- Time travel has fascinated scientists since time immemorial
- Can we really travel back in time?
A new scientific study admits the possibility of time travel. Its author is Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland. The physics student reports that he has been working on how to “amplify the numbers” in order to realize without paradoxes a phenomenon known to mankind mainly from science fiction films and novels.
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Time travel without time paradoxes
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least as far as we know, but the question of whether it is theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As shown in movies like The Terminator, Donnie Darko or Back to the Future, time travel creates a lot of problems against the basic rules of how the universe works: for example, if you go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting, how can you even exist to go back in time?
Scientists call this problem the “grandfather paradox”, but physics student Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia has now figured out how to “match the numbers” to allow time travel without creating time paradoxes. “Classical dynamics says that if you know the state of a system at a certain time, it can tell you about its entire history. But Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that there are time loops or time travel, so an event can happen in the past and in the future at the same time, which actually refutes the study of dynamics,” he explains.
His calculations suggest that spacetime can potentially adjust to avoid paradoxes. Imagine a time traveler who travels back in time to stop a disease from spreading. If his mission was successful, he wouldn’t even have to go back in time to defeat her one day. However, Tobar’s work suggests that the disease would still spread in a different way, route or method, eliminating the aforementioned paradox. And no matter what the time traveler did, he would not be able to prevent the outbreak of the pandemic described above.
We will not change history
Understanding student work is problematic even for mathematicians. It investigates the influence of deterministic processes without randomness on any number of areas in the content of space-time and shows how both closed time curves (defined already by Einstein) can correspond to the rules of free will and classical physics. “The math fits and the results are like something out of science fiction,” said Tobar’s supervisor, physicist Fabio Costa of the University of Queensland.
Tobar’s study is also unique in that it removes the problem with the hypothesis that time travel is possible, but travelers would be limited in what they would do so as not to create a paradox. In this model, travelers can do anything, but paradoxes are not possible. “Events are always adjusted so that there are no irregularities. A number of mathematical processes we have discovered suggest that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradoxes,” adds Costa. However, a true return to the past remains elusive. Potential time machines are currently just sets of numbers and take the form of calculations “scribbled” on paper.
Preview photo source: Genty / Pixabay, source: Science Alert, Classical and Quantum Gravity
2023-12-19 07:00:51
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