Posted on 10/01/2020 10:13:13 AM PDT 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 now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says 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," says Tobar.
"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," says 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.
Here’s a link to a a PDF that contains short stories by the famous SciFi writer The late Issac Asimov.
One of the stories in it, the first one, is called ‘The Dead Past’.
It somewhat relates to your situation............ENJOY!....
http://fennetic.net/irc/Isaac%20Asimov%20-%20The%20Complete%20Stories%20Volume%201.pdf
That could be why we haven’t seen time travelers. They are floating in space somewhere. Maybe even inside some other object that happened to occupy that same space.
Motorcycle Baja 1000 competitor Lyle Swann—the ”Timerider.” Only he fulfilled the mystery figure of the great-grandfather that disappeared from his family tree.
Think it was Niven working on the viewpoint that every time someone built a time machine, the Universe found a way of erasing their efforts to avoid a paradox. If your sun goes Nova just as you complete your time machine, you might be having a bad day!
I’ve always wanted to see if the Time Barrier could be warped on my 93FXR! :-)
I watched a documentary yesterday about 3 aliens whose warp drive had been sabotaged and they ended up on Earth some 400 years back in time to the New Mexico area in the year 1947.
They managed to get back to their time period and the US gov’t back then covered it all up saying the alien spacecraft was just a weather balloon.....
Like a star or asteroid..........................
There was a Star Trek TNG episode of that....................
Good find. But puzzling. How is that ‘The Billiard Ball’ can be in the public domain and available for free on the internet? That one and many more at the link.
Maybe the Star Trek episode was based on true events as depicted in the “documentary”?.... : )
Are you sure the three words weren’t ‘Barack Hussein Obama’? Hahahaha
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