A Physicist Says 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible

 

(andrey_l/Shutterstock)

To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever traveled through time, yet scientists are nevertheless fascinated by the possibility that it could be done.

Moving around in time causes many issues for the fundamental laws of the universe, as demonstrated by films like The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future, and many more. For example, if you go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting, how can you possibly exist in the first place to go back in time?

The 'grandfather paradox' is a huge conundrum, but Germain Tobar, a physics student at the University of Queensland in Australia, figured a how to "square the numbers" a few years ago to make time travel feasible without the paradoxes.

Going back in time to make your grandfather disappear might make your own birth a touch more difficult according to the grandfather paradox. (Jokic/Getty Images)

"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," Tobar stated in 2020.

"However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."

The computations demonstrate that space-time may be able to adjust itself to steer clear of paradoxes.

As a topical example, consider a time traveler who goes back in time to prevent the spread of a disease; if the mission is successful, the time traveler will not have any sickness to battle.

According to Tobar's research, the contradiction would be resolved if the illness managed to evade detection in some other way. The sickness would not be halted by the time traveler's actions.

The influence of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on an arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum is examined in Tobar's work, which is difficult for non-mathematicians to understand. It also shows how closed time-like curves (as predicted by Einstein) can be reconciled with the principles of classical physics and free will.

 The study's supervisor, physicist Fabio Costa of the University of Queensland, remarked, "The math checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction."

Another theory, that time travel is feasible but that time travelers would be constrained in their actions to prevent them from generating a paradox, was used by the researchers to resolve the issue.  Paradoxes are impossible in this scenario, but time travelers are free to behave as they like.

 Even while the equations might make sense, it is still impossible to bend space and time in order to travel back in time. The time machines that scientists have created thus far are so abstract that they are currently merely computations on paper.

According to recent research, if we ever make it there, the earth will reconfigure itself to allow us to do whatever we want to it. Stephen Hawking absolutely believed that it was conceivable.

 "Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency," Costa stated.

 "The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our Universe without any paradox."

Reference