Time travel into the past is possible and avoids paradox?

A new article and paper claims to prove this, at https://www.popularmechanics.com/science...ble-study/ .

A temporal paradox is a mind-bending concept that seems to twist basic logic into pretzels. According to the new paper the rub is that technically time travel into the past may be possible, but an actual paradox is prevented because a natural law-like automatic readjustment of reality always happens to prevent the paradox from actually occuring. Example: the grandfather paradox. Going back in time to kill your grandfather before your father's conception logically would create a paradox where in the new reality, you supposedly couldn't in the first place exist to go back in time to intervene and prevent the already taken place event. But logically you had to already exist in the present in order to use the time machine to go back in time.

Such an automatic readjustment of reality to prevent the paradox from occuring could be anything, like for instance when you are back in the past getting ready to shoot your grandfather your gun just happens to jam and prevents the actual occurence or he jumps out of the way in time to avoid the bullet, etc. You just aren't allowed to actually kill him however you try.
 
The result is the frustrating outcome that it is still impossible to actually change the past in some way that would change your current time in a paradoxical way. You can't cheat Mother Nature.

Accordingly, according to the paper, time travel into the past though being technically possible is completely impractical and can't be used to actually do anything in a practical sense. So we might as well not bother to try to invent a time machine.

The Grandfather Paradox is just one of several kinds of such paradoxes supposedly caused by actual time travel into the past. Another one is the notion of going back in time and introducing for instance an invention or work of art that has been created in your present time. If this was possible then the paradoxical result would be the invention or creative work of art actually existing before they were created. But for the invention or work of art to exist requires the creative human effort of the designer or artist to have actually occured in the present. So the paradoxical result if this actually occured would be that the invention or work of art would then exist in the past without having a maker. That seems impossible or a paradox.

It is not clear from the article that this type of temporal paradox is also functionally prevented by the automatic workings of Mother Nature.

If Time Travel is possible it seems to me there would have to be something more to time than change, mainly that time would need to be spatial.

That I think is the first mistake.

The second is even if Time were spatial, you would need to have two causal arrows where one drives reality forward and the other somehow allows movement in the opposite direction. This is actually very hard to justify logically, or so it seems to me.

Beyond that I think this could only even begin to be conceived under a special kind of Design, where the Time Travel takes place within one frame of reality and on a higher frame the Designers - or some servitors - have to play clean up. It's too much like a conspiracy theory of time, in addition to the issue that chaotic systems would mean that preventing paradoxes could causes even greater changes in the "temporal downstream" of later events.

If Time Travel is possible it seems to me there would have to be something more to time than change, mainly that time would need to be spatial.

That I think is the first mistake.

The second is even if Time were spatial, you would need to have two causal arrows where one drives reality forward and the other somehow allows movement in the opposite direction. This is actually very hard to justify logically, or so it seems to me.

Beyond that I think this could only even begin to be conceived under a special kind of Design, where the Time Travel takes place within one frame of reality and on a higher frame the Designers - or some servitors - have to play clean up. It's too much like a conspiracy theory of time, in addition to the issue that chaotic systems would mean that preventing paradoxes could causes even greater changes in the "temporal downstream" of later events.

Why if the new theory of the paper is valid would time travel need to be spacial?

I agree that deliberate and conscious intelligent intervention of an immensely superior Designing Intelligence in a higher realm of existence than our reality of time and space could conceivably be the way the past reality is seemingly automatically and instantly readjusted so that supposedly according  to the paper's theory, despite the travel back in time actually occuring, no actual paradox results that would otherwise result in catastrophic interference and disruption of the timeline.

But this concept and the paper's version of it seem to be fatally flawed.

I think that there is a fundamental problem with the scheme presented in the article and paper. It must be wrong and wouldn't work because each instant automatic readjustment of the past reality to prevent the upcoming paradox would itself still be a change to the past timeline and cause another perhaps even greater paradox which would presumably catastrophically propagate back in to our present time causing disruption of our timeline. 

It occurs to me that the immensely superior Designing Intelligence might be so powerful and in such a higher level or realm of reality and existence that it could simply by fiat decree that either: (1) the resultant paradox catastrophes simply are not allowed to happen regardless of any logic to the contrary, or (2) time travel into the past is simply made impossible in the first place.

This partial analysis and a look at our actual experience indicates that probably since we are not experiencing any timeline catastrophes, time travel into the past is in reality fundamentally simply impossible. A second possibility is that because the superior Designing Intelligence controlling things by fiat concept is really the case, some time in the future a working time machine will actually be invented and it will actually change the past without resulting resulting catastrophe, despite all the theory that says that it is impossible. 

