Aussie Theoreticians Claim To Have Solved Time Travel Paradox – IOTW Report

Aussie Theoreticians Claim To Have Solved Time Travel Paradox

Tuesday, 6 October 2020, 15:30 Dr. Tar Uncategorized 38

Evening Standard

Australian scientists claim they have solved a logical paradox, proving that time travel is theoretically possible.

A 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 could travel back in time freely without creating paradoxes.

The most famous time-travel paradox is the grandfather paradox, which asks what would happen if you travelled back in time and killed your own grandfather. If you kill him, you will cease to exist, but if you cease to exist then you never existed to kill him. More

38 Comments on Aussie Theoreticians Claim To Have Solved Time Travel Paradox

  6. Back when I was in high school I woke up in the middle of the night with a way to time travel. I woke up and looked for something to write it down. I didn’t find anything, but I figured that the answer was so simple that I would easily remember it the next morning.

    I didn’t

    15

  7. …I think Douglas Adams covered all this about as well as any human being possibly can…

    “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the history of catering. It has been built on the fragmented remains of… it will be built on the fragmented… that is to say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been—

    One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can’t cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

    The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner’s Time Traveler’s Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

    Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later aditions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
    -Douglas Adam’s, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”
    http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~param/quotes/guide.html

    5

  12. As for the paradox, I don’t think it is anything to worry about.

    I look at it this way. Let’s say you invent a time machine. You want to use that time machine to go back to the Titanic. So what does your time machine do — does it take you back to the time of the Titanic or does it gather up everything and everyone who existed at the time of the Titanic and do a “take 2?”

    If it gathers everything and everyone who existed at the time of the Titanic then you can change things.

    If it takes you back to the time of the Titanic then you were already there. You can do whatever you can but that is already part of history. To say that you can’t change things is NOT to say that you cannot effect things.

    As an example, let’s say you get up to the bridge of the Titanic at the last possible moment. You overpower the helmsman and spin the wheel counter-clockwise in an attempt to get the ship to go to the port thus avoiding the iceberg. Unfortunately you are unaware that the Titanic was old fashioned in a way: the wheel worked opposite of what we know today. By turning the wheel counter-clockwise you actually turned the ship starboard into the iceberg. So yes, you affected things, but not quite the way you intended.

    There is an episode of The Twilight Zone (when it was an hour long) that addresses this. Dana Andrews goes back in time. He tries to change a couple of things before he goes back to the 18070’s or so because he thinks it will be peaceful there. There is one thing that he wants to prevent in that time. However, in his attempt to prevent it, he actually causes it.

    Interesting concept.

    4

  19. Time is a where, not a when. A location in an all encompassing continuum, not a change in it from one thing into another.

    Travel to the location of a point in time, by perceptually defining it in all dimensions, and you travel to that point in time. It’s already there, it’s always been there, and it will always be there the same way a statue is always within a block of marble waiting to be defined by the artist.

    4

  25. You can go back in time, but you’re likely in a quantum copy of this universe offset by a certain amount of time. So, anything you change there doesn’t effect this universe. It just affects that parallel clone universe.

  27. As efemdy’s comment illustrates, as soon as you travel back in time, no matter what action you take (even killing a butterfly), you alter the future (your present), thus creating a new time line. The present you came from no longer exists as far as you’re concerned. This is what prevents paradoxes involving time travel. If you go back to the new present, the only person who will know anything has changed is you. Trying to explain what happened would probably earn you a ticket to the nearest Nut Hut.

    However, if you were somehow able to return to your old present you would find that nothing had changed.

    Thus we can see that even though time travel to the past may have occurred many times, everyone would still be blissfully unaware of it.

    🙂

    3

  28. Sounds like the mathematically proved the Mandela effect. Which I remember as the Bernstien bear effect (which in itself is a mandela effect! weird!) That aside The best time travel TV show/movie is/was Timeless I miss that show I am convinced it was more documentary than scifi.

  29. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self all the good things that were going to happen in my/his later life he probably wouldn’t believe it. My younger self would tell my old guy self quit kidding me and you’re full of it and say you’re not me when I get to be that old and I know what I’m doing so buzz off you old fart. It’s a good thing that we can’t go back in time because no one would believe that we’re from the future. And he especially wouldn’t have believed about the beautiful girl he was going to meet when he was 23 and marry her when he was 24 and she was 21. It’d be inconceivable to him that he would get lucky and be blessed like that.

    4

  31. They shouldn’t have any expectation of making any money from patenting their time travel discovery. Big corporations like Microsoft, GE, etc. have bigger legal divisions with more lawyers than the University of Queensland has faculty members.

    They will claim one of their employees wrote out the same idea on a paper napkin ten years ago just before passing out at the company New Year’s party and they own the patent because one of their employees thought of it first. Then dare them to challenge them in court. Where they will drag it out for years till the discover / inventors run out of money.

  35. Oh! Solving the “paradox” isn’t the same as solving the problem.
    A “paradox” is a thought-construction – an idea – a philosophical question – not something that actually exists.
    (the Greeks had that whole “Achilles and the Turtle” thing)

    izlamo delenda est …

    1

  38. It’s like this: you can start with a cow on Wednesday and end up with a hamburger by Saturday. But you can’t start with a hamburger on Saturday and go back to the cow by next Tuesday. All you can do is gladly pay for the hamburger next Tuesday.

Comments are closed.

iOTWreport.com ©2024 ----- iOTWreport is not responsible for the content of comments. All opinions in comments are solely the commenter's.