Time travel has always caught the attention of people, and whether it is possible or not, many have concluded that there would be a lot of paradoxes one should deal with if it ever happens.
Several creative minds have stretched the concept of time travel and brought it to life through various books and movies, such as the Back to the Future and Terminator. These stories have all concluded that going back in time and changing the past could be catastrophic.
But a new mathematical model from a physics student has proven that time travel could become possible without paradoxes. His name is Germain Tobar from the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland in Australia. He said that he has "squared the numbers" to allow time travel without dealing with any paradoxes.
Avoiding the Paradox
Despite any valid reasoning, a self-contradictory statement like the paradox cannot be proven acceptable. Some paradoxes are the bootstrap paradox, the Fermi paradox, and the grandfather's paradox.
Dr. Fabio Costa of the Center for Engineered Quantum Systems at the University of Queensland's School of Mathematics and Physics and Tobar's professor takes the example of COVID-19.
Imagine going back to the time when COVID-19 patient zero was exposed to the virus. Stopping him from getting infected means eliminating the motivation to go back in time to prevent the pandemic from happening. That is a paradox or an inconsistency leading people to think that time travel is impossible in this universe.
An alternative example also is the grandfather's paradox, wherein the time traveler goes back in time to kill the grandfather but in the process prevents the existence of the time traveler.
According to Tobar, classical dynamics says that if someone knows how it is at a specific time, it could tell people the entire history of the dynamics. But in the theory of general relativity of Einstein, he predicted the existence of time loops and time travel.
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The Original Outcome Would Find a Way to Happen
Tobar's mathematical model proves that paradoxes can be eliminated, meaning that the virus would still spread but via a different route. According to the Tobar and Costa, non-random deterministic processes can influence an arbitrary number of areas in the spacetime continuum.
Moreover, closed time-like curves in Einstein's theory of general relativity could fit in with the rules of free will. This means the virus may stop infecting patient zero, but it will still find a way to spread somehow.
The researchers combined Kurt Godel's theory of closed time-like curves, Einstein's theory of general relativity, and their mathematical model to prove that time travel will happen without any inconsistencies. In their paper, they explained that combining quantum physics and general relativity could lead spacetime to lose its classical properties, which leads to indefinite causal structures, and spacetime will adjust itself.
Dr. Costa said that the events will always adjust themselves to avoid any paradox. The range of mathematical processes they discovered shows that arbitrary time travel is logically possible in this universe without paradox.
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