time travel to future essay

Time Travel and Possible Consequences Essay (Speech)

Introduction, time travel: rewriting history. possible consequences, improvement or a step backward.

Time travel is one of the ideas that has been occupying the minds of several people from science fiction writers to average citizens for a while. Even though the concept has been proven practically impossible by now, the idea still retains its power and stirs people’s imagination. Taking the classical idea of time travel as the process that can potentially alter the present time, I would move further in time to explore the wonders of the future without dreading that I could disrupt the current environment beyond recognition.

Numerous sci-fi novels have taught people that time travel requires a lot of responsibility. Any minor change that one makes to the past will inevitably result in tremendous and possibly disastrous effects on the present-day environment. Therefore, I would not like the idea of going back to the past, even though witnessing a particularly spectacular event such as the first successful flight would be delightful.

However, traveling to the future is theoretically also fraught with numerous challenges. For example, if I traveled to the future, I would be excited to see technological innovations and advances, yet I would be very hesitant to tell about them in our time. What might seem like a massive improvement may have detrimental effects if people are not ready to use the suggested tools?

Even though the idea of time travel has been practically proven impossible, I would be thrilled to travel to the future and see the innovations and progress that people will have witnessed. It would be amazing to talk to the people of the future and see what discoveries they will have made and how far they will have advanced by the time I arrive. Using time travel to learn more about future technological advances and the means of coping with some of the current issues, including incurable diseases, overpopulation, etc., would be a fascinating experience.

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April 26, 2023

Is Time Travel Possible?

The laws of physics allow time travel. So why haven’t people become chronological hoppers?

By Sarah Scoles

yuanyuan yan/Getty Images

In the movies, time travelers typically step inside a machine and—poof—disappear. They then reappear instantaneously among cowboys, knights or dinosaurs. What these films show is basically time teleportation .

Scientists don’t think this conception is likely in the real world, but they also don’t relegate time travel to the crackpot realm. In fact, the laws of physics might allow chronological hopping, but the devil is in the details.

Time traveling to the near future is easy: you’re doing it right now at a rate of one second per second, and physicists say that rate can change. According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time’s flow depends on how fast you’re moving. The quicker you travel, the slower seconds pass. And according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity , gravity also affects clocks: the more forceful the gravity nearby, the slower time goes.

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“Near massive bodies—near the surface of neutron stars or even at the surface of the Earth, although it’s a tiny effect—time runs slower than it does far away,” says Dave Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University.

If a person were to hang out near the edge of a black hole , where gravity is prodigious, Goldberg says, only a few hours might pass for them while 1,000 years went by for someone on Earth. If the person who was near the black hole returned to this planet, they would have effectively traveled to the future. “That is a real effect,” he says. “That is completely uncontroversial.”

Going backward in time gets thorny, though (thornier than getting ripped to shreds inside a black hole). Scientists have come up with a few ways it might be possible, and they have been aware of time travel paradoxes in general relativity for decades. Fabio Costa, a physicist at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, notes that an early solution with time travel began with a scenario written in the 1920s. That idea involved massive long cylinder that spun fast in the manner of straw rolled between your palms and that twisted spacetime along with it. The understanding that this object could act as a time machine allowing one to travel to the past only happened in the 1970s, a few decades after scientists had discovered a phenomenon called “closed timelike curves.”

“A closed timelike curve describes the trajectory of a hypothetical observer that, while always traveling forward in time from their own perspective, at some point finds themselves at the same place and time where they started, creating a loop,” Costa says. “This is possible in a region of spacetime that, warped by gravity, loops into itself.”

“Einstein read [about closed timelike curves] and was very disturbed by this idea,” he adds. The phenomenon nevertheless spurred later research.

Science began to take time travel seriously in the 1980s. In 1990, for instance, Russian physicist Igor Novikov and American physicist Kip Thorne collaborated on a research paper about closed time-like curves. “They started to study not only how one could try to build a time machine but also how it would work,” Costa says.

Just as importantly, though, they investigated the problems with time travel. What if, for instance, you tossed a billiard ball into a time machine, and it traveled to the past and then collided with its past self in a way that meant its present self could never enter the time machine? “That looks like a paradox,” Costa says.

Since the 1990s, he says, there’s been on-and-off interest in the topic yet no big breakthrough. The field isn’t very active today, in part because every proposed model of a time machine has problems. “It has some attractive features, possibly some potential, but then when one starts to sort of unravel the details, there ends up being some kind of a roadblock,” says Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island.

For instance, most time travel models require negative mass —and hence negative energy because, as Albert Einstein revealed when he discovered E = mc 2 , mass and energy are one and the same. In theory, at least, just as an electric charge can be positive or negative, so can mass—though no one’s ever found an example of negative mass. Why does time travel depend on such exotic matter? In many cases, it is needed to hold open a wormhole—a tunnel in spacetime predicted by general relativity that connects one point in the cosmos to another.

Without negative mass, gravity would cause this tunnel to collapse. “You can think of it as counteracting the positive mass or energy that wants to traverse the wormhole,” Goldberg says.

Khanna and Goldberg concur that it’s unlikely matter with negative mass even exists, although Khanna notes that some quantum phenomena show promise, for instance, for negative energy on very small scales. But that would be “nowhere close to the scale that would be needed” for a realistic time machine, he says.

These challenges explain why Khanna initially discouraged Caroline Mallary, then his graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, from doing a time travel project. Mallary and Khanna went forward anyway and came up with a theoretical time machine that didn’t require negative mass. In its simplistic form, Mallary’s idea involves two parallel cars, each made of regular matter. If you leave one parked and zoom the other with extreme acceleration, a closed timelike curve will form between them.

Easy, right? But while Mallary’s model gets rid of the need for negative matter, it adds another hurdle: it requires infinite density inside the cars for them to affect spacetime in a way that would be useful for time travel. Infinite density can be found inside a black hole, where gravity is so intense that it squishes matter into a mind-bogglingly small space called a singularity. In the model, each of the cars needs to contain such a singularity. “One of the reasons that there's not a lot of active research on this sort of thing is because of these constraints,” Mallary says.

Other researchers have created models of time travel that involve a wormhole, or a tunnel in spacetime from one point in the cosmos to another. “It's sort of a shortcut through the universe,” Goldberg says. Imagine accelerating one end of the wormhole to near the speed of light and then sending it back to where it came from. “Those two sides are no longer synced,” he says. “One is in the past; one is in the future.” Walk between them, and you’re time traveling.

You could accomplish something similar by moving one end of the wormhole near a big gravitational field—such as a black hole—while keeping the other end near a smaller gravitational force. In that way, time would slow down on the big gravity side, essentially allowing a particle or some other chunk of mass to reside in the past relative to the other side of the wormhole.

Making a wormhole requires pesky negative mass and energy, however. A wormhole created from normal mass would collapse because of gravity. “Most designs tend to have some similar sorts of issues,” Goldberg says. They’re theoretically possible, but there’s currently no feasible way to make them, kind of like a good-tasting pizza with no calories.

And maybe the problem is not just that we don’t know how to make time travel machines but also that it’s not possible to do so except on microscopic scales—a belief held by the late physicist Stephen Hawking. He proposed the chronology protection conjecture: The universe doesn’t allow time travel because it doesn’t allow alterations to the past. “It seems there is a chronology protection agency, which prevents the appearance of closed timelike curves and so makes the universe safe for historians,” Hawking wrote in a 1992 paper in Physical Review D .

Part of his reasoning involved the paradoxes time travel would create such as the aforementioned situation with a billiard ball and its more famous counterpart, the grandfather paradox : If you go back in time and kill your grandfather before he has children, you can’t be born, and therefore you can’t time travel, and therefore you couldn’t have killed your grandfather. And yet there you are.

Those complications are what interests Massachusetts Institute of Technology philosopher Agustin Rayo, however, because the paradoxes don’t just call causality and chronology into question. They also make free will seem suspect. If physics says you can go back in time, then why can’t you kill your grandfather? “What stops you?” he says. Are you not free?

Rayo suspects that time travel is consistent with free will, though. “What’s past is past,” he says. “So if, in fact, my grandfather survived long enough to have children, traveling back in time isn’t going to change that. Why will I fail if I try? I don’t know because I don’t have enough information about the past. What I do know is that I’ll fail somehow.”

If you went to kill your grandfather, in other words, you’d perhaps slip on a banana en route or miss the bus. “It's not like you would find some special force compelling you not to do it,” Costa says. “You would fail to do it for perfectly mundane reasons.”

