United States: Ever wondered about the famous grandfather paradox? It’s the idea that traveling back in time and changing something could break the entire timeline. But one scientist says this paradox might not even be possible.
Physicist Lorenzo Gavassino argues that using the principles of quantum mechanics, any paradox created by time travel would simply undo itself, or never even happen in the first place. Interesting, right?
As reported by the Popular Mechanics, if I traveled back in time and murdered my own Grandfather, did I ever exist? And if all of a sudden, I did not exist anymore, who killed my grandfather? That’s what has been termed the ‘grandfather paradox’ and is perhaps the most common of the time travel paradoxes that could actually happen.
Except… maybe it couldn’t happen at all. A recent study —which was written by a physicist from Vanderbilt University and published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity—suggest that while we may be able of rewinding the clock, any alterations we make may not be permanent due to the existence of the laws of physics.
As with this thought there are three concepts with the first of them being entropy, which in functional terms is the degree of randomness. Entropy rises progressively as we advance in time that things deteriorate.
And it only increases. For instance, if you have a vase and you drop it and it falls in pieces then it is in all sorts of little pieces. Its entropy has increased. Even if you glue all these little pieces together, they didn’t actually re-become one single item again. You can always try and reverse the process of increasing the amount of disorder, but without success.
A second key element in the attempt at paradox nullification made by Gavassino appears herein in the form of the closed time like curve. Originally proposed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, closed time like curves are what happens when a rotating gravity well can essentially pull spacetime around with it; spacetime being space and time at once.
We watch strange phenomena related to gravity with spacetime around black holes every day, but if you draw the logical conclusion from a thought that gravity literally drags spacetime, a rotating ‘gravity well’ can eventually pull time.