Posted on 01/29/2021 12:32:34 PM PST by Red Badger
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?
It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but in September last year a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
"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 back in September 2020.
"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."
What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes.
To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.
Tobar's work suggests that the disease would still escape some other way, through a different route or by a different method, removing the paradox. Whatever the time traveller did, the disease wouldn't be stopped.
Tobar's work isn't easy for non-mathematicians to dig into, but it looks at the influence of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on an arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum, and demonstrates how both closed timelike curves (as predicted by Einstein) can fit in with the rules of free will and classical physics.
"The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction," said physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland, who supervised the research.
The new research smooths out the problem with another hypothesis, that time travel is possible but that time travellers would be restricted in what they did, to stop them creating a paradox. In this model, time travellers have the freedom to do whatever they want, but paradoxes are not possible.
While the numbers might work out, actually bending space and time to get into the past remains elusive – the time machines that scientists have devised so far are so high-concept that for they currently only exist as calculations on a page.
We might get there one day – Stephen Hawking certainly thought it was possible – and if we do then this new research suggests we would be free to do whatever we wanted to the world in the past: it would readjust itself accordingly.
"Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency," says Costa. "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 has been published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.
A version of this article was first published in September 2020.
Back further. When the fraud mechanism was being establihed.
I’m going back in time and becoming an executive for Dominion Voting systems
My thinking is that all matter is traveling down a “road” of time. Down the road ahead of matter matter is nothing and the same behind the matter. If some of matter “jumps” down the road (going forward in time), or go backwards down the road (going back in time), it would encounter nothing as all the rest of matter is back where it left it.
Yeah I probably speak nonsense but there it is.
” where an event can be both in the past and future of itself...”
~~~
Of itself, yes. Of course! The future of a past can be contiguous to itself, but the subsequent past will be different than the future and require a separate timeline (or dimension or universe) but in the case of this article, an “adjustment” cannot be explained if the existential reality of the timeline is singular. Then the paradox would negate the abberations
Total rubbish! The cause/effect continuum is absolute. There is no way for mere mortals to break out of it.
If someone went back in Time and changed something, he would be the only one aware of it.
The past is over and the future hasn’t happened yet; there is only the present.
I went back and lent some cash to Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates. They paid me off in stock so I figured why not invest more with them. Ugly guys but seemed smart.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
I just went back to the past and found out that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Wait, why is Joe Biden president?
Now where did I put that flux capacitor???
To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.
How could they use this as an example, but just happen to miss 12 Monkeys as a time travel movie?
In reality we live in the multiverse. Multiple timelines exist and if you were to travel back along a timeline and change the future as you knew it you would be creating a new and different timeline.
> No one has yet managed to travel through time... <
Well, forward time travel is an established fact. It’s one consequence of Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity.You just need to move (at any speed) relative to the Earth.
But for the “time travel” to be readily noticeable, you’d have to move very close to the speed of light. That would be tough for humans to do. But it’s easy for atomic particles to do.
I knew that years ago.
That’s what I think. There’s no such thing as time like there’s gravity or energy. Humans think of time because they observe birth and death, sunrise and sunset, etc. but in reality time is just a concept.
Especially in space where there are no clocks or time reference points.
Even if time travel were possible, the when isn’t as big a problem as the where. The earth is spinning around the axis while wobbling and then orbiting the sun which is hurtling through space along with the rest of the universe.
Doesn’t really matter if I can go forward or backwards in time, if the where of the when is in the middle of empty space when I get there.
In order to travel through time, you have to be able to accurately and effortlessly travel through space.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.