In 2020 Costa worked with Germain Tobar, then his undergraduate student at the University of Queensland in Australia, on the math that would underlie a similar idea: that time travel is possible without paradoxes and with freedom of choice.

Goldberg agrees with them in a way. “I definitely fall into the category of [thinking that] if there is time travel, it will be constructed in such a way that it produces one self-consistent view of history,” he says. “Because that seems to be the way that all the rest of our physical laws are constructed.”

No one knows what the future of time travel to the past will hold. And so far, no time travelers have come to tell us about it.

Time Travel: Dream or Possible Reality?

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Time travel is a favorite plot device in science fiction stories and movies. Perhaps the most famous recent series is Dr. Who , with its traveling Time Lords who whisk throughout time as if traveling by jet. In other stories, the time travel is due to unexplainable circumstances such as a too-close approach to a very massive object like a black hole. In Star Trek: The Voyage Home , the plot device was a trip around the Sun that hurled Kirk and Spock back to 20th century Earth. In the popular movie series Back to the Future , the characters traveled both backward and forward in time. However it is described in stories, traveling through time seems to pique people's interest and ignite their imaginations. But, is such a thing possible? 

The Nature of Time

It's important to remember that we are always traveling into the future. That's the nature of space-time. This is why we remember the past (instead of "remembering" the future). The future is largely unpredictable because it hasn't happened yet, but everyone is headed into it all the time.

To speed up the process, to peer further into the future, to experience events more quickly than those around us, what would or could anyone do to make it happen? It's a good question without a definitive answer. Right now, no one has built a working time machine to travel temporally.

Traveling into the Future

While it's not possible (yet) to travel to the future fast than the rate at which we're doing it now, it is possible to speed up the passage of time. But, it only happens in small increments of time. And, it has only happened (so far) to very few people who have traveled off Earth's surface. For them, time moves at an infinitesimally different rate. Could it happen over longer time spans? 

It might, theoretically. According to Einstein's theory of special relativity , the passage of time is relative to an object's speed. The more quickly an object moves through space, the more slowly time passes for it compared to an observer traveling at a slower pace. 

The classic example of traveling into the future is the twin paradox . It works like this: take a pair of twins, each 20 years old. They live on Earth. One takes off on a spaceship on a five-year journey traveling at nearly the speed of light . The traveling twin ages five years while on the journey and returns to Earth at the age of 25. However, the twin who stayed behind is 95 years old! The twin on the ship experienced only five years of time passing, but returns to an Earth that is much farther into the future.

Using Gravity as a Means of Time Travel

In much the same way that traveling at speeds close to the speed of light can slow down perceived time, intense gravitational fields can have the same effect.

Gravity only affects the movement of space, but also the flow of time. Time passes more slowly for an observer inside a massive object's gravitational well. The stronger the gravity, the more it affects the flow of time. 

Astronauts on the  International Space Station experience a combination of these effects, though on a much smaller scale. Since they are traveling quite quickly and orbiting around Earth (a massive body with significant gravity), time slows down for them compared to people on Earth. The difference is much less than a second over the course of their time in space. But, it is measurable.

Could We Ever Travel into the Future?

Until we can figure out a way to approach the speed of light (and warp drive doesn't count , not that we know how to do that at this point, either), or travel near black holes (or travel to black holes for that matter) without falling in, we won't be able to do time travel any significant way into the future. 

Travel into the Past

Moving into the past is also impossible given our current technology. If it were possible, some peculiar effects could occur. These include the famous "go back in time and kill your grandfather" paradox. If you did do it, you couldn't do it, because you already killed him, so therefore you don't exist and can't go back in time to do the dastardly deed. Confusing, isn't it? 

Key Takeaways

• Time travel is a science fiction trope that may possibly be technically possible. But, no one has achieved it.
• We do travel into the future all our lives, at a second per second. To do it faster requires technology we don't have.
• Travel to the past is also impossible at the present time.
• Is Time Travel Possible?| Explore , www.physics.org/article-questions.asp?id=131.
• NASA , NASA, spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/time-travel.html.
• “Time Travel.”  TV Tropes , tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TimeTravel.

Edited by Carolyn Collins Petersen .

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• Understanding Cosmology and Its Impact
• What are Rotation and Revolution?

Is Time Travel Possible?

We all travel in time! We travel one year in time between birthdays, for example. And we are all traveling in time at approximately the same speed: 1 second per second.

We typically experience time at one second per second. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's space telescopes also give us a way to look back in time. Telescopes help us see stars and galaxies that are very far away . It takes a long time for the light from faraway galaxies to reach us. So, when we look into the sky with a telescope, we are seeing what those stars and galaxies looked like a very long time ago.

However, when we think of the phrase "time travel," we are usually thinking of traveling faster than 1 second per second. That kind of time travel sounds like something you'd only see in movies or science fiction books. Could it be real? Science says yes!

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxies that are very far away as they existed a very long time ago. Credit: NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)

How do we know that time travel is possible?

More than 100 years ago, a famous scientist named Albert Einstein came up with an idea about how time works. He called it relativity. This theory says that time and space are linked together. Einstein also said our universe has a speed limit: nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

Einstein's theory of relativity says that space and time are linked together. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What does this mean for time travel? Well, according to this theory, the faster you travel, the slower you experience time. Scientists have done some experiments to show that this is true.

For example, there was an experiment that used two clocks set to the exact same time. One clock stayed on Earth, while the other flew in an airplane (going in the same direction Earth rotates).

After the airplane flew around the world, scientists compared the two clocks. The clock on the fast-moving airplane was slightly behind the clock on the ground. So, the clock on the airplane was traveling slightly slower in time than 1 second per second.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Can we use time travel in everyday life?

We can't use a time machine to travel hundreds of years into the past or future. That kind of time travel only happens in books and movies. But the math of time travel does affect the things we use every day.

For example, we use GPS satellites to help us figure out how to get to new places. (Check out our video about how GPS satellites work .) NASA scientists also use a high-accuracy version of GPS to keep track of where satellites are in space. But did you know that GPS relies on time-travel calculations to help you get around town?

GPS satellites orbit around Earth very quickly at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. This slows down GPS satellite clocks by a small fraction of a second (similar to the airplane example above).

GPS satellites orbit around Earth at about 8,700 miles (14,000 kilometers) per hour. Credit: GPS.gov

However, the satellites are also orbiting Earth about 12,550 miles (20,200 km) above the surface. This actually speeds up GPS satellite clocks by a slighter larger fraction of a second.

Here's how: Einstein's theory also says that gravity curves space and time, causing the passage of time to slow down. High up where the satellites orbit, Earth's gravity is much weaker. This causes the clocks on GPS satellites to run faster than clocks on the ground.

The combined result is that the clocks on GPS satellites experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second. Luckily, scientists can use math to correct these differences in time.

If scientists didn't correct the GPS clocks, there would be big problems. GPS satellites wouldn't be able to correctly calculate their position or yours. The errors would add up to a few miles each day, which is a big deal. GPS maps might think your home is nowhere near where it actually is!

In Summary:

Yes, time travel is indeed a real thing. But it's not quite what you've probably seen in the movies. Under certain conditions, it is possible to experience time passing at a different rate than 1 second per second. And there are important reasons why we need to understand this real-world form of time travel.

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May 14, 2020

Time travel into the future is totally possible

by Paul M. Sutter, Universe Today

Believe it or not, time travel is possible.

In fact, you're doing it right now. Every single second of every single day, you are advancing into your own future. You are literally moving through time, the same way you would move through space. It may seem pedantic, but it's a very important point. Movement through time is still movement, and you are reaching your own future (whether you like it or not).

And what's even cooler is that you can skip forward in time if you feel like it.

Well, let me be clear, you need to do a little bit of engineering first.

We know through the physics of Einstein's special theory of relativity that you can trade motion in space for motion in time. If you're standing perfectly still, you're moving through the dimension of time at a particular speed (the speed of light , for those of you who are curious). As soon as you start moving through space, however, you slow down your rate of moving through time.

In other words, the faster you move in space , the slower you move in time.

This means that moving objects, like a clock on a rocket, run a little bit slow. One second for someone in a moving spaceship lasts a little bit longer than a second for someone staying still.

The trick is that in order for this to have any sort of noticeable impact, you have to get close to the speed of light, which is really hard to do—to give you some perspective, astronauts that orbit the Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour are off by only a microsecond or so from our clocks on the ground.

