I have written many posts over the years about time travel, and while I am pretty sure I read this article in 2020 about some theoretical work at UQ, I don't think I got around to posting about it.
Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible, according to the mathematical modelling of a prodigious University of Queensland undergraduate student.
Fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) student Germain Tobar has been investigating the possibility of time travel, under the supervision of UQ physicist Dr Fabio Costa....
“The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” Dr Costa said.
“Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus.
“However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.
“This is a paradox – an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our universe.
“Some physicists say it is possible, but logically it’s hard to accept because that would affect our freedom to make any arbitrary action.
“It would mean you can time travel, but you cannot do anything that would cause a paradox to occur.”
However the researchers say their work shows that neither of these conditions have to be the case, and it is possible for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action that the time traveller makes.
“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,” Mr Tobar said.
“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.”
The research is published in Classical and Quantum Gravity (DOI: 10.1088/1361-6382/aba4bc).
Actually, while searching this place for previous time travel posts, I realised that I had been thinking about a certain idea since at least 2013 - much longer than I would have estimated.
Time flies, I guess.
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