For almost over a century, we have wondered about time travel and whether it’ll be possible to travel back in time to see a loved one or to travel into the future where we can see how the world changed.
But, as we learned more and more about the physics and mathematics of time travel, we somehow came to the conclusion that time travel was not possible.
That is no longer true. In a discovery, that could change the entire world of physics – a physics student has solved the math for time travel and proved that it’s possible to travel back in time.
However, there is a catch.
This is the unsolvable problem with time travel
Do you know about time travel paradoxes? Imagine you went back in time and killed your grandfather, which means you wouldn’t even exist in the first place to actually make that journey – paradox.
What if you went back in time and killed Hitler, does that mean that the Holocaust would have never happened?
There are many problems in time travel and we have had thousands of books and films exploring these ideas.
But the truth is much more simple.
Here’s the solution that was discovered by a college student
The physics student who solved the math for time travel, studies at the University of Queensland. And they said that it’s possible to travel back in time. Not only that, but you could also do whatever you want in the past and there will be nothing stopping you.
But the catch is that whatever you do, it won’t change the present.
You would think that you are doing whatever you want, but you will only be doing whatever has already happened. And you wouldn’t be able to change the course of history even if you tried.
Suppose you went back in time to kill Hitler, but you’d fail – not because of some law of physics preventing you, but just the local circumstances. The fact that Hitler lived also indicates the fact that you went back in time to kill him but failed.
Whatever has happened, has already happened. And if you went back, it means you were already a part of it.
This is what the research paper basically means to say
The paper titled “Reversible dynamics with closed time-like curves and freedom of choice” was published in the Classical and Quantum Gravity journal, and this is what it says:
“We have developed a characterization of deterministic processes in the presence of closed time-like curves (CTCs) for an arbitrary number of localized regions. Our proofs have demonstrated that non-trivial time travel between multiple regions is consistent with the absence of a logical paradox as long as once the outputs of all but two regions are fixed, at most one-way signaling is possible.”
“Time-like curves” are any paths through space that are permitted for massive particles like electrons, protons, or spaceships. “Closed” time-like curves are any paths that end up back where and when they started, hence closed curves in the 4-dimensional world of space and time.
So now we know the theory, it’s just an engineering problem
So basically, now it seems theoretically possible for spaceships to move through time. This means that time machines are not that far-fetched now, and it’s only a matter of an engineering problem to devise a machine that can take us back in time.
How soon that’ll be, depends on how fast the researchers get funded to actually do it.
Featured Image Courtesy: Science Direct