Would Time Travel Create an Inescapable Paradox?

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A DeLorean like the one used for time travel in Back to the Future sits in an empty parking lot
Image by Dave Tavres

We’ve all thought about it at one time or another. What if you could go back in time and change your life for the better? Just hop in your DeLorean, fire up the flux capacitor, smack the gas to 88 MPH and you’re aces! Right? Well maybe…

While time travel is believed to be possible within the laws of physics as we currently understand them, there is a catch. According to some researchers, time travelers could not succeed in altering their version of the past in any measurable way due to the probability that doing so would create a paradoxical scenario i.e.; The Grandfather Paradox.

The grandfather paradox or consistency paradox is a hypothetical problem that is believed to arise if one were to go back in time and assassinate one’s grandfather before he ever met one’s grandmother. This action would stop the two from ever conceiving either your mother or father and ultimately result in you never having been born to assassinate your grandfather in the first place.

However, Recently University of Queensland undergraduate student Germain Tobar who has been investigating the possibility of paradox-free time travel under the supervision of physicist Dr. Fabio Costa, affirms their research shows that it is theoretically possible for future events to adjust themselves, keeping consistent with the would-be actions of a time traveler.  

“Events readjust around anything that could cause a paradox, so the paradox does not happen,” 

“Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency.

“The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”

Tobar’s work can be found published in Classical and Quantum Gravity

Source: The University of Queensland

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