Australian Physicists Resolve Time Travel Paradox, Showing It Could Be Possible According to Einstein’s Theory
TL;DR
Australian physicists have demonstrated that time travel could be theoretically possible by resolving the classic grandfather paradox. By aligning Einstein’s theory of general relativity with classical dynamics, researchers at the University of Queensland showed that time travel scenarios, such as altering past events, can coexist without resulting in logical inconsistencies. They used a model involving the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate how events would adjust themselves to avoid paradoxes. This research suggests that time travel, while complex, does not inherently create contradictions and could be feasible according to current mathematical models.
__________________________
Australian scientists have reportedly demonstrated that time travel could be theoretically feasible by resolving a logical paradox.
Physicists at the University of Queensland employed mathematical modeling to align Einstein’s theory of general relativity with classical dynamics. This discrepancy between the two frameworks is the basis of the well-known time travel paradox, known as the grandfather paradox.
Einstein’s theory suggests that a person could use a time loop to travel back and potentially kill their grandfather. However, classical dynamics implies that such an action would lead to a sequence of events that would ultimately prevent the time traveler from ever existing.
“As physicists, we want to understand the universe’s most basic, underlying laws and for years I’ve puzzled on how the science of dynamics can square with Einstein’s predictions,” said Germain Tobar, who led the research. “Is time travel mathematically possible?”
For their analysis, Tobar and Dr. Costa used the coronavirus pandemic as a model to determine whether the two theories could coexist.
They conceptualized a scenario where a time traveler attempts to go back and stop the initial patient from contracting Covid-19.
While Einstein’s theory permits the possibility of time travel, classical dynamics would imply that the essential sequence of events cannot be altered.
This is because if the time traveler succeeded in halting the virus’s spread, it would remove their reason for traveling back in time in the first place.
“In the coronavirus patient zero example, you might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” Tobar explained.
“No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you. This would mean that – no matter your actions – the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it. Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves to avoid any inconsistency.
“The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”
Dr. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the University of Queensland who supervised the research, added: “The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction.”
A paper detailing the research was published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Well, if he did make Paradox-free time travel possible, why didn’t anyone go to Stephen Hawking’ time traveller party?
Yes, any notion of time-travel being possible necessarily means space-travel is possible. That’s why physicists talk about space-time as a single concept; if you can travel through time, you can travel through space. That said, traveling through space isn’t all that impressive; you can do that by walking into the other room. For that matter, we all time-travel at a rate of one second per second.
The theory of relativity also says that there’s no notion of “universal coordinates”. We can talk about where Earth was a year ago, but when we do, that needs to be in relation to something. We can talk about where Earth was a year ago in relation to the Sun (roughly the same spot), or in relation to Venus, or in relation to Alpha Centauri, but there is no universal notion of “where the Earth was a year ago in space”.
With all that said, this guy has not come up with any sort of method of time travel.
One thing folks need to remember about time travel is that it would confuse our languages and the way we think about time, at least in a single timeline as implied in the article. We can no longer speculate that time travel will be invented or has been invented. It either exists now, or it does not. If it “will be” invented in “the future”, it already “has been” invented in the “past”.
so… what if you went back in time and just straight up killed your parents before you were born? how would the universe smooth out that paradox? I understand that if the virus was stopped, it would be released in some other way…. but how would you be born if you slaughter your parents?
or does it not work that way and someone one else takes on your “role in the universe” and does all the things you were “meant” to do
This is one of the standard science fiction approaches to this problem. It has problems.
Well, his example with the pandemic didn’t answer killing his grandfather. If his father never existed, then he never met your mother, and you don’t exist. DNA doesn’t change, so how will the universe adjust around you to make you still here?