Our fastest human spacecraft don't even crack a tenth of a percent of the speed of light. But if you could somehow spend a good amount of time hugging close to that ultimate speed limit in the universe, the slower your clock will run. You will travel through time into the future. Nothing will feel different for you, but after a couple of years' journey you would return to the Earth to find our clocks advanced by thousands or even tens of thousands of years, depending on how fast you go.

So the future is yours, and you get to choose how quickly you reach it.

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How would time travel affect life as we know it?

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Key Takeaways

• If unrestricted time travel were possible, it would lead to a complete breakdown of the rational order of things.
• The ability to travel to both the past and future would upend our understanding of time.
• Stephen Hawking's "chronology protection hypothesis" suggests there might be natural laws preventing unrestricted time travel.

Science fiction has thoroughly covered the topic of time travel, starting with H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" in 1895 and continuing right up to modern movies like " Déjà Vu " starring Denzel Washington. But physicists have also explored the nature of time and the plausibility of time travel for more than century, beginning with Albert Einstein's theories of relativity. Thanks to Einstein, scientists know that time slows as moving objects approach the speed of light. Gravity also slows time. This means that, in one sense, all of us can already consider ourselves time travelers in a limited way because we experience a tiny time warp (a difference of only nanoseconds) when we, for example, take a flight on an airplane. But physicists who study time travel today search for plausible ways to create a time warp large enough to allow noticeable travel into the past or future.

In his book "How to Build a Time Machine," physicist Paul Davies writes, "The theory of relativity implies that a limited form of time travel is certainly possible, while unrestricted time travel -- to any epoch, past or future -- might just be possible, too." This astonishing statement begs an important question: If time travel did indeed become a reality, how would it affect our world as we currently experience it?

First, it's important to realize that building a time machine would likely involve enormous expense, and the sheer complexity of such an apparatus would mean only a limited group of time travelers would have access to it. But even a small group of "astronauts" traveling through time and space could conceivably have a tremendous impact on life as we know it today. The possibilities, in fact, seem almost infinite.

Let's begin by assuming that it's possible to create a complete loop in time travel -- that time travelers could travel back into the past and then return to the future (or vice versa). Although scientists view traveling to the future as a much less problematic proposition than traveling to the past, our daily lives wouldn't change much if we could only send time travelers backward or forward in time, unable to recall them to the present. If we could, in fact, complete this loop of time travel, we can conjure up an incredible array of possible effects.

Possibilities and Paradoxes of Time Travel

Time travel turned total mayhem.

Imagine sending a time traveling astronaut 100 years into the future. The time traveler could witness technological advancements that we can only dream of today, much as people at the turn of the 20th century likely couldn't imagine the items we take for granted in 2010, such as iPods or laptop computers. The time traveler could also gain insight into medical advancements, such as new medicines, treatments and surgical techniques. If the time traveler could bring this knowledge backward in time to the present, the time from which he or she came, society could effectively leap forward in terms of its technical and scientific knowledge.

The futuristic time traveler could also bring back knowledge of what lay ahead for the world. He or she could warn of natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, epidemics and other events of worldwide importance. This knowledge could potentially change the very way we operate. For example, what if a time traveler journeyed into the future and literally saw the effects that automobiles would eventually have on our planet? What if the time traveler witnessed an environment so polluted and damaged that it's unrecognizable? How might that change our willingness to use alternative forms of transportation?

Imagine that time travel became less restricted and more available to a larger population. Perhaps travel into the future would be exploited for personal gain. A futuristic time traveler could draw on knowledge of the stock market to guide his or her investment decisions, effectively using the granddaddy of all insider information to amass a fortune. Militaries might rely on time travel to gain valuable knowledge about the enemy's positioning and resources in future battles. Terrorists could use time travel to scout out the scenes of future attacks, allowing them to carefully plan with precise knowledge of future conditions.

The potential effects seem equally limitless in terms of the less likely possibility of time travel into the past. History books would no longer be based solely on exhaustive research and interpretation of ancient materials. Time travelers could resolve historical debates and verify how things did or didn't happen in the past. Imagine how different our understanding of the world might be if we could say definitively, for example, whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea or whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy. A journey into the past could prove or disprove religious beliefs or result in face-to-face encounters with people such as Jesus, Buddha, Napoleon or Cleopatra -- or even the time traveler's former self. Perhaps time travelers could even bring back from the past things that had been lost, such as extinct species or dead and long-forgotten languages.

But here it's very important to raise the issue of self-consistent narratives and paradoxes. The concept of self-consistent narratives tells us that anything a time traveler would alter or affect in the past would have to remain consistent with the future from which he or she journeyed. Changing the past would effectively change the future, creating a causal loop. But such causal loops would only pose inherent problems if changes to the past resulted in a future different from the one the time traveler came from.

But perhaps the question of how time travel would affect life as we know it goes deeper than even a discussion of potential paradoxes and causal loops. Perhaps a discussion of specific effects of consequences on life as we know it makes little sense when faced with something that could change everything about the way in which we perceive our world.

Physicist Paul Davies gives a good example of a consistent causal loop in his book "How to Build a Time Machine." A mathematics professor uses a time machine to travel forward in time, where he discovers a new theorem. He returns back to the time he came from and gives one of his particularly gifted students the idea for that theorem. The student goes on to publish the theorem, and it turns out that it was this very student's work that the professor perused during his journey to the future. The narrative here is consistent.

On the other hand, with the grandfather paradox, a time traveler goes back in time and kills his grandfather. But if the time traveler's grandfather dies before the time traveler is born, how can he or she exist at all? And if the time traveler doesn't exist, how could he or she travel back in time to kill granddad?

As physicist Paul Davies describes it, unrestricted time travel -- meaning time travel that could form a complete loop to both the past and future -- would ultimately lead to total mayhem. In his words, "Time travel opens a view of the world that is a sort of madhouse where the rational order of things would no longer work. Under those circumstances, it's very hard to see how ordinary human life could continue."

In a world where the relationship between past, present and future is turned on its head, we would transcend the things that define our lives today. We would lose our notion of how time works, which could be so fundamentally damaging to our worldview that we would no longer care as much about the things that matter to us today: work, finances, making plans with friends and family, shopping -- you name it. These things just wouldn't be relevant in this crazy new world because we'd have a newfound preoccupation with simply making sense of a world without a set chronology -- we wouldn't know the order in which things occur.

It may be beside the point, then, to talk about resolving historical debates, saving endangered species or gaining technological, financial or military insight because those things might very likely fall by the wayside in the strange world that would follow the advent of unrestricted time travel.

As Davies makes clear, none of this fallout would occur from one-way travel. Hitching a one-way ride to the future or even the past (assuming we stick with self-consistent narratives) wouldn't cause this kind of profound reordering of the world as we currently experience it. But closing that loop of travel could be, in a word, disastrous.

Davies points out that science fiction normally focuses on the novelty aspect of time travel. But according to him, "It's not a novelty or a curiosity, it's something that strikes at the very rational basis of how we live and function. It's really hard to imagine that anything could be the same again." In his view, unrestricted time travel could change life as we know it so dramatically that we wouldn't even recognize it. Because chronology would have no meaning, we couldn't easily tell if something happened before or after, was a cause or an effect, and we would lose the ability to predict rationally the outcomes of our actions. In essence, it would be as though we had all gone insane.

These sobering potential effects of time travel have caused some scientists to wonder whether a principle exists in nature that would actually prevent unrestricted time travel, such as Stephen Hawking's "chronology protection hypothesis." This type of "theory of everything" might provide a scientific explanation as to why we could never unhinge the universe as we know it by making unrestricted time travel a reality. Scientists have yet to discover such a theory, but hearing Davies' take on the frightening effects of time travel makes one hope that they find it soon -- even if it means that we won't ever know for sure who killed JFK.

Frequently Asked Questions

How could time travel impact our understanding of history, what are the ethical implications of time travel, lots more information, related articles.

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More Great Links

• NOVA Online: Time Travel
• Paul Davies' Web site
• ABC Science Online. "The Big Questions: The Riddle of Time." Jan. 17, 2002. (Oct. 7, 2010) http://www.abc.net.au/science/bigquestions/s460740.htm
• Davies, Paul. "How to Build a Time Machine." Penguin Books. 2002.
• Davies, Paul. Personal interview. Oct. 13, 2010.
• PBS Nova. "Sagan on Time Travel." October 1999. (Oct. 7, 2010) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/sagan.html
• Pickover, Clifford. "Time: a traveler's guide." Oxford University Press. 1999.

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On the campus essay: learning to travel through time with my astrophysics professor.

For 35 years I’ve been traveling through time with the Princeton professor who showed that time travel is possible.

