Time travel paradoxes have been troubling mathematicians, sci-fi film enthusiasts, screenplay writers, and physicists for many decades now. Simply put, traveling back in time and changing something at a point in the past could introduce a new chain of events that may eliminate the motivation you had to go back in time in the first place, or even expunge your very existence.
Germain Tobar, a young undergraduate student of the University of Queensland proposes a new theory based on the so-called “closed time-like curves” (CTC), which essentially proposes paradox-free time travel. The man suggests that no matter what interaction the time traveler would attempt with the past, things will shift dynamically so that everything that will be reflected in the future stays the same.
For example, the scientist suggests that a traveler goes back in time to stop COVID-19 patient zero from catching the virus. Tobar explains that according to the CTC theory, you could catch the virus instead, or someone else would. No matter the efforts of the time traveler to stop the coronavirus from hopping to a human, the events would re-calibrate as required to reach the determined result and avoid any inconsistency.
While this may sound like hopeful thinking, the young scientist’s proposal is actually consistent with other recent quantum findings and recently solved mathematical problems like that of the “random walk”. From a scientific standpoint, the most significant part of Tobar’s paper is the discovery of distinct non-trivial quadripartite process functions that are compatible with the presence of CTCs.
This practically means that you can go back in time, have fun, do whatever you want, and not worry about destroying the world, altering the future, or having yourself go “poof” in the process.
No matter what you do, the past will re-adjust things in a way that will make your efforts unavailing. That would make time-travel as relaxing and enjoyable as it deserves to be. If only we had a working time machine now.
