New Study; Time Travel Possible

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia say time travel is possible, at least in theory.

Don’t jump to any conclusions based on Science Fiction because that’s not an option; except in the Michael J Fox Back to the Future film series where the conundrum would be the same in real life.

Set in 1985, Fox portrays Marty McFly, a teenager accidentally sent back in time to 1955 in a time -travelling automobile built by his eccentric scientist friend Doctor Emmet “Doc Brown”.

Trapped in the past, Marty inadvertently prevents his future parents’ meeting, threatening his very existence, so he is forced to reconcile the pair and somehow get back to the future.

This study confirms that timewise there is no travelling back to the past to alter the present or the future; the calculations remain the same as they always were so no changes.

“Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen,” study leader and spokesman Germain Tobar told IFL Science.

The study published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity confirms that in Time, any changes made to the past are subsequently offset by events in the future, thus the laws of physics make any changes null and void.

Physicists used mathematical modeling to reconcile classic dynamics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, with the contradiction between the two systems called the grandfather paradox.

“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 Tobar. “Is time travel mathematically possible?”

According to classical dynamics, any attempt by a time traveler to go back in time and, say, kill their grandfather, would result in the time traveler never coming into existence in the first place.

Within Einstein’s theoretical framework, a person could go back in time to kill their grandfather.

This is because he calculated that an object in our universe could travel through both time and space in a circular direction before ultimately ending up where it had been before — a path known as the closed time-like curve.

Tobar and his colleagues used the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as the basis for their study, imagining what would happen if a time traveler had gone back to prevent “patient zero” from being infected.

“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,”

No matter your actions, the pandemic would occur regardless.

Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust them-selves 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,” Tobar added.

With stipulations of course, as any attempt to kill your grandfather would mean that something or someone would have to intervene to prevent this from happening — or, at the very least, your mother would already be a fetus in your grandmother’s womb by the time he did perish.

Dr. Fabio Costa, the University of Queensland physicist who supervised the project, noted; “The math checks out — and the results are the stuff of science fiction.”

So back to square one, proving what’s theoretically possible doesn’t necessarily tie up with what’s practically possible as it affects destiny, something long suspected in physics.