Time travel has seen its share of fantasy in both cinema and literature. From Marvel's Avengers to HG Wells' The Time Machine, everyone has showcased their versions of how it works.
Today science has found a solution to one of the most complex problems associated with time travel. A study by Germain Tobar on the University of Queensland suggest you time travel, do whatever you want and don't change a thing!
Germain Tobar is a fourth year student with a bachelor's degree in advanced science. His study, supervised by Dr Fabio Costa, said: "The range of mathematical processes that we have discovered shows that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox."
Yeah, you read it right. Even if you were to come back in 2019, isolate patient zero (the first patient) from COVID-19, you would still read this article as you are, and things will stay the same. This means that time will find a way to unfold events, as they did before.
Time travel will not induce the grandfather paradox
The Grandpa Paradox, described in Back to the Future and several other media, suggests that if you travel through time and kill your grandfather, you will never be born. Let me take a better example here: if a special forces group were sent back in time to smash Hitler, it wouldn't change a thing. Probably Hitler would be replaced by another guy, but the timeline will play out as it's supposed to.
The grandfather paradox argues that once the goal is achieved, the motivation to time travel would be gone and the person would not need to time travel in the first place.
But the new study says the universe will recalibrate itself for similar events to occur. So if you have isolated patient zero, you might get infected in the process, become patient zero, or maybe someone else will.
Although this one is about going back in time, a study from the University of British Columbia has already explored ways to travel through time.
Science fiction time travel
Most of us have seen Avenger's Endgame, where Captain America specifically stepped back in time to restore the jewels to their original timestamp. Guess what? He didn't have to! If this theory is to be considered, Captain America didn't need to do it in the first place.
Homer from the Simpsons has traveled through time and has been warned not to touch anything. But when Homer kills an insect, Ned Flanders becomes the "undisputed master of the world". This comes from chaos theory, which says that smaller changes in the past can lead to larger changes in the future. Although chaos theory is much more complicated, it is the simplest explanation one can offer.
The publication New study says time travel in the past won't change the future first appeared on Fossbytes.