[ExI] On a more extropian note...

Dylan Distasio interzone at gmail.com
Mon Sep 28 03:54:38 UTC 2020


Apparently, life may imitate the movie 12 Monkeys!  Curious if John or
anyone else has any comments on the underlying paper:

A Physicist Has Come Up With Math That Makes 'Paradox-Free' Time Travel
Plausible
DAVID NIELD
26 SEPTEMBER 2020
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge –
but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically
possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many
others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the
fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your
parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to
go back in time in the first place?
It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but
now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in
Australia, says he has worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time
travel viable without the paradoxes.
"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular
time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," says Tobar.
"However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of
time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and
future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."
What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself
to avoid paradoxes.

To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past
to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time
traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.
Tobar's work suggests that the disease would still escape some other way,
through a different route or by a different method, removing the paradox.
Whatever the time traveller did, the disease wouldn't be stopped.
Tobar's work isn't easy for non-mathematicians to dig into, but it looks at
the influence of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on an
arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum, and demonstrates
how both closed timelike curves (as predicted by Einstein) can fit in with
the rules of free will and classical physics.
"The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,"
says physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland, who
supervised the research.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-physicist-has-come-up-with-the-maths-to-make-time-travel-plausible
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