It’s 1981. I’m a senior in the astrophysics department, choosing a topic for my undergraduate thesis. I’m in the Peyton Hall office of J. Richard Gott III *73, an astrophysicist who’s building a reputation as one of the best and quirkiest teachers at Princeton. I’m 20 years old, he’s 34.

Professor Gott is a native of Louisville, Ky. He studied math and physics at Harvard before getting his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton. He has a strong Kentucky drawl and a special enthusiasm for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the equations that link space and time and gravity. He leans forward in his chair and fervently talks about curvature tensors and spacetime metrics. And as I listen to him, I start to feel the same excitement.

He finds a recent issue of Scientific American and opens the magazine. “Here’s something interesting. It’s about Flatland, a hypothetical universe with only two spatial dimensions. It has length and width, but no height. You could do a thesis on that.”

I’m confused. “Flatland?”

“You could figure out how general relativity would work in a universe with only two spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time.”

He draws a spacetime diagram to make things clearer. The vertical dimension in this diagram is the dimension of time. The top of the page is the future, and the bottom is the past. Every object in our universe follows a “world line” in this diagram, moving left and right through the spatial dimensions but also traveling inexorably upward, toward the future.

That meeting in Peyton Hall is the beginning of our journey. My world line and Professor Gott’s run close and parallel for the next six months as I struggle with the mathematics of relativity. I finally derive a solution for Flatland and rush to Dr. Gott’s office. He smiles and gives me the highest compliment that one theorist can give another: “This solution is non-trivial!”

The theory of relativity, we discover, would work very differently in Flatland than it does in our universe. There would be no gravitational attraction between massive objects, and yet those objects still would alter the geometry of the spacetime around them. It’s an interesting result. Dr. Gott and I co-author a research paper that’s published in a somewhat esoteric journal called General Relativity and Gravitation.

After I graduate from Princeton, though, I stop studying astrophysics. I fall in love with poetry and get a master’s degree in creative writing. Eventually I become a journalist. My world line diverges from Professor Gott’s.

But then something remarkable happens. My Princeton education isn’t over yet. Our world lines come back together.

It’s 1998. Oddly enough, I’m now an editor at Scientific American. My wife and I go to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to hear a lecture by Dr. Gott. He’s made an amazing discovery: Under extraordinary circumstances, the theory of relativity allows for time travel to the past. The circumstances involve cosmic strings, infinitely long strands of high-density material that may have been created in the first moments of our universe’s history. If cosmic strings really exist — astronomers haven’t observed any yet — Professor Gott believes they could be used to build a time machine.

With his usual enthusiasm, he explains to the audience in the lecture hall how the time machine would work. First, you’d have to find two cosmic strings that are zooming past each other at nearly the speed of light. Then you’d jump into a spaceship and steer around the pair of strings in a tight circle. Because the strings radically change the geometry of the surrounding spacetime, the rocket would return to your starting point at a time before you embarked on the journey. Upon your arrival, you could shake hands with your slightly younger self and reassure him or her that the trip will be successful. Your world line has twisted into a closed curve, allowing you to loop back to an event in your past.

But wait, Dr. Gott tells the audience, there’s more! Researchers have discovered other methods of time travel allowed by Einstein’s equations, including scenarios involving wormholes — shortcuts through spacetime, like the one shown in the movie Interstellar — and exotic vacuum states. “I’m not talking about a Hoover vacuum,” Gott says passionately in his characteristic drawl. “I’m talking about a negative-energy quantum vacuum!” Even stranger, it’s possible that our universe began as a closed time loop, a vacuum state that whirled back and forth in time and simultaneously sent a branch of spacetime into the future, where it became our modern-day cosmos.

This cosmological model is appealing to physicists and philosophers because it cleverly answers an age-old question: What started the universe? If our cosmos branched off from a closed time loop, then the universe has no beginning, because every moment in time is preceded by an earlier moment. There’s no need to imagine a cosmic birth that created everything out of nothing, because it didn’t happen. Instead, the universe created itself.

These ideas about time travel and cosmology dazzle the audience at the museum. After the lecture, several people rush toward the stage to talk to Professor Gott. My wife pushes me forward. “Go on, say hello to him.”

Researchers have discovered other methods of time travel allowed by Einstein’s equations, including scenarios involving wormholes — shortcuts through spacetime, like the one shown in the movie Interstellar — and exotic vacuum states. “I’m not talking about a Hoover vacuum,” Gott says passionately in his characteristic drawl. “I’m talking about a negative-energy quantum vacuum!”

I shake my head. “No, he won’t remember me.” But I go to the stage anyway and say hello.

He smiles. “Of course, I remember you! That research we did together? On Flatland? That led to my work on cosmic strings.”

As it turns out, the spacetime around a cosmic string is very similar to the distorted geometry around massive objects in Flatland. When Dr. Gott tells me this, I sense a strange tug in my own world line. I’m looping across time.

Einstein, in one of his last letters: “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

It’s 2007. I’m having lunch with Professor Gott at a Chinese restaurant near Princeton. We’ve stayed in touch over the past decade; we follow each other’s work and occasionally discuss the latest science news. The relationship is incredibly rewarding. I feel as if I’ve enrolled in an open-ended astrophysics course that has no final exam but keeps giving me credits.

I arranged this lunch so we can discuss a manuscript I’ve written. It’s my first novel, Final Theory, a thriller about Einstein and apocalyptic physics. Dr. Gott has scribbled comments on dozens of Post-It notes. He points at the novel, which has several physicists in its cast of characters. “Well, I recognize which character is me,” he says. “And I know which one is you. So who should play us in the movie?”

He has a soft spot for science-fiction movies, especially any film that features time travel. After we go over the casting choices, Dr. Gott corrects several mistakes I made in the first draft of the novel. In one scene, I put the wrong constellations in the summer sky. That would’ve been a humiliating error for a former astrophysics major.

It’s 2015. I’m in Professor Gott’s office again, but now my 16-year-old son, Tommy, is there too. He’s thinking about applying to Princeton and wants to meet my favorite teacher.

Dr. Gott is generous with his time. He gives Tommy a tour of the astrophysics department. He tells stories about the Intel Science Talent Search, the contest for which he served as a judge for many years. (He was a contestant when he was in high school, winning second place in 1965.) Then he switches gears and talks about space exploration and the War of the Worlds broadcast, the famous Orson Welles radio play that terrified the country in 1938 by describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. He says he recently celebrated the anniversary of the broadcast by visiting Grover’s Mill, the site of the fictional Martian landing. It’s just a few miles from Princeton.

He keeps us enthralled for almost two hours. After we leave Peyton Hall, Tommy is thoroughly intimidated. “If you have to be that smart to get into Princeton, I don’t have a chance,” he says.

I reassure him by pointing out that very few people in the world are as smart as Professor Gott.

It’s 2016. In one of the most important discoveries of the century, scientists detect gravitational waves for the first time, providing the best evidence yet for the theory of relativity. And at the end of the spring semester, Dr. Gott will retire from the Princeton faculty. I’m 55 years old, he’s 69.

I’m glad we stayed in touch. I tell all my friends and fellow alumni that they should look up their former professors. It’s like another kind of time travel.

And you don’t even need any cosmic strings. 

Emil Friedman *73

Is Prof. Gott's time travel example two-way? After going back to the past can he return to the future? What about the paradox proposed by Larry Niven? If a method of traveling to the past were discovered, would somebody go back and do something to prevent the discovery? (One-way time travel to the future is clearly possible. All of us do it continuously.)   Nicholas Meyler '81 

The key problem in time-travel is traveling to the past. Travel to the future is already a known phenomenon (according to Relativity and the Lorentz contraction equations). A sufficiently fast rocket, near light-speed, could easily travel to the future, while the astronaut onboard ages less due to the time-dilation effect.

So, Gott's solution is about time-travel to the past, primarily. Would a paradox result? According to the "many worlds" hypothesis of Hugh Everett III (a Princeton PhD), each time-travel event creates a new universe, so that paradoxes need not exist.

When we refer to "time-travel," we are mostly referring to events that are spatio-temporally discontinuous, so not quite like just aging, although I think that counts, too.

The classical "paradox" in time-travel is called "the grandfather paradox" (i.e. could I go back in time and kill my grandfather before I was born?) ... If so, how would I get born in the first place? Everett's solution is that yes, you can go kill your grandfather, but you wouldn't be in the same Universe or "time-line" anymore, and you obviously have already been born, so you wouldn't simply "disappear," like the silly "Back to The Future" photograph.

