At least to our knowledge – no one has managed to pass the time, but the question of whether such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
Such as movies Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the future And many others show that moving on time poses many problems for the basic laws of the universe: if you go back in time and stop meeting your parents, for example, to go back in time is possible if you exist. In the first place?
It’s the main screw of a monument called ‘Grandfather Contradiction’, but now phys Torben, a physics student at the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel possible without contradiction. .
“Classical dynamics says that if you know the state of a system at a particular time, it can tell us the complete history of the system,” says Tober.
“However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both past and future – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head.”
What calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid contradictions.
To use a pertinent example, imagine a time travel in the past to prevent the spread of a disease – if this mission were successful, the time traveler would have no disease to return to in time for defeat.
Tober’s work suggests that the disease will escape in some other way, by removing the contradiction, by a different route or by some other method. Whatever the time traveler did, the disease did not stop.
Tober’s work is not easy for non-mathematicians to dig into, but it looks at the influence of an arbitrary number of territorial processes (without any anomalies) in space-time continuity and shows that both closed times have the same curve (as Einstein predicted). Will sit close with classical physics.
“Mathematics checks – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” says Fabio Costa, a physicist at the University of Queensland, who oversaw the research.
Fabio Costa (left) and German Tober (right). (Ho Wu)
The new research simplifies the problem with the second notion, time travel is possible but travelers of that time will be banned from what they did, in order to prevent their contradictions. In this model, time travelers have the freedom to do what they want, but contradiction is not possible.
While numbers can work, it’s really tricky to turn the space and time into the past – the time machines scientists have devised so far.
We can get there one day – Stephen Hawking certainly thought it was possible – and if we do, this new research suggests that we will be free to do what the world wants in the past: it will adjust itself accordingly.
“You try as hard as you can to create contradictions, events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistencies,” says Costa. “The series of mathematical processes we have discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our world without any contradictions.”
Research has been published in Classical and quantum gravity.
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