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BY OUR STUDENT CONTRIBUTORS
Nitya Nigam Get your power tools out and start building, because scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia have proven that time travel is theoretically possible after resolving a logical paradox. Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa used mathematical models to align classical dynamics (Newtonian physics) with general relativity (proposed by Einstein). You can find their full paper here, but we’ll be summarising its findings in the rest of this article.
You may have heard of the grandfather paradox, which is a commonly cited logical problem with the concept of time travel. If someone were to go back in time and kill their grandfather, classical dynamics states that the events following the grandfather’s demise would result in the time traveller not being born. However, relativity allows for the time traveller to use a “time loop” (formally called a closed timelike curve, or CTC) to go back in time and kill their grandfather. CTCs are essentially results of solutions to the mathematical equations of relativity. The methods used by Tobar and Costa reconcile this maths with that of classical dynamics. The two scientists used the model of the COVID-19 pandemic to work out whether the two conflicting theories could coexist. What they found is that events would realign themselves so that even if someone went back in time from t=0 and stopped COVID-19 from infecting a human at, say, t=-10000, the end result of the pandemic at t=0 would still occur. “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,” explained Mr Tobar. Essentially, regardless of what you did as a time traveller, events would recalibrate themselves without you, meaning that the pandemic would occur and give your original self a reason to go back in time and stop it. Mr Tobar summed this up by saying: “The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.” Dr Fabio Costa added: “The maths checks out - and the results are the stuff of science fiction.” This is truly some remarkable research, but readers must keep in mind that this paper has only been through one round of peer review, so there may be errors in the paper that haven’t been caught just yet. Furthermore, this only shows that there is a possibility for logically consistent time travel, not that this definitely can exist. But this is definitely a win for all the sci-fi nerds out there.
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