Whether paradoxes really would ensue is somewhat dubious, though, even if time-travel were to the same Universe as it started from. Kip Thorne did extensive "thought experiments" that proved time-travel to the past was possible, with some degree of interaction. Scientists in Australia have also found similar results modeling sending particles back through wormholes, where the particles have the opportunity to interact with their previous "selves." No paradoxes arose, from what I understand.   Nicholas Meyler ’81

"Time Travel in Einstein's Universe" was an excellent book, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I was under the impression, though (and a bit sadly), that Gerard t'Hooft had shown that Gott's proposed time-machine can't work because it would "collapse the Universe".

Also, given that in Relativity (which might be true), even if two cosmic strings are rushing past each other, each nearly at the speed of light, that doesn't "add up" to faster-than-light relative motion between the two strings... since the relative speed measured from one point on one string to one point on the other string still cannot exceed lightspeed. So, my question is what mathematics justifies this contention, and what would be the slowest two cosmic strings could be moving past each other and still produce the required exotic space-time effects for a looping rocket trip to travel backwards in time?

Has Gott done any research on the idea of spinning cosmic strings (approximating a Tipler cylinder)? This might be of some interest...

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Time Travel and Modern Physics

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn’t this require some implausible constraint on otherwise unrelated circumstances? We examine such worries in the context of modern physics.

1. Paradoxes Lost?

2. topology and constraints, 3. the general possibility of time travel in general relativity, 4. two toy models, 5. slightly more realistic models of time travel, 6. the possibility of time travel redux, 7. even if there are constraints, so what, 8. computational models, 9. quantum mechanics to the rescue, 10. conclusions, other internet resources, related entries.

• Supplement: Remarks and Limitations on the Toy Models

Modern physics strips away many aspects of the manifest image of time. Time as it appears in the equations of classical mechanics has no need for a distinguished present moment, for example. Relativity theory leads to even sharper contrasts. It replaces absolute simultaneity, according to which it is possible to unambiguously determine the time order of distant events, with relative simultaneity: extending an “instant of time” throughout space is not unique, but depends on the state of motion of an observer. More dramatically, in general relativity the mathematical properties of time (or better, of spacetime)—its topology and geometry—depend upon how matter is arranged rather than being fixed once and for all. So physics can be, and indeed has to be, formulated without treating time as a universal, fixed background structure. Since general relativity represents gravity through spacetime geometry, the allowed geometries must be as varied as the ways in which matter can be arranged. Alongside geometrical models used to describe the solar system, black holes, and much else, the scope of variation extends to include some exotic structures unlike anything astrophysicists have observed. In particular, there are spacetime geometries with curves that loop back on themselves: closed timelike curves (CTCs), which describe the possible trajectory of an observer who returns exactly back to their earlier state—without any funny business, such as going faster than the speed of light. These geometries satisfy the relevant physical laws, the equations of general relativity, and in that sense time travel is physically possible.

Yet circular time generates paradoxes, familiar from science fiction stories featuring time travel: [ 1 ]

• Consistency: Kurt plans to murder his own grandfather Adolph, by traveling along a CTC to an appropriate moment in the past. He is an able marksman, and waits until he has a clear shot at grandpa. Normally he would not miss. Yet if he succeeds, there is no way that he will then exist to plan and carry out the mission. Kurt pulls the trigger: what can happen?
• Underdetermination: Suppose that Kurt first travels back in order to give his earlier self a copy of How to Build a Time Machine. This is the same book that allows him to build a time machine, which he then carries with him on his journey to the past. Who wrote the book?
• Easy Knowledge: A fan of classical music enhances their computer with a circuit that exploits a CTC. This machine efficiently solves problems at a higher level of computational complexity than conventional computers, leading (among other things) to finding the smallest circuits that can generate Bach’s oeuvre—and to compose new pieces in the same style. Such easy knowledge is at odds with our understanding of our epistemic predicament. (This third paradox has not drawn as much attention.)

The first two paradoxes were once routinely taken to show that solutions with CTCs should be rejected—with charges varying from violating logic, to being “physically unreasonable”, to undermining the notion of free will. Closer analysis of the paradoxes has largely reversed this consensus. Physicists have discovered many solutions with CTCs and have explored their properties in pursuing foundational questions, such as whether physics is compatible with the idea of objective temporal passage (starting with Gödel 1949). Philosophers have also used time travel scenarios to probe questions about, among other things, causation, modality, free will, and identity (see, e.g., Earman 1972 and Lewis’s seminal 1976 paper).

We begin below with Consistency , turning to the other paradoxes in later sections. A standard, stone-walling response is to insist that the past cannot be changed, as a matter of logic, even by a time traveler (e.g., Gödel 1949, Clarke 1977, Horwich 1987). Adolph cannot both die and survive, as a matter of logic, so any scheme to alter the past must fail. In many of the best time travel fictions, the actions of a time traveler are constrained in novel and unexpected ways. Attempts to change the past fail, and they fail, often tragically, in just such a way that they set the stage for the time traveler’s self-defeating journey. The first question is whether there is an analog of the consistent story when it comes to physics in the presence of CTCs. As we will see, there is a remarkable general argument establishing the existence of consistent solutions. Yet a second question persists: why can’t time-traveling Kurt kill his own grandfather? Doesn’t the necessity of failures to change the past put unusual and unexpected constraints on time travelers, or objects that move along CTCs? The same argument shows that there are in fact no constraints imposed by the existence of CTCs, in some cases. After discussing this line of argument, we will turn to the palatability and further implications of such constraints if they are required, and then turn to the implications of quantum mechanics.

Wheeler and Feynman (1949) were the first to claim that the fact that nature is continuous could be used to argue that causal influences from later events to earlier events, as are made possible by time travel, will not lead to paradox without the need for any constraints. Maudlin (1990) showed how to make their argument precise and more general, and argued that nonetheless it was not completely general.

Imagine the following set-up. We start off having a camera with a black and white film ready to take a picture of whatever comes out of the time machine. An object, in fact a developed film, comes out of the time machine. We photograph it, and develop the film. The developed film is subsequently put in the time machine, and set to come out of the time machine at the time the picture is taken. This surely will create a paradox: the developed film will have the opposite distribution of black, white, and shades of gray, from the object that comes out of the time machine. For developed black and white films (i.e., negatives) have the opposite shades of gray from the objects they are pictures of. But since the object that comes out of the time machine is the developed film itself it we surely have a paradox.

However, it does not take much thought to realize that there is no paradox here. What will happen is that a uniformly gray picture will emerge, which produces a developed film that has exactly the same uniform shade of gray. No matter what the sensitivity of the film is, as long as the dependence of the brightness of the developed film depends in a continuous manner on the brightness of the object being photographed, there will be a shade of gray that, when photographed, will produce exactly the same shade of gray on the developed film. This is the essence of Wheeler and Feynman’s idea. Let us first be a bit more precise and then a bit more general.

For simplicity let us suppose that the film is always a uniform shade of gray (i.e., at any time the shade of gray does not vary by location on the film). The possible shades of gray of the film can then be represented by the (real) numbers from 0, representing pure black, to 1, representing pure white.

Let us now distinguish various stages in the chronological order of the life of the film. In stage \(S_1\) the film is young; it has just been placed in the camera and is ready to be exposed. It is then exposed to the object that comes out of the time machine. (That object in fact is a later stage of the film itself). By the time we come to stage \(S_2\) of the life of the film, it has been developed and is about to enter the time machine. Stage \(S_3\) occurs just after it exits the time machine and just before it is photographed. Stage \(S_4\) occurs after it has been photographed and before it starts fading away. Let us assume that the film starts out in stage \(S_1\) in some uniform shade of gray, and that the only significant change in the shade of gray of the film occurs between stages \(S_1\) and \(S_2\). During that period it acquires a shade of gray that depends on the shade of gray of the object that was photographed. In other words, the shade of gray that the film acquires at stage \(S_2\) depends on the shade of gray it has at stage \(S_3\). The influence of the shade of gray of the film at stage \(S_3\), on the shade of gray of the film at stage \(S_2\), can be represented as a mapping, or function, from the real numbers between 0 and 1 (inclusive), to the real numbers between 0 and 1 (inclusive). Let us suppose that the process of photography is such that if one imagines varying the shade of gray of an object in a smooth, continuous manner then the shade of gray of the developed picture of that object will also vary in a smooth, continuous manner. This implies that the function in question will be a continuous function. Now any continuous function from the real numbers between 0 and 1 (inclusive) to the real numbers between 0 and 1 (inclusive) must map at least one number to itself. One can quickly convince oneself of this by graphing such functions. For one will quickly see that any continuous function \(f\) from \([0,1]\) to \([0,1]\) must intersect the line \(x=y\) somewhere, and thus there must be at least one point \(x\) such that \(f(x)=x\). Such points are called fixed points of the function. Now let us think about what such a fixed point represents. It represents a shade of gray such that, when photographed, it will produce a developed film with exactly that same shade of gray. The existence of such a fixed point implies a solution to the apparent paradox.