But if the second of these last outlined alternatives is the case then we should have been able to detect that through historically having experienced seemingly impossible occurences, for instance the appearance of inventions or works of art out of nothing which have no human inventors or artists. There is no record of any such occurences, which indicates that the first and simplest possibility given above is the correct one - travel into the past is simply fundamentally impossible. 

Finally, yet another possible solution to the paradox problem would be that time travel into the past is indeed possible, but with this type of time travel the system prevents the time traveler into the past from having any causal interaction with the past reality. He can invisibly observe but with no physical interaction. Such a form of time travel would be limited but still useful.

All this shows that attempting to reason through this issue is quite complicated and difficult because of its convoluted nature.

If Time Travel is possible it seems to me there would have to be something more to time than change, mainly that time would need to be spatial.

That I think is the first mistake.

The second is even if Time were spatial, you would need to have two causal arrows where one drives reality forward and the other somehow allows movement in the opposite direction. This is actually very hard to justify logically, or so it seems to me.

Beyond that I think this could only even begin to be conceived under a special kind of Design, where the Time Travel takes place within one frame of reality and on a higher frame the Designers - or some servitors - have to play clean up. It's too much like a conspiracy theory of time, in addition to the issue that chaotic systems would mean that preventing paradoxes could causes even greater changes in the "temporal downstream" of later events.

I haven't read the paper

...but more generally the Feynman Stueckelberg interpretation suggests that time can flow backwards and that particles can move in both directions. It also introduces the concept of anti-particles, which are particles that move backwards in time and have opposite charges to their corresponding particles. As I've suggested in an older thread, that this might be how we can understand PC Alan Godfrey's experience in Todmorden - that is the balancing of particles/anti-particles, led to time apparently slowing down in the everyday world (result), allowing Alan to experience some distorted view of the bus that had stopped for 60 seconds within the anomaly, around 5 minutes before Alan experienced the anomaly.

What's also interesting is that as far as I remember, it remains unclear why anti-particles are so rare, but one could speculate that the difficulty of making enough of them, only allows one to slow down time, or at least not reverse it in anything but a trivial way within spacetime.

Another consideration...

I'm certain that the future affects the past, but outside of spacetime - outside the result. So sitting here with a perspective in what we call the present, it's possible for someone to influence me from what we call the future, using a matching pattern, without any paradox at all, as it's already happened.

One of my suspicions is that incoming high energy particles - like Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR's), might be the 'cause' of the sporadic but very profound experiences we call religious ecstasy experiences, spiritually transformative experiences etc, like my own in the kitchen back in 2021. That a GCR might penetrate the body, and very occasionally, somehow interact with say, the QM isolation within a microtubule (which might be the shape, a sort-of duality of the shared mathematical structure where experience arises). The high energy particle offloads it's abnormal higher energy/data into experience, in exactly the same way that I suggest it might have to Alan Godfrey. But there might be a much vaster amount of past-particle-path data stored within the GCR + it's higher energy. You think about Edgar Mitchell's sudden life changing experience when returning to earth, and privately other astronauts who told him they had the same experience but didn't want to talk about it. Mitchel resigned from the US Navy, his wife left him, he set up IONS, it blew his life apart, just like it seems to have done with David Icke who went up a mountain in Peru and seems to have had a profound Spiritual experience. There is the hint, that these direct, high energy cosmic ray interactions, might have an increased probability of occurring the higher up one is (less atmosphere/shielding to dissipate the CR)

Why if the new theory of the paper is valid would time travel need to be spacial?

How else can one travel to the past unless it exists as something more than just memories held by Experiencers?

I think that there is a fundamental problem with the scheme presented in the article and paper. It must be wrong and wouldn't work because each instant automatic readjustment of the past reality to prevent the upcoming paradox would itself still be a change to the past timeline and cause another perhaps even greater paradox which would presumably catastrophically propagate back in to our present time causing disruption of our timeline.

Yeah I think if there are no truly chaotic systems - in the sense that small changes lead to large deviations - then maybe this sort of paradox-correction could work. But it still seems that it would need Design to ensure at least some key events come to pass.
 

It occurs to me that the immensely superior Designing Intelligence might be so powerful and in such a higher level or realm of reality and existence that it could simply by fiat decree that either the resultant paradox catastrophes simply are not allowed to happen regardless of any logic to the contrary, or that time travel into the past is simply made impossible in the first place.

I think the issue here is once you allow Omnipotence to resolve issues you can invoke it for just about any thing?

I'm also unconvinced any amount of power and/or control over reality can allow for logically impossible things. And it seems to me time travel has too many issues to really resolve without invoking logical impossibilities.

