Jan 10, 2025 04:10 AM
(This post was last modified: Jan 10, 2025 04:36 AM by C C.)
Physicist claims to have solved the infamous 'grandfather paradox,' making time travel (theoretically) possible
https://www.livescience.com/physics-math...y-possible
EXCERPT: Gavassino's research, published Dec. 12, 2024 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, provides an intriguing solution. Drawing inspiration from the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli, he demonstrated that the behavior of thermodynamics fundamentally changes on a closed timelike curve. On such a loop, quantum fluctuations arise that can erase entropy — a process fundamentally different from what we experience in everyday life.
These fluctuations could have dramatic effects on a time traveler. For instance, as entropy decreases, a person's memories might vanish, and aging would reverse. "Entropy increase is the reason why we die. What happens when you invert death?" Gavassino asked. This phenomenon could even render irreversible events, like killing one's grandfather, temporary on a time loop, nullifying the paradox altogether.
"Most physicists and philosophers in the past have argued that if time travel exists, nature will always find a way to prevent contradictory situations," Gavassino said. "A 'self-consistency principle' was introduced, suggesting that everything should align to create a logically coherent story. My work provides the first rigorous derivation of this self-consistency principle directly from established physics. Specifically, I applied the standard framework of quantum mechanics — without additional postulates or controversial assumptions — and demonstrated that the self-consistency of history naturally follows from quantum laws." (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
COMMENT: If "time travel" did not involve a physical loop, but was merely your consciousness temporarily reversing direction in the way it experiences time... You would never know such had even happened, because no existing structure is altered in the brain either way, with respect to memories and anything else. Much as events don't change in a movie if you rewind it to an earlier state and then switch back to normal playing. This is why we're incapable of verifying our conviction that awareness ALWAYS unfolds in the direction toward the future.
Still, speculations in the the research narrative at the top coincidentally seem to parallel what would be experienced in the scenario above, with regard to memory and aging reversing.
However, the idea of consciousness literally "flowing" through spacetime (either way) as if it were some kind of substance or energy is a simplification of cognition that caters to commonsense beliefs. It was recruited back in the early days of first viewing time as a fourth dimension, as a way to explain the illusion of time likewise flowing. It was too difficult and lengthy trying explain to people how dependent "understanding and identification" is upon memory and its incremental organization along the worldline of a dimensionally extended brain. And still is. Better to just economically claim that consciousness moves -- which in a sense, it can certainly seem to from the private perspective within it.
Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
H.G. Wells (1895): “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives." --The Time Machine
https://www.livescience.com/physics-math...y-possible
EXCERPT: Gavassino's research, published Dec. 12, 2024 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, provides an intriguing solution. Drawing inspiration from the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli, he demonstrated that the behavior of thermodynamics fundamentally changes on a closed timelike curve. On such a loop, quantum fluctuations arise that can erase entropy — a process fundamentally different from what we experience in everyday life.
These fluctuations could have dramatic effects on a time traveler. For instance, as entropy decreases, a person's memories might vanish, and aging would reverse. "Entropy increase is the reason why we die. What happens when you invert death?" Gavassino asked. This phenomenon could even render irreversible events, like killing one's grandfather, temporary on a time loop, nullifying the paradox altogether.
"Most physicists and philosophers in the past have argued that if time travel exists, nature will always find a way to prevent contradictory situations," Gavassino said. "A 'self-consistency principle' was introduced, suggesting that everything should align to create a logically coherent story. My work provides the first rigorous derivation of this self-consistency principle directly from established physics. Specifically, I applied the standard framework of quantum mechanics — without additional postulates or controversial assumptions — and demonstrated that the self-consistency of history naturally follows from quantum laws." (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
COMMENT: If "time travel" did not involve a physical loop, but was merely your consciousness temporarily reversing direction in the way it experiences time... You would never know such had even happened, because no existing structure is altered in the brain either way, with respect to memories and anything else. Much as events don't change in a movie if you rewind it to an earlier state and then switch back to normal playing. This is why we're incapable of verifying our conviction that awareness ALWAYS unfolds in the direction toward the future.
Still, speculations in the the research narrative at the top coincidentally seem to parallel what would be experienced in the scenario above, with regard to memory and aging reversing.
However, the idea of consciousness literally "flowing" through spacetime (either way) as if it were some kind of substance or energy is a simplification of cognition that caters to commonsense beliefs. It was recruited back in the early days of first viewing time as a fourth dimension, as a way to explain the illusion of time likewise flowing. It was too difficult and lengthy trying explain to people how dependent "understanding and identification" is upon memory and its incremental organization along the worldline of a dimensionally extended brain. And still is. Better to just economically claim that consciousness moves -- which in a sense, it can certainly seem to from the private perspective within it.
Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
H.G. Wells (1895): “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives." --The Time Machine