Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) was an American author who wrote his stories from the margins, going so far as to cross the boundaries of the genre, whether black, horror or science fiction, like the story that concerns us today and which is titled Father, dear father.
In the aforementioned story, Beaumont brings us closer to the famous grandfather paradox, the same one that says that a person travels through time and kills his grandfather before he has offspring, in such a way that the time traveler never could have been conceived and this is supposed to be contrary to all logic. But, in this case, Beaumont makes a variant; He changes the grandfather for the father, achieving a hooligan story that turns the paradox on its head. The volume in which this piece appears has just been recently published by Paseo editorial; a selection of stories where, in addition to time travel, we also find forays into quantum physics and parallel universes.
By reading Beaumont’s stories we delve into scientific paradoxes, since traveling in time confronts the principle of causality, by which it is postulated that causes precede effects and never the other way around. From this conflict we obtain two categories of paradoxes, on the one hand we have the paradoxes of incoherence, where the effect returns to the past to prevent its cause, as in the case of the grandfather paradox that Beaumont turns 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 in such a way that the time traveler, when going back to the past, realizes that it is his own grandfather. .
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-type curve, since an effect is simultaneous. with his cause. To illustrate this, Escher made another of his impossible lithographs, titled Ascending and Descending and he made it based on the staircase devised by the British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose, inspired, in turn, by the genius of Escher.
Because the aforementioned Penrose staircase is an impossible structure that violates the foundations of Euclidean geometry. With this, the causal loop can also be transferred to the relationship of facts, in this case to the inspiration that meanders from art to science, from Escher to Penrose; two men completing the same staircase that brings them back to artistic creation, giving rise to a fascinating image of a monastery where monks go up and down following a closed time-type curve. They do it in such a way that each of the monks on the staircase is both in front of and behind the other monks, that is, we would not know how to point out a monk as the first or the last.
With this, Escher combined science and art to enlighten us about how the principle of causality is violated until the causal loop is achieved, in the same way that Charles Beaumont, three years earlier, in 1957, also violates the principle of causality when he publishes a story. shameless and thuggish as a variant of the grandfather paradox, a founding example of the paradox of incoherence.
In short, in the best of cases, if we set out to travel to the past, the best thing that can happen to us is to become our own grandmother.
The stone ax It is a section where Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, exercises its particular siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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