But if the second of these last outlined alternatives is the case then we should have been able to detect that through historically having experienced seemingly impossible occurences, for instance the appearance of inventions or works of art out of nothing which have no human inventors or artists. There is no record of any such occurences, which indicates that the first and simplest possibility given above is the correct one - travel into the past is simply fundamentally impossible. 

I vaguely recall some claim that a painting exists of an angel riding a bicycle before the vehicle's invention, but AFAIK this was debunked so I guess there are no such occurrences.

Finally, yet another possible solution to the paradox problem would be that time travel into the past is indeed possible, but with this type of time travel the system prevents the time traveler into the past from having any causal interaction with the past reality. He can invisibly observe but with no physical interaction. Such a form of time travel would be limited but still useful.

This *might* be possible, though given sensory input is usually considered to be part of the causal chain I'm not 100% sure it can be without paradox?

All this shows that attempting to reason through this issue is quite complicated and difficult because of its convoluted nature.

I would say the most logical conclusion is that Time Travel is impossible, and there is only one directional arrow in which Time moves.

There *might* be different rates of temporal flow in different realities, but that isn't really time travel.

I'm certain that the future affects the past, but outside of spacetime - outside the result. So sitting here with a perspective in what we call the present, it's possible for someone to influence me from what we call the future, using a matching pattern, without any paradox at all, as it's already happened.

I think this leaves a question as to why such a time loop exists in the first place?

If the loop is just part of the 4D (5D?) structure of a block universe, then I am not even sure we should say the information comes from the future because there is no movement of information so much as we who are in time perceive it that way?

Perhaps I am not fully grasping what you mean?

I think this leaves a question as to why such a time loop exists in the first place?

If the loop is just part of the 4D (5D?) structure of a block universe, then I am not even sure we should say the information comes from the future because there is no movement of information so much as we who are in time perceive it that way?

Perhaps I am not fully grasping what you mean?

You can think of them as loops. I have previously, to help me try and understand poltergiest activity - some energy-like effect 'apparently' furniture moving around etc, because the distance between the anomalous connected patterns, is somehow larger than normal? (I'll explain that more fully further down).

But my own simple understanding is that experience is formed from patterns, which I think of as just adding-up outside of spacetime, so that all the matching patterns can just completely flatten to a result (experience). Thus, rejecting information as coming from the future - seems fine to me - there is nothing coming from anywhere - that's just how we observe it + the stories we've made up to join these observations together.

There is an energy-like conservation on these evolving patterns (somehow why water pulls itself back into a ball to minimise it's surface), we might call it efficient. Patterns can't normally make huge jumps, they have to evolve, stage by stage, small changes, based on summing the past patterns (Sheldrake might call these habits). But then, adding a little bit more bias of the most common future patterns on top of this - before getting a result. That way we can get some evolution of the pattern, and can explain how weeds, pests, bacteria can become resistant to chemicals etc. As the dying plants/pests patterns have fewer numbers in the future, the evolving pattern is now biased towards evolving towards the larger number of surviving patterns in the future. But why just a little bit of future bias? Why not a lots of the future? Why can't it just make large jumps in pattern alterations? Because it will tend to make the most energy efficient matches possible, which has something to do early observations, that every object moves to expend the least energy, and earlier understanding about QM (which also follows principle of least action - Lifeguard explanation). For a fuller explanation. There is something deeper/simpler going on, to explain this, but I just don't have the lips...

But not all patterns match, or match completely, hence they won't add up, (My analogy about the Lego bricks also applies). And it seems no one can know all the patterns either. I can't say I've ever taken much notice of the block universe idea, it's never seemed relevant, wrong way of thinking perhaps)

As for our understanding of what we call the past. There is obviously something different about past experience, which becomes facts, and can't in themselves be altered via the result. As I write this, I think there is probably some logic in there (probs from the mathematical structure), which likely makes a nonsense of any attempt to change a past result (a fact), via another result (a fact). The future is therefore somehow our understanding of experience, which hasn't yet become a fact. But if you had the patterns, you would experience the future, else we're going to struggle to explain invention. Our understanding of past and future also have something to do with scale - which has something to do with this infinite helix-like cylinder (I keep going on about) - which has something to do with gravity - which has something to do with ordering... on and on...

One of the hardest things I had to give up, is the naive idea, that you can say anything about the particle in the double slit experiment, between it's preparation, and it's measurement. It wasn't just knowing the knowledge about that, it was the absolute giving up on it. So hard to reach that place... I used to read Lubos Motl's blog every few nights in bed, and dozing off, in the hope that some overall picture would develop in my mind about what QM was... and it did... the comments section was also so helpful... alternative examples, explanations and disagreements... now the blogs gone... and I think partly, because Lubos knew what was coming... he had authored at least one paper with Nima...