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Time Travel: A Quirky Domain of Temporal Mechanics
“I myself believe that there will one day be time travel because when we find that something isn’t forbidden by the over-arching laws of physics we usually eventually find a technological way of doing it.” -David Deutsch
Time travel may still be in the realm of science fiction, inspiring the plots of countless books, movies and Star Trek episodes, but not out of the realm of possibility. While basic physics allows for the possibility of moving through time, certain practical concerns and paradoxes seem to stand in the way. The “Fractal Soliton of Improbability,” postulating that any moment is unique and only happens once in the lifetime of a universe, or “Grandfather Paradox,” in which a traveler jumps back in time, kills his grandfather and therefore prevents his own existence, are the most salient paradoxes arising in relation to time travel. On the other hand, Digital Physics makes time travel both theoretically possible and creatively irresistible.
PART I. THEORETICAL POSSIBILITIES OF TIME TRAVEL
Contrary to what many people think, time travel is possible. We travel in time “all the time” and do it automatically — you traveled few seconds into the future since you started reading this sentence. What we really mean by time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space, typically using a hypothetical device known as a time machine, in the form of a vehicle or of a portal connecting distant points in time. So first, let’s examine existing time travel theoretical possibilities and related concepts:
PARALLEL UNIVERSES WITH ALTERNATE TIMELINES
The existence of parallel universes is no longer a science fiction but a science fact thanks to weirdness of quantum mechanics. According to Richard Feynman’s Sum Over Histories Interpretation which are widely accepted among physicists, particles such as electrons travel along all possible paths from beginning to ending points, and the world has a full spectrum of possible histories, each eternally present, however not perceptible to us. As quantum…
