While each person is traveling through time at a one second per second rate, it's safe to say that no one has managed to travel through it and end up in the past or future. However, scientists are still fascinated by the theoretical possibilities.
Science Alert notes how several movies show that moving through time can lead to issues with universal laws. For example, if one goes back in time to stop parents' from meeting in the first place, how is it possible to exist and to time travel?
This head-scratcher is dubbed the grandfather paradox. However, a few years back, Germain Tobar, a physics student from the University of Queensland, worked around the numbers in order to calculate how time travel would be possible without such kind of paradoxes. According to Big Think, Tobar teamed up with physicist Dr. Fabio Costa from the same university.
Is It Possible To Time Travel Without Paradoxes?
Their study was published in Classical and Quantum Gravity last 2020.
Tobar mentions how there are certain physicists who believe in these possibilities. He also notes, however, that this may be logically difficult to embrace because it would affect one's freedom to decide. This means that one may time travel but be unable to perform anything that could lead to a paradox.
He further notes that the prominent general relativity theory of Einstein predicts time travel and time loops.
Space-Time Can Theoretically Adapt
Science Alert notes how their calculations revealed that space-time may adapt with its own self in order to dodge such paradoxes. With this, time travel may possibly be consistent and exempted from such occurrences. However, Big Think notes that it would need all outputs except that of two specific space-time regions. In such a case, even if timelike loops that are closed are present, entities may have preserved freedom to decide without leading to a paradox.
The University of Queensland also reports how Tobar stated that classical dynamics states that if one knows a system's state in a certain period, it may reveal the system's complete history. He also states how this may have widespread applications, such as enabling humanity to deploy rockets to different planets.
The work of Tobar may be quite difficult for those who are not mathematicians. However, the approach focuses on the deterministic processes' influence across various regions within the continuum of space-time. It also shows how time-like curves that are closed may still coincide with classic physics and free will.
The study also smoothed out an issue with a different hypothesis pertaining to how time travel may be possible but travelers would have restrictions in order to prevent paradoxes from taking place. In such a model, time travels have freedom while paradoxes cannot happen.
Time Travel Remains Elusive
Nevertheless, though these numbers may theoretically work out, bending both space and time in order to move to the past is quite elusive. Costa expressed, however, that the various mathematical processes that they noted revealed that time travel, while preserving one's free will, is logically possible to happen without any paradoxes.
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