A Physicist Says New Math Proves Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Possible

Time travel has been the staple science fiction books and movies for many years. Most who have read or watched content focusing on time travel knows about the paradox issue. Perhaps the best example is the 80s classic "Back to the Future," where Marty accidentally prevents his parents from meeting and has to fix his error before he's wiped out of existence.

Time travel is something that scientists and physicists have considered for many years. A physics student named Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia says that he has figured out the math that would make time travel viable without paradoxes. According to Tobar, classical dynamics says if you know the state of the system at a particular time, it can tell you the entire history of the system.

His calculations suggest that space-time may be able to adapt itself to avoid paradoxes. One example is a time traveler who journeys into the past to stop a disease from spreading. If the mission were successful, there would've been no disease for the time traveler to go back and try and prevent. Tobar suggests that the disease would still spread in some other way, through different route or method, removing the paradox.

He says whatever the time traveler did, the disease wouldn't be stopped. Tobar's work is highly complicated but is essentially looking at deterministic processes on an arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum. It's demonstrating how closed timelike curves, which Einstein predicted, can fit in with the rules of free will and classical physics.

Tobar's research supervisor is physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland. Costa says that the "maths checks out," further noting that the results are the stuff of science fiction. The new math suggests that time travelers can do what they want, and paradoxes are not possible. Costa says that events will always adjust themselves to avoid any inconsistency.