Physicists have developed a model in which a person can travel in time and change the past without causing temporal paradoxes.
If you go into the past and eliminate your ancestors, then cancel the very fact of your existence - after all, there will be no one to give birth to you. But who then will commit the murder? How will the universe get out of this difficult situation? This and many other temporal paradoxes have puzzled scientists and science fiction writers all over the world for decades, and various hypotheses on this subject have led to the emergence of a whole galaxy of films about time travel - for example, the famous franchise "Back to the Future".
New Scientist reports that physicists Barak Shoshani and Jacob Hauser have come up with an obvious solution to these types of paradoxes, which requires a very large - but not necessarily infinite - number of parallel universes.
Last month, they uploaded their research paper to arXiv. It describes a model in which a person could theoretically travel from one timeline to another, passing through a hole in spacetime, the so-called. wormhole. Scientists claim that this is "mathematically possible."
“The approach to parallel universes that we propose says that there are different parallel universes, where the course of events is approximately the same. Moreover, each such universe is mathematically located on a separate space-time continuum,”Shoshani said in an interview with New Scientist.
Thus, several separate time scales allow you to go into the past and eliminate ancestors, without causing a paradox - you just will not be born in this particular universe. The researchers even calculated that the existence of such a system does not even need "an infinite number of parallel universes", as we used to think.
This model has a major flaw, at least for narrative purposes: time travel will not bring about changes in your own time. Astrophysicist Geraint Lewis of the University of Sydney, who was not involved in the study, notes that “… In a sense, this is not really time travel as we usually imagine it. What's the point in going back in time and killing Hitler if it doesn't change your present?"
Author: Vasily Makarov
Promotional video: