Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) was an American author who wrote his stories from the margins, even crossing the boundaries of the genre, whether black, horror or science fiction, like the story that concerns us today and which gives the title bears father, dear father.
In the story mentioned above, Beaumont introduces us to the famous grandfather paradox, which states that a person travels through time and kills his grandfather before he has offspring, in such a way that the time traveler could never have been conceived, namely so should contradict all logic. But in this case Beaumont does a variation; swaps the grandfather for the father, creating a hooligan story that reverses the paradox. The volume in which this piece appears was recently published by the Paseo editorial team; a selection of stories in which, in addition to time travel, we also find forays into quantum physics and parallel universes.
Through reading Beaumont’s stories, we are immersed in scientific paradoxes as traveling through time is confronted with the principle of causality, which postulates that causes precede effects and never the opposite. Two categories of paradoxes arise from this conflict: on the one hand, the paradoxes of incoherence, in which the effect returns to the past to prevent its cause, as in the case of the grandfather paradox that Beaumont translates into literature; As a second category we have the paradoxes of predestination or causal loop, which are the paradoxes caused by an effect when it becomes its own cause, so that the time traveler, returning to the past, realizes that it is his own grandfather . .
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As an example of the latter, we also have the lithographs and drawings of MC Escher (1898-1972), impossible figures that tell us that the principle of causality is not fulfilled in a closed time curve, since an effect is simultaneous. with his thing. To illustrate this, Escher made another of his impossible lithographs entitled Ascending and Descending, based on the staircase by British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, who in turn was inspired by Escher’s genius.
Because the Penrose Staircase mentioned above is an impossible structure that violates the fundamentals of Euclidean geometry. This means that the causal cycle can also be transferred to the facts, in this case to inspiration, which meanders from art to science, from Escher to Penrose; Two men climbing the same staircase bring her back to artistic creation, creating a fascinating image of a monastery in which monks walk up and down following a closed time curve. They make it so that each of the monks on the stairs is both in front of and behind the other monks, meaning we don’t know how to mark a monk as first or last.
With this, Escher combined science and art to enlighten us about how the principle of causality is violated until the causal cycle is achieved, in the same way that Charles Beaumont also violated the principle of causality three years earlier, in 1957, when he publishes a story. shameless and brutal as a variant of the grandfather paradox, a founding example of the paradox of incoherence.
In short, if we embark on a journey into the past, the best thing that can happen to us is becoming our own grandmother.
The stone axe It is a section in which Montero GlezWith a penchant for prose, he makes his special attack on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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