Science & Technology

Physicist solves time travel paradox problem

By T.K. Randall
September 28, 2020 ·  15 comments

Is it really possible to travel backwards through time ? Image Credit: Pixabay / TheDigitalArtist From 'Doctor Who' to 'Back to the Future', time travel has been a staple science-fiction technology in movies, books and TV shows for years. But could it really be possible to travel into the past ?

One of the longest-standing problems when it comes to time travel is the paradox - a concept that would seem to make the idea of changing events in the past a total impossibility.

As an example, imagine traveling into the past to stop a deadly disease. If you succeeded, there wouldn't have been a disease to travel back in time to stop - hence the paradox.

Now though, physics student Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia believes that he has come up with the mathematics necessary to avoid paradoxes entirely.

According to his calculations, space-time is actually capable of adapting itself to avoid them from happening. In the example mentioned above, this could manifest as the disease breaking out regardless of efforts to travel back in time to stop it, thus making it an inevitable occurrence."Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," said Tobar.

"However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel - where an event can be both in the past and future of itself - theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."

Of course all of this is purely hypothetical - it remains to be seen whether or not time travel is actually possible and even it is, it isn't certain how it would work and whether or not things could be changed.

Tobar's work on the subject however has at least proven to be quite compelling

"The maths checks out - and the results are the stuff of science fiction," said physicist Fabio Costa.

Source: Science Alert | Comments (15)

Tags: Time Travel