All the Fun of Time Travel Without the Grandfather Paradox
According to a recent article in the Telegraph, there is a new possible path to a unified theory of physics in town, and it goes by the name of ‘hypertime.’
First, a little physics background. Time and space as we know it today is theoretically made up of 4 dimensions…3 of them space, and 1 of them time. The three spatial dimensions are length, width and depth, and the time dimension is the passage of the spatial dimensions along another axis.
The trouble with this 4-dimensional theory is that it doesn’t quite allow the laws of relativity, which reign over gravity and anything seen (and many things small enough not to be seen), and the laws of quantum theory, which apply to uber-sub-atomic particles and the like.
The mind behind the hypertime theory is Itzhak Bars, a scientist from USC in LA. He proposes that rather than 3 spatial dimensions there are 4 (not exactly an extravagant claim, considering that the most promising unifying theory up until this point claims there are 11 dimensions, 10 of them spatial). The seemingly heretical part of his theory is that he believes there are actually 2 dimensions of time, which would visually translate into time looking like a flat piece of paper rather than a line.
The big hurdle that most speculators run into when they start to conceive of time as anything other than a line is the possibility of paradoxes that emerge from the concept of time travel. If time is not a line, that means one could move side to side in it, not just forward, and if one could move to the side, what would one find? And could one then move backward?
A common name for this concept is the Grandfather Paradox, which is generally considered to mean that time travel into the past must be impossible, otherwise one could travel into the past and kill his grandfather, which would then lead to his not existing and therefore not being able to kill his grandfather, which would then lead to him being born and going back and killing his grandfather and round and round and round.
There are other theories that circumvent the Grandfather Paradox, such as Navikov’s self-consistency principle, which in essence says that everything has already been taken into account in history, so if time travelers have gone back to influence something, it’s already happened (perhaps they simply couldn’t change anything and died, got sent back to their own time prematurely, or simply made the changes without anyone knowing it was caused by someone from the future).
But philosophy aside, the theory of hypertime has one enormous leg-up over competing theories: it’s creator says it is testable. And not only is it testable; it’s testable in about a year, when CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland smashes some particles together to create some new ‘supersymmetric’ particles.
The big concern for many scientists regarding Bars’ theories is that it’s nothing more than mathematical trickery, working on paper but having no practical possibility.
Fortunately in this case, unlike most others, within a year or so, we should know whether all the science textbooks will have to be scrapped and rewritten, or if we’ll be clinging to an outdated conception of how the physical environment and time interact.
This is the newest iteration of the art/design/culture mag I publish monthly, though it’s been a few months since the last one because of graduation/moving.