Let us now be more general and allow color photography. One can represent each possible color of an object (of uniform color) by the proportions of blue, green and red that make up that color. (This is why television screens can produce all possible colors.) Thus one can represent all possible colors of an object by three points on three orthogonal lines \(x, y\) and \(z\), that is to say, by a point in a three-dimensional cube. This cube is also known as the “Cartesian product” of the three line segments. Now, one can also show that any continuous map from such a cube to itself must have at least one fixed point. So color photography can not be used to create time travel paradoxes either!

Even more generally, consider some system \(P\) which, as in the above example, has the following life. It starts in some state \(S_1\), it interacts with an object that comes out of a time machine (which happens to be its older self), it travels back in time, it interacts with some object (which happens to be its younger self), and finally it grows old and dies. Let us assume that the set of possible states of \(P\) can be represented by a Cartesian product of \(n\) closed intervals of the reals, i.e., let us assume that the topology of the state-space of \(P\) is isomorphic to a finite Cartesian product of closed intervals of the reals. Let us further assume that the development of \(P\) in time, and the dependence of that development on the state of objects that it interacts with, is continuous. Then, by a well-known fixed point theorem in topology (see, e.g., Hocking & Young 1961: 273), no matter what the nature of the interaction is, and no matter what the initial state of the object is, there will be at least one state \(S_3\) of the older system (as it emerges from the time travel machine) that will influence the initial state \(S_1\) of the younger system (when it encounters the older system) so that, as the younger system becomes older, it develops exactly into state \(S_3\). Thus without imposing any constraints on the initial state \(S_1\) of the system \(P\), we have shown that there will always be perfectly ordinary, non-paradoxical, solutions, in which everything that happens, happens according to the usual laws of development. Of course, there is looped causation, hence presumably also looped explanation, but what do you expect if there is looped time?

Unfortunately, for the fan of time travel, a little reflection suggests that there are systems for which the needed fixed point theorem does not hold. Imagine, for instance, that we have a dial that can only rotate in a plane. We are going to put the dial in the time machine. Indeed we have decided that if we see the later stage of the dial come out of the time machine set at angle \(x\), then we will set the dial to \(x+90\), and throw it into the time machine. Now it seems we have a paradox, since the mapping that consists of a rotation of all points in a circular state-space by 90 degrees does not have a fixed point. And why wouldn’t some state-spaces have the topology of a circle?

However, we have so far not used another continuity assumption which is also a reasonable assumption. So far we have only made the following demand: the state the dial is in at stage \(S_2\) must be a continuous function of the state of the dial at stage \(S_3\). But, the state of the dial at stage \(S_2\) is arrived at by taking the state of the dial at stage \(S_1\), and rotating it over some angle. It is not merely the case that the effect of the interaction, namely the state of the dial at stage \(S_2\), should be a continuous function of the cause, namely the state of the dial at stage \(S_3\). It is additionally the case that path taken to get there, the way the dial is rotated between stages \(S_1\) and \(S_2\) must be a continuous function of the state at stage \(S_3\). And, rather surprisingly, it turns out that this can not be done. Let us illustrate what the problem is before going to a more general demonstration that there must be a fixed point solution in the dial case.

Forget time travel for the moment. Suppose that you and I each have a watch with a single dial neither of which is running. My watch is set at 12. You are going to announce what your watch is set at. My task is going to be to adjust my watch to yours no matter what announcement you make. And my actions should have a continuous (single valued) dependence on the time that you announce. Surprisingly, this is not possible! For instance, suppose that if you announce “12”, then I achieve that setting on my watch by doing nothing. Now imagine slowly and continuously increasing the announced times, starting at 12. By continuity, I must achieve each of those settings by rotating my dial to the right. If at some point I switch and achieve the announced goal by a rotation of my dial to the left, I will have introduced a discontinuity in my actions, a discontinuity in the actions that I take as a function of the announced angle. So I will be forced, by continuity, to achieve every announcement by rotating the dial to the right. But, this rotation to the right will have to be abruptly discontinued as the announcements grow larger and I eventually approach 12 again, since I achieved 12 by not rotating the dial at all. So, there will be a discontinuity at 12 at the latest. In general, continuity of my actions as a function of announced times can not be maintained throughout if I am to be able to replicate all possible settings. Another way to see the problem is that one can similarly reason that, as one starts with 12, and imagines continuously making the announced times earlier, one will be forced, by continuity, to achieve the announced times by rotating the dial to the left. But the conclusions drawn from the assumption of continuous increases and the assumption of continuous decreases are inconsistent. So we have an inconsistency following from the assumption of continuity and the assumption that I always manage to set my watch to your watch. So, a dial developing according to a continuous dynamics from a given initial state, can not be set up so as to react to a second dial, with which it interacts, in such a way that it is guaranteed to always end up set at the same angle as the second dial. Similarly, it can not be set up so that it is guaranteed to always end up set at 90 degrees to the setting of the second dial. All of this has nothing to do with time travel. However, the impossibility of such set ups is what prevents us from enacting the rotation by 90 degrees that would create paradox in the time travel setting.

Let us now give the positive result that with such dials there will always be fixed point solutions, as long as the dynamics is continuous. Let us call the state of the dial before it interacts with its older self the initial state of the dial. And let us call the state of the dial after it emerges from the time machine the final state of the dial. There is also an intermediate state of the dial, after it interacts with its older self and before it is put into the time machine. We can represent the initial or intermediate states of the dial, before it goes into the time machine, as an angle \(x\) in the horizontal plane and the final state of the dial, after it comes out of the time machine, as an angle \(y\) in the vertical plane. All possible \(\langle x,y\rangle\) pairs can thus be visualized as a torus with each \(x\) value picking out a vertical circular cross-section and each \(y\) picking out a point on that cross-section. See figure 1 .

Figure 1 [An extended description of figure 1 is in the supplement.]

Suppose that the dial starts at angle \(i\) which picks out vertical circle \(I\) on the torus. The initial angle \(i\) that the dial is at before it encounters its older self, and the set of all possible final angles that the dial can have when it emerges from the time machine is represented by the circle \(I\) on the torus (see figure 1 ). Given any possible angle of the emerging dial, the dial initially at angle \(i\) will develop to some other angle. One can picture this development by rotating each point on \(I\) in the horizontal direction by the relevant amount. Since the rotation has to depend continuously on the angle of the emerging dial, circle \(I\) during this development will deform into some loop \(L\) on the torus. Loop \(L\) thus represents all possible intermediate angles \(x\) that the dial is at when it is thrown into the time machine, given that it started at angle \(i\) and then encountered a dial (its older self) which was at angle \(y\) when it emerged from the time machine. We therefore have consistency if \(x=y\) for some \(x\) and \(y\) on loop \(L\). Now, let loop \(C\) be the loop which consists of all the points on the torus for which \(x=y\). Ring \(I\) intersects \(C\) at point \(\langle i,i\rangle\). Obviously any continuous deformation of \(I\) must still intersect \(C\) somewhere. So \(L\) must intersect \(C\) somewhere, say at \(\langle j,j\rangle\). But that means that no matter how the development of the dial starting at \(I\) depends on the angle of the emerging dial, there will be some angle for the emerging dial such that the dial will develop exactly into that angle (by the time it enters the time machine) under the influence of that emerging dial. This is so no matter what angle one starts with, and no matter how the development depends on the angle of the emerging dial. Thus even for a circular state-space there are no constraints needed other than continuity.

Unfortunately there are state-spaces that escape even this argument. Consider for instance a pointer that can be set to all values between 0 and 1, where 0 and 1 are not possible values. That is, suppose that we have a state-space that is isomorphic to an open set of real numbers. Now suppose that we have a machine that sets the pointer to half the value that the pointer is set at when it emerges from the time machine.

Figure 2 [An extended description of figure 2 is in the supplement.]

