Is Time travel about to come true?

A physicist has discovered the math that makes time travel become a reality without the influence of paradox.

Time travel is still impossible - at least that is what we know - But the question is, whether such a feat can be theoretically feasible or not is still a subject of interest in the scientific community.

According to some films like The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others, Time travel would have many consequences for the fundamental laws of the universe. For example, if you go back in time and prevent your parents from meeting from happening, will you still exist to be able to do that?

Is Time travel about to come true?

Is Time travel about to come true? / ph: pexels

That example is called the "Grandfather Paradox", a problem still troubling the scientific community. However, in September last year, a physics student named Germain Tobar, studying at the University of Queensland in Australia, pointed out that he has found the math to make time travel possible without happening out of any paradox.

"Classical dynamics have shown that if you know the state of a system at a particular point in time, you know the full history of that system" said Tobar in September 2020.

"However, according to general relativity, Einstein predicted the existence of time loops, or time travel - where an event could occur both in its own past and in the future - has theoretically taken the study of dynamics into a new chapter."

Calculations show that space - time has the ability to adapt itself to avoid possible paradoxes.

For a topical example, imagine that a time traveler has traveled into the past to prevent an epidemic from spreading - if the mission succeeds, he will not encounter the disease so he can go back in time and find ways to contain it.

However, Tobar's work suggests that this pandemic can still be cured in some other way, through a different route or by a different method, that has eliminated the above paradox. No matter what time traveler does, a pandemic will not be stopped.

Tobar's work is not easy to understand for people outside of mathematics.

However, it investigated the effect of determinism (which does not include randomness) on a random number of continuous space-time intervals, and revealed both closed timelike curves can all fit together according to the laws of free will and classical physics as predicted by Einstein.

"The calculations have been verified - and the results are a product of science fiction." commented physicist Fabio Costa of the University of Queensland, who supervised the study.

This new research has solved the problems of other theories, assuming time travel is possible, but time travelers will be limited in what they can do to prevent the paradox from being constructed.

In this new paradigm, the time traveler has the ability to do whatever they want without any conflict.

Although the theory seems viable, bending space and time to travel time is still difficult to do when the time travel machine that scientists invented was just a visualization on paper.

We'll get there in the future - Stephen Hawking is confident it will come true - and if we follow what the research shows, one day we will be able to freely do all we want with the past and its job is to self-regulate as needed.

"Do everything you can to create a paradox that will operate on its own and change itself to avoid any potential conflict" says Costa. "To the extent of the calculations we have found, time travel with free will is logically possible without causing any contradiction."