No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least as far as we know – but the question of whether such a feat is theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
As these kinds of movies show “Terminator”, “Donnie Darko”, “Back to the Future” and many others, time travel poses many problems for the basic rules of the universe: If you go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting, for example, how can you exist to go back in time?
It’s a tremendous puzzle known as the “grandfather paradox,” but a few years ago physics student Germaine Tobar of the University of Queensland in Australia figured out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel feasible without paradoxes.
“Classical dynamics says that if you know the state of a system at a particular moment in time, that can tell us about the entire history of the system,” Tobar explained in 2020.
“But Einstein’s theory of general relativity implies the existence of time loops, or time travel, in which an event can happen both in the past and in the future, which theoretically reverses the study of dynamics.”
Calculations show that space-time could potentially adapt to avoid paradoxes. To give a current example, imagine a time traveler who goes back in time to stop the spread of a disease; If the mission is successful, the time traveler will not have the disease to travel back in time to defeat.
Tobar’s work suggested that the disease could be escaped in another way, another way, or another method, by eliminating the paradox. No matter what the time traveler does, the disease cannot be stopped.
Tobar’s work is difficult for non-mathematicians to study in depth, but it looks at the effects of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on a random number of regions in the space-time continuum and shows how both time-like curves close (as predicted). by Einstein) can obey the rules of free will and classical physics.
“The math is being tested and the results are science fiction,” said University of Queensland physicist Fabio Costa, who led the study.
The study solved the problem with another hypothesis, which hypothesized that time travel was possible, but that time travelers would be limited in what they could do to avoid creating a paradox. In this model, time travelers have the freedom to do whatever they want, but paradoxes are impossible.
While the numbers work, actually bending space and time to go into the past remains difficult; The time machines scientists have built so far are so high-concept that they currently exist only as calculations on a page.
We may get there one day – Stephen Hawking certainly thought it was possible – and if we can, this new research shows that we will be free to do whatever we want to the world in the past: The world will rearrange itself accordingly.
“No matter how many paradoxes you try to create, events will always be reversed to avoid inconsistency,” Costa said. “The variety of mathematical processes we discovered shows that free will time travel is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.” The study was published on: Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Source: Port Altele
