My first memory of finding out about time travel fiction is when Marty McFly travels back in time (accidentally, thanks to Doc) and meets the younger version of his parents. It all seemed so fascinating, but I also made me think about how if someone changed even a single thing in the past, the future events also change their course.
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However, according to a new study - a hypothetical one, of course - the paradox most commonly associated with time-travel may not be true. The study has been published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.?
Scientists have spent years researching on the mystery that is time, to understand how it works.??
According to the much-believed paradox, if a time-traveller goes back to their ancestors, they could alter the course of reality. Like we have mostly seen in films and TV shows, doing so would result in a situation where the person who has travelled back in time would never be born in the first place.?
However, authors of the study believe that there would be self-correcting methods of time itself.
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The paper is researched by graduate student Germain Tobar, who is working under Physics professor, Dr Fabio Costa, at the University of Queensland. Their work consists of studying some of the most common paradoxes associated with time travel, and hypothesise that if time travel were possible, the timelines would have the ability to self-correct so that the future, where the person has travelled from, will be maintained as it is.?
They used the general theory of relativity and of course, some very complex math, which suggested that it may not only be possible to travel back in time but also interact with oneself. The paper states that no matter what attempts are made by the time-traveller to alter the past, it will bear no effect on the future and events will take place as they always have.?
According to Dr Costa, the future will always happen like it is supposed to happen. He said that if a time-traveller went back in time to stop the Coronavirus pandemic from happening, the virus would find some other way to infect someone else but the pandemic will always happen.
All those jokes about going back in time and stopping someone from eating a bat don't sound so funny now, do they?
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