Traveling in time could be safer than we thought

Two Australian students from the University of Queensland would seem to have found a way to demonstrate that Traveling in time could be safer of what we don’t believe …

Do we have to rewrite return to the future? We probably all remember “Doc”, the eccentric scientist who transform a Delorean into a time machine: His friend Marty leaps to the past, he meets his parents and his mother accidentally falls in love with him, thus risking to blow up the marriage and – with it – the very existence of the protagonist. We are obviously talking about the first film of the return trilogy to the future, probably the best known film production on time travel ever made, and well explains one of the possible paradoxes which could generate if we could freely scroll back and forth between the years.

But if, on the other hand, there was no risk? Or, to put it in DOC’s words in the second film of the saga, the risk of “causing a chain reaction That would break down the texture of the time-time continuum destroying the entire universe “?

There is no risk no paradox. Germain Tobar and Fabio Costa, these are the names of the two students, have developed a mathematical model that would solve this historic science fiction node. According to their theory, the flow of events has a sort of “internal resilience“, which allows him to self-conceived To avoid logical contradictions. In detail: if a traveler over time tries to change an event of the past, The time line would not break Nor would it create absurd scenarios, but rather would reorganize themselves in order to ensure that the main events take place anyway.

Time closed curves. This hypothesis is based on the concept of Closed time -type curves (CTC)introduced by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and suggests that reality is deterministic, but at the same time compatible with a certain freedom of local action.

The two researchers have shown with mathematical formulas that, even if someone traveled back in time to modify history, The universe would however find a way to keep the sequence of key events intact, making the facts as a whole remain consistent. In practice, the past can be influenced, but not rewritten arbitraryly, a theory that has among other things used in many science fiction films, from The army of the 12 monkeys (1995) a Donnie Darko (2001), from The Time Machine (2002) a Predestination (2014).

Covid and time travel. To better explain this idea, Costa did a very concrete examplelinked to the Covid-19 pandemic that a few years ago shocked the whole world. Suppose that A temporal traveler returns to 2019 to prevent the so -called zero patient from contracting the virus, with the intention of Avoid the outbreak of the pandemic. If he really manages to prevent the infection, the very reason for his journey would be less: without pandemic, there would be no reason to go back and intervene: a classic temporal paradoxwhich would suggest the impossibility of traveling through time.

But according to the model of Tobar and Costa, the weather would not be manipulated so easily. Even if the zero patient was saved, The virus would however find another way to spread: maybe another person would be infected, or – why not? – The same traveler, trying to prevent contagion, would end up involuntarily become the bearer. In other words, the weather “fixes itself” to prevent contradictions from being created, ensuring that The great historical events occur anywayeven if through slightly different dynamics.

Travel through time (but with caution). If the theory were correct, whoever manages to build a time machine It could travel in the past without fear of destroying reality with a run -over. However, this does not mean that the past is completely malleable or that altering it has no repercussions.

Local changes are possible, but only up to a certain point: History always tends to rebalance itself to guarantee consistency. While remembering in part the so -called butterfly effect, according to which small actions can lead to large consequences, this reasoning is approaching more to another concept: that of Monkey pawtaken from a story by WW Jacobs.

In this story, a desire is always fulfilled, but with unexpected and often unwanted implications. For example, those who ask for wealth find themselves receiving it in the form of a legacy linked to the loss of a loved one. Likewise, travel through time could be possiblebut it should be careful what you try to changebecause the universe would respond in unpredictable ways, even by facing a future that we never wanted to create.