Name: Qld scientists find paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible
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Qld scientists find paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible

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Qld scientists find paradox-free time travel is theoretically possibleWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementMathematical modelling by Queensland scientists has sent accepted time-travel theory for a loop, proving that paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible.A new paper by University of Queensland advanced science student Germain Tobar and his professor, physicist Fabio Costa, details the complex mathematical proofs that show a person travelling from the present to the past would still be able to act freely without creating paradoxes.The most famous time-travel paradox is the grandfather paradox - what happens if you travel back in time and kill your own grandfather? If you do, you cease to exist, but if you cease to exist then you never existed to kill your grandfather.The scientific consensus about time-travel paradoxes is that even if you were able to travel to the past you would not be able to do anything differently to what had already occurred, ensuring paradoxes do not occur.Dr Costa had demonstrated in earlier work that a limited amount of free will was possible if a person travelled to the past and assigned Mr Tobar the problem of developing the mathematical proofs further.“If there’s a wide variety of processes which can happen then this gives strong support to the argument that time travel is possible,” Mr Tobar said.“There is a lot of debate at the moment, a lot of physicists think closed time-like curves [where events from one point on a timeline affect things at a previous point in the timeline] can’t exist because of the possibility for these paradoxes.“No one has been able to show that these inconsistencies can be avoided, so we’ve found a lot of processes that are consistent.”AdvertisementThe researchers use the example of someone travelling back in time to stop the current pandemic. Under the previous model, they would not be able to stop “patient zero” contracting the virus. They could under the new model outlined in the paper, but the pandemic would still occur through other means - a different person gets sick, the time traveller gets sick, or something else.Dr Costa said it was heady stuff to think about, and their equations were about proving logical consistencies, rather than a way to allow physical time travel.He said it was an important step to a greater understanding of how the universe worked.“This is quite a significant result. It’s all about a shift in perspective in how one considers the laws of the universe,” he said.“The standard position is to consider the laws of the universe as telling you what happens if you know what the system is at a given time, the laws tell you what it will be at a future time, which doesn’t allow for time travel.“The shift is having a new way to look at the laws of the universe in a way that is consistent with time travel.”Dr Costa said he expected the work to spark “a lot of discussion” in scientific circles, but believed it could shape how physicists thought about time travel into the future.“We still don’t have a complete understanding of the laws of the universe, especially in the realms where gravity plays an important role, we don’t know what the physics looks like,” he said.“So we can’t say that time travel is physically possible, but what we have shown is that it is not impossible.”The research has been published in the journal .Log in, or to save articles for later. covers health, science and technology for the Brisbane Times.Advertisement

Qld scientists find paradox-free time travel is theoretically possibleWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementMathematical modelling by Queensland scientists has sent accepted time-travel theory for a loop, proving that paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible.A new paper by University of Queensland advanced science student Germain Tobar and his professor, physicist Fabio Costa, details...

Qld scientists find paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible

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