Suppose the pointer starts at value \(I\). As before we can represent the combination of this initial position and all possible final positions by the line \(I\). Under the influence of the pointer coming out of the time machine the pointer value will develop to a value that equals half the value of the final value that it encountered. We can represent this development as the continuous deformation of line \(I\) into line \(L\), which is indicated by the arrows in figure 2 . This development is fully continuous. Points \(\langle x,y\rangle\) on line \(I\) represent the initial position \(x=I\) of the (young) pointer, and the position \(y\) of the older pointer as it emerges from the time machine. Points \(\langle x,y\rangle\) on line \(L\) represent the position \(x\) that the younger pointer should develop into, given that it encountered the older pointer emerging from the time machine set at position \(y\). Since the pointer is designed to develop to half the value of the pointer that it encounters, the line \(L\) corresponds to \(x=1/2 y\). We have consistency if there is some point such that it develops into that point, if it encounters that point. Thus, we have consistency if there is some point \(\langle x,y\rangle\) on line \(L\) such that \(x=y\). However, there is no such point: lines \(L\) and \(C\) do not intersect. Thus there is no consistent solution, despite the fact that the dynamics is fully continuous.

Of course if 0 were a possible value, \(L\) and \(C\) would intersect at 0. This is surprising and strange: adding one point to the set of possible values of a quantity here makes the difference between paradox and peace. One might be tempted to just add the extra point to the state-space in order to avoid problems. After all, one might say, surely no measurements could ever tell us whether the set of possible values includes that exact point or not. Unfortunately there can be good theoretical reasons for supposing that some quantity has a state-space that is open: the set of all possible speeds of massive objects in special relativity surely is an open set, since it includes all speeds up to, but not including, the speed of light. Quantities that have possible values that are not bounded also lead to counter examples to the presented fixed point argument. And it is not obvious to us why one should exclude such possibilities. So the argument that no constraints are needed is not fully general.

An interesting question of course is: exactly for which state-spaces must there be such fixed points? The arguments above depend on a well-known fixed point theorem (due to Schauder) that guarantees the existence of a fixed point for compact, convex state spaces. We do not know what subsequent extensions of this result imply regarding fixed points for a wider variety of systems, or whether there are other general results along these lines. (See Kutach 2003 for more on this issue.)

A further interesting question is whether this line of argument is sufficient to resolve Consistency (see also Dowe 2007). When they apply, these results establish the existence of a solution, such as the shade of uniform gray in the first example. But physicists routinely demand more than merely the existence of a solution, namely that solutions to the equations are stable—such that “small” changes of the initial state lead to “small” changes of the resulting trajectory. (Clarifying the two senses of “small” in this statement requires further work, specifying the relevant topology.) Stability in this sense underwrites the possibility of applying equations to real systems given our inability to fix initial states with indefinite precision. (See Fletcher 2020 for further discussion.) The fixed point theorems guarantee that for an initial state \(S_1\) there is a solution, but this solution may not be “close” to the solution for a nearby initial state, \(S'\). We are not aware of any proofs that the solutions guaranteed to exist by the fixed point theorems are also stable in this sense.

Time travel has recently been discussed quite extensively in the context of general relativity. General relativity places few constraints on the global structure of space and time. This flexibility leads to a possibility first described in print by Hermann Weyl:

Every world-point is the origin of the double-cone of the active future and the passive past [i.e., the two lobes of the light cone]. Whereas in the special theory of relativity these two portions are separated by an intervening region, it is certainly possible in the present case [i.e., general relativity] for the cone of the active future to overlap with that of the passive past; so that, in principle, it is possible to experience events now that will in part be an effect of my future resolves and actions. Moreover, it is not impossible for a world-line (in particular, that of my body), although it has a timelike direction at every point, to return to the neighborhood of a point which it has already once passed through. (Weyl 1918/1920 [1952: 274])

A time-like curve is simply a space-time trajectory such that the speed of light is never equaled or exceeded along this trajectory. Time-like curves represent possible trajectories of ordinary objects. In general relativity a curve that is everywhere timelike locally can nonetheless loop back on itself, forming a CTC. Weyl makes the point vividly in terms of the light cones: along such a curve, the future lobe of the light cone (the “active future”) intersects the past lobe of the light cone (the “passive past”). Traveling along such a curve one would never exceed the speed of light, and yet after a certain amount of (proper) time one would return to a point in space-time that one previously visited. Or, by staying close to such a CTC, one could come arbitrarily close to a point in space-time that one previously visited. General relativity, in a straightforward sense, allows time travel: there appear to be many space-times compatible with the fundamental equations of general relativity in which there are CTC’s. Space-time, for instance, could have a Minkowski metric everywhere, and yet have CTC’s everywhere by having the temporal dimension (topologically) rolled up as a circle. Or, one can have wormhole connections between different parts of space-time which allow one to enter “mouth \(A\)” of such a wormhole connection, travel through the wormhole, exit the wormhole at “mouth \(B\)” and re-enter “mouth \(A\)” again. CTCs can even arise when the spacetime is topologically \(\mathbb{R}^4\), due to the “tilting” of light cones produced by rotating matter (as in Gödel 1949’s spacetime).

General relativity thus appears to provide ample opportunity for time travel. Note that just because there are CTC’s in a space-time, this does not mean that one can get from any point in the space-time to any other point by following some future directed timelike curve—there may be insurmountable practical obstacles. In Gödel’s spacetime, it is the case that there are CTCs passing through every point in the spacetime. Yet these CTCs are not geodesics, so traversing them requires acceleration. Calculations of the minimal fuel required to travel along the appropriate curve should discourage any would-be time travelers (Malament 1984, 1985; Manchak 2011). But more generally CTCs may be confined to smaller regions; some parts of space-time can have CTC’s while other parts do not. Let us call the part of a space-time that has CTC’s the “time travel region” of that space-time, while calling the rest of that space-time the “normal region”. More precisely, the “time travel region” consists of all the space-time points \(p\) such that there exists a (non-zero length) timelike curve that starts at \(p\) and returns to \(p\). Now let us turn to examining space-times with CTC’s a bit more closely for potential problems.

In order to get a feeling for the sorts of implications that closed timelike curves can have, it may be useful to consider two simple models. In space-times with closed timelike curves the traditional initial value problem cannot be framed in the usual way. For it presupposes the existence of Cauchy surfaces, and if there are CTCs then no Cauchy surface exists. (A Cauchy surface is a spacelike surface such that every inextendable timelike curve crosses it exactly once. One normally specifies initial conditions by giving the conditions on such a surface.) Nonetheless, if the topological complexities of the manifold are appropriately localized, we can come quite close. Let us call an edgeless spacelike surface \(S\) a quasi-Cauchy surface if it divides the rest of the manifold into two parts such that

• every point in the manifold can be connected by a timelike curve to \(S\), and
• any timelike curve which connects a point in one region to a point in the other region intersects \(S\) exactly once.

It is obvious that a quasi-Cauchy surface must entirely inhabit the normal region of the space-time; if any point \(p\) of \(S\) is in the time travel region, then any timelike curve which intersects \(p\) can be extended to a timelike curve which intersects \(S\) near \(p\) again. In extreme cases of time travel, a model may have no normal region at all (e.g., Minkowski space-time rolled up like a cylinder in a time-like direction), in which case our usual notions of temporal precedence will not apply. But temporal anomalies like wormholes (and time machines) can be sufficiently localized to permit the existence of quasi-Cauchy surfaces.

Given a timelike orientation, a quasi-Cauchy surface unproblematically divides the manifold into its past (i.e., all points that can be reached by past-directed timelike curves from \(S)\) and its future (ditto mutatis mutandis ). If the whole past of \(S\) is in the normal region of the manifold, then \(S\) is a partial Cauchy surface : every inextendable timelike curve which exists to the past of \(S\) intersects \(S\) exactly once, but (if there is time travel in the future) not every inextendable timelike curve which exists to the future of \(S\) intersects \(S\). Now we can ask a particularly clear question: consider a manifold which contains a time travel region, but also has a partial Cauchy surface \(S\), such that all of the temporal funny business is to the future of \(S\). If all you could see were \(S\) and its past, you would not know that the space-time had any time travel at all. The question is: are there any constraints on the sort of data which can be put on \(S\) and continued to a global solution of the dynamics which are different from the constraints (if any) on the data which can be put on a Cauchy surface in a simply connected manifold and continued to a global solution? If there is time travel to our future, might we we able to tell this now, because of some implied oddity in the arrangement of present things?

