quantum suicide games, the ratio of ones who survive different lengths of time should be about what they'd expect from a normal probability calculation. The argument here is that the subjective odds of survival for the person…

It is possible to talk about proportions of different classes of results in infinite sets though—this is an area of math called measure theory.

Thus our essence is the combined product of our mind, our actions, our feelings. You subjugate that to a hive mind, you concede all the elements that define the purpose of living. The purpose of life isn't just to 'be' happy, but rather, to 'achieve' happiness. There is an implicit interaction with the universe, a…

Yeah, that's a good point—probably a lot of these "not a prequel" comments are about adjusting audience expectations so they aren't disappointed.

But couldn't a hive mind be seen as creating a larger self, just different from the kind of individually-brained selves that existed before the hive mind? After all, my right and left hemispheres don't seem to worry that their separate selves are being negated by their incorporation into the "self" constructed by my…

"He's also distanced himself from those statements numerous times"

My belief is that this will be a movie in the same universe as Alien, with a similar storyline, a different enemy, just set a while before the original Alien (ergo, if they wanted to make any more movies, they could). Ridley hasn't even given us that much, though. He basically said Weyland was the only connection to…

This is an old urban legend going back to 1993 at least, see here and here and here. Maybe you just decided to stretch the truth a little for the sake of a funny anecdote, but if not, this could be a case of a story you heard inserting itself into your memory so that you think you actually witnessed it—memory is…

I don't understand, why do you say "but" as if you're disagreeing with me? I haven't argued in favor of leaving the water in the tissue, vitrification seems like a good idea to me.