Even though, to our knowledge, time travel has not yet been accomplished, scientists are nonetheless fascinated by the idea of it being theoretically feasible.
Moving through time poses many challenges to the fundamental laws of the universe, as depicted in films like The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future, and many others. For instance, if you travel through time and prevent your parents from meeting, how can you possibly exist to travel through time in the first place?
The "grandfather paradox" is a major brainteaser, but Germain Tobar, an Australian University of Queensland student studying physics, claims he has figured a how to "square the numbers" to make time travel possible without the paradoxes.
According to Tobar, "classical dynamics states that knowing the state of a system at a certain moment may tell us the complete history of the system."
The study of dynamics is conceptually turned on its head by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicts the occurrence of time loops or time travel, where an event may occur simultaneously in the past and the future.
The calculations demonstrate the possibility of space-time self-adaptation to avoid paradoxes.
Imagine a time traveller going back in time to prevent the spread of a disease. If the mission is successful, the time traveller will not have a sickness to fight in the future.
According to Tobar's research, the paradox would be resolved if the illness still managed to find a way to spread via a new pathway or technique. No matter what the time traveller accomplished, the sickness would still exist.
Tobar's work is difficult to understand for non-mathematicians, but it examines how deterministic processes—without any randomness—affect any number of regions in the space-time continuum and shows how closed timelike curves—as predicted by Einstein—can fit in with both classical physics and the laws of free will.
The research's principal investigator, physicist Fabio Costa of the University of Queensland, says the math "checks out" and the findings are "the stuff of science fantasy."
The latest study eliminates the issue with a different theory, according to which time travel is feasible but subject to limitations to prevent paradoxes from being created. In this hypothetical scenario, time travellers are free to act whatever they like, but paradoxes are impossible.
The time machines that scientists have so far created are so high-concept that for the time being they only exist as equations on a paper. Despite the fact that the math may work out, actually bending space and time to go into the past remains elusive.
Stephen Hawking believed it was conceivable, so we could get there one day. If we do, this new study says we would be free to alter the past anyway we pleased since it would adapt itself appropriately.
The occurrences will always modify themselves to prevent any contradiction, no matter how hard you try to create a paradox, claims Costa. Our discovery of a variety of mathematical techniques demonstrates that time travel with free will is logically consistent with our reality and does not present any paradoxes.
The study was published in the journals classical and quantum gravity.
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