Time travel is a concept that has both fascinated and bothered great minds through centuries. A major setback of this concept or the possibility of it is the Grandfather paradox, a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to a past time.
To put things in perspective, if a person travels back in time and kills his/her grandfather before he had children, it would make the person’s own birth impossible. So, time travel must avoid such logical inconsistencies and contradictions.
A student-teacher duo from Australia has now come out with a solution that could potentially make time travel possible and eliminate this paradox.
“Say you travelled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus, If you stopped that individual from becoming infected — that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place. This is a paradox — an inconsistency that often leads people to think that time travel cannot occur in our Universe,” Dr Fabio Costa from the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Queensland explains.
A paradox-free time travel was thus, not believed to be possible until now but Dr Costa, along with an undergraduate student at the University of Queensland by the name of Germain Tobar, has come up with a mathematical model that proves that such paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible. If the current position and velocity of an object free falling under the force of gravity is known, it can help us calculate where it will be at any point of time.
This has now been published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity and explains that knowing the state of a system at a particular time can tell us the entire history of the system, thereby helping us effectively eliminate the possibility of the paradox occurring.
The researchers say that it is possible “for events to adjust themselves to be logically consistent with any action” that the time traveler makes in the past or the future.
That is, if one were to try and stop the patient zero from getting infected of COVID, the person travelling back in time might catch the virus and become patient zero or someone else might get it.
In essence, no matter the actions we take, the pandemic would occur, giving your younger self the motivation to go back and stop it, Tony says.
The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox,” he says.
This new revelation poses a plethora of exciting opportunities for physicists and researchers, moving forward, as it could make time travel possible in our universe without any paradox.