Recently, a group of scientists may have unlocked all the secrets of time travel. Physicist Igor Dmitrievich Nivikov may have found a way to get rid of temporal paradoxes thanks to the principle of self-consistency. We explain to you.
The paradoxes of time travel
Time travel is a fantasy that has fascinated human beings for centuries. Time travel is also a source of inspiration for many artists, and this concept is at the heart of many films. Whether in Back to the Future, Terminator, Looper, Avengers: Endgame or even Bill & Ted, the concept of time travel is absolutely everywhere. However, it is still today a concept out of reach for ordinary mortals. Unless…
ScienceAlert became interested in a physicist who allegedly found a way to make time travel possible. Our understanding of time and space depends almost entirely on Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This theory governs the overall structure of our universe, and all equations and studies of time revolve around this Einstein theory. But the latter is made up of two barriers concerning time travel.
The first concerns exotic matter, or negative energy matter. Energy needed to build a time machine. Thanks to quantum physics, we know that in theory we can create this type of matter. The problem is that we can only have it in limited and unsustainable quantities.
The second reason that prevents time travel are the temporal paradoxes. The most problematic is the paradox of coherence. An example, if you use a time machine, and you go back 5 minutes. So you never created this machine, so how could you go back in time?
Eliminate the paradoxes
Igor Dmitrievich Nivikov and two of his students then had an idea. Rather than fighting the paradoxes of coherence, wouldn’t it be better just to destroy them? Igor Dmitrievich Nivikov therefore uses the principle of self-consistency to explain that the past is immutable and that we could travel through it without changing it. A theory that was later supported by Barak Shoshany, a professor at Brock University. The latter even proposed another theory: of multiple histories.
The idea is simple: present several parallel timelines in which one could go back in time and thus modify only one of the two. This is the principle used in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with their concept of the multiverse. But this theory of multiple chronologies, put forward by the physicist Everett, has never been proven. Concretely, even if many theories are put forward and allow us to continually get closer to the fantasy of being able to travel in time, we are still a long way off…
