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After some serious number crunching, a University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus) researcher has come up with a mathematical model for a viable time machine.
Ben Tippett, a mathematics and physics instructor at University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus, recently published a study about the feasibility of time travel. Tippett, whose field of expertise is Einstein's theory of general relativity, studies black holes and science fiction when he's not teaching. Using math and physics, he has created a formula that describes a method for time travel.
"People think of time travel as something as fiction," says Tippett. "And we tend to think it's not possible because we don't actually do it. But, mathematically, it is possible."
"The time direction of the space-time surface also shows curvature. There is evidence showing the closer to a black hole we get, time moves slower," says Tippett. "My model of a time machine uses the curved space-time -- to bend time into a circle for the passengers, not in a straight line. That circle takes us back in time."
The division of space into three dimensions, with time in a separate dimension by itself, is incorrect, says Tippett. The four dimensions should be imagined simultaneously, where different directions are connected, as a space-time continuum. Using Einstein's theory, Tippett says that the curvature of space-time accounts for the curved orbits of the planets.
[...] "While is it mathematically feasible, it is not yet possible to build a space-time machine because we need materials--which we call exotic matter--to bend space-time in these impossible ways, but they have yet to be discovered."
[...] For his research, Tippett created a mathematical model of a Traversable Acausal Retrograde Domain in Space-time (TARDIS). He describes it as a bubble of space-time geometry which carries its contents backward and forwards through space and time as it tours a large circular path. The bubble moves through space-time at speeds greater than the speed of light at times, allowing it to move backward in time.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170427091717.htm
[Abstract] Traversable acausal retrograde domains in spacetime
What do you think ?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday April 28 2017, @04:43PM
So where's the evidence that there is a past for us to travel to in our current universe?
I think to the extent that there is any "evidence," it has to do with the mathematical models work and how time appears to behave in many physics models as if it were a "dimension" somewhat similar to spatial dimensions. From that perspective, it seems logically consistent that rather than simply experiencing time, we "travel" through it in an analogous way to a spatial dimension. Many of the equations seem to allow the possibility of "reverse" travel in that dimension, at least theoretically.
So, it's not evidence, merely a bunch of suggestive analogies based on the form of the math.
Does simulating our universe accurately require storing billions of years of our past?
Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by "simulating our universe accurately." Do you mean literally tracking every single particle and its present state? If so, and IF time travel is actually possible within the laws of physics of the universe, then I guess so.