It is not at all surprising that there might be constraints on the data which can be put on a locally space-like surface which passes through the time travel region: after all, we never think we can freely specify what happens on a space-like surface and on another such surface to its future, but in this case the surface at issue lies to its own future. But if there were particular constraints for data on a partial Cauchy surface then we would apparently need to have to rule out some sorts of otherwise acceptable states on \(S\) if there is to be time travel to the future of \(S\). We then might be able to establish that there will be no time travel in the future by simple inspection of the present state of the universe. As we will see, there is reason to suspect that such constraints on the partial Cauchy surface are non-generic. But we are getting ahead of ourselves: first let’s consider the effect of time travel on a very simple dynamics.

The simplest possible example is the Newtonian theory of perfectly elastic collisions among equally massive particles in one spatial dimension. The space-time is two-dimensional, so we can represent it initially as the Euclidean plane, and the dynamics is completely specified by two conditions. When particles are traveling freely, their world lines are straight lines in the space-time, and when two particles collide, they exchange momenta, so the collision looks like an “\(X\)” in space-time, with each particle changing its momentum at the impact. [ 2 ] The dynamics is purely local, in that one can check that a set of world-lines constitutes a model of the dynamics by checking that the dynamics is obeyed in every arbitrarily small region. It is also trivial to generate solutions from arbitrary initial data if there are no CTCs: given the initial positions and momenta of a set of particles, one simply draws a straight line from each particle in the appropriate direction and continues it indefinitely. Once all the lines are drawn, the worldline of each particle can be traced from collision to collision. The boundary value problem for this dynamics is obviously well-posed: any set of data at an instant yields a unique global solution, constructed by the method sketched above.

What happens if we change the topology of the space-time by hand to produce CTCs? The simplest way to do this is depicted in figure 3 : we cut and paste the space-time so it is no longer simply connected by identifying the line \(L-\) with the line \(L+\). Particles “going in” to \(L+\) from below “emerge” from \(L-\) , and particles “going in” to \(L-\) from below “emerge” from \(L+\).

Figure 3: Inserting CTCs by Cut and Paste. [An extended description of figure 3 is in the supplement.]

How is the boundary-value problem changed by this alteration in the space-time? Before the cut and paste, we can put arbitrary data on the simultaneity slice \(S\) and continue it to a unique solution. After the change in topology, \(S\) is no longer a Cauchy surface, since a CTC will never intersect it, but it is a partial Cauchy surface. So we can ask two questions. First, can arbitrary data on \(S\) always be continued to a global solution? Second, is that solution unique? If the answer to the first question is \(no\), then we have a backward-temporal constraint: the existence of the region with CTCs places constraints on what can happen on \(S\) even though that region lies completely to the future of \(S\). If the answer to the second question is \(no\), then we have an odd sort of indeterminism, analogous to the unwritten book: the complete physical state on \(S\) does not determine the physical state in the future, even though the local dynamics is perfectly deterministic and even though there is no other past edge to the space-time region in \(S\)’s future (i.e., there is nowhere else for boundary values to come from which could influence the state of the region).

In this case the answer to the first question is yes and to the second is no : there are no constraints on the data which can be put on \(S\), but those data are always consistent with an infinitude of different global solutions. The easy way to see that there always is a solution is to construct the minimal solution in the following way. Start drawing straight lines from \(S\) as required by the initial data. If a line hits \(L-\) from the bottom, just continue it coming out of the top of \(L+\) in the appropriate place, and if a line hits \(L+\) from the bottom, continue it emerging from \(L-\) at the appropriate place. Figure 4 represents the minimal solution for a single particle which enters the time-travel region from the left:

Figure 4: The Minimal Solution. [An extended description of figure 4 is in the supplement.]

The particle “travels back in time” three times. It is obvious that this minimal solution is a global solution, since the particle always travels inertially.

But the same initial state on \(S\) is also consistent with other global solutions. The new requirement imposed by the topology is just that the data going into \(L+\) from the bottom match the data coming out of \(L-\) from the top, and the data going into \(L-\) from the bottom match the data coming out of \(L+\) from the top. So we can add any number of vertical lines connecting \(L-\) and \(L+\) to a solution and still have a solution. For example, adding a few such lines to the minimal solution yields:

Figure 5: A Non-Minimal Solution. [An extended description of figure 5 is in the supplement.]

The particle now collides with itself twice: first before it reaches \(L+\) for the first time, and again shortly before it exits the CTC region. From the particle’s point of view, it is traveling to the right at a constant speed until it hits an older version of itself and comes to rest. It remains at rest until it is hit from the right by a younger version of itself, and then continues moving off, and the same process repeats later. It is clear that this is a global model of the dynamics, and that any number of distinct models could be generating by varying the number and placement of vertical lines.

Knowing the data on \(S\), then, gives us only incomplete information about how things will go for the particle. We know that the particle will enter the CTC region, and will reach \(L+\), we know that it will be the only particle in the universe, we know exactly where and with what speed it will exit the CTC region. But we cannot determine how many collisions the particle will undergo (if any), nor how long (in proper time) it will stay in the CTC region. If the particle were a clock, we could not predict what time it would indicate when exiting the region. Furthermore, the dynamics gives us no handle on what to think of the various possibilities: there are no probabilities assigned to the various distinct possible outcomes.

Changing the topology has changed the mathematics of the situation in two ways, which tend to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, \(S\) is no longer a Cauchy surface, so it is perhaps not surprising that data on \(S\) do not suffice to fix a unique global solution. But on the other hand, there is an added constraint: data “coming out” of \(L-\) must exactly match data “going in” to \(L+\), even though what comes out of \(L-\) helps to determine what goes into \(L+\). This added consistency constraint tends to cut down on solutions, although in this case the additional constraint is more than outweighed by the freedom to consider various sorts of data on \({L+}/{L-}\).

The fact that the extra freedom outweighs the extra constraint also points up one unexpected way that the supposed paradoxes of time travel may be overcome. Let’s try to set up a paradoxical situation using the little closed time loop above. If we send a single particle into the loop from the left and do nothing else, we know exactly where it will exit the right side of the time travel region. Now suppose we station someone at the other side of the region with the following charge: if the particle should come out on the right side, the person is to do something to prevent the particle from going in on the left in the first place. In fact, this is quite easy to do: if we send a particle in from the right, it seems that it can exit on the left and deflect the incoming left-hand particle.

Carrying on our reflection in this way, we further realize that if the particle comes out on the right, we might as well send it back in order to deflect itself from entering in the first place. So all we really need to do is the following: set up a perfectly reflecting particle mirror on the right-hand side of the time travel region, and launch the particle from the left so that— if nothing interferes with it —it will just barely hit \(L+\). Our paradox is now apparently complete. If, on the one hand, nothing interferes with the particle it will enter the time-travel region on the left, exit on the right, be reflected from the mirror, re-enter from the right, and come out on the left to prevent itself from ever entering. So if it enters, it gets deflected and never enters. On the other hand, if it never enters then nothing goes in on the left, so nothing comes out on the right, so nothing is reflected back, and there is nothing to deflect it from entering. So if it doesn’t enter, then there is nothing to deflect it and it enters. If it enters, then it is deflected and doesn’t enter; if it doesn’t enter then there is nothing to deflect it and it enters: paradox complete.

But at least one solution to the supposed paradox is easy to construct: just follow the recipe for constructing the minimal solution, continuing the initial trajectory of the particle (reflecting it the mirror in the obvious way) and then read of the number and trajectories of the particles from the resulting diagram. We get the result of figure 6 :

Figure 6: Resolving the “Paradox”. [An extended description of figure 6 is in the supplement.]

As we can see, the particle approaching from the left never reaches \(L+\): it is deflected first by a particle which emerges from \(L-\). But it is not deflected by itself , as the paradox suggests, it is deflected by another particle. Indeed, there are now four particles in the diagram: the original particle and three particles which are confined to closed time-like curves. It is not the leftmost particle which is reflected by the mirror, nor even the particle which deflects the leftmost particle; it is another particle altogether.

The paradox gets it traction from an incorrect presupposition. If there is only one particle in the world at \(S\) then there is only one particle which could participate in an interaction in the time travel region: the single particle would have to interact with its earlier (or later) self. But there is no telling what might come out of \(L-\): the only requirement is that whatever comes out must match what goes in at \(L+\). So if you go to the trouble of constructing a working time machine, you should be prepared for a different kind of disappointment when you attempt to go back and kill yourself: you may be prevented from entering the machine in the first place by some completely unpredictable entity which emerges from it. And once again a peculiar sort of indeterminism appears: if there are many self-consistent things which could prevent you from entering, there is no telling which is even likely to materialize. This is just like the case of the unwritten book: the book is never written, so nothing determines what fills its pages.

So when the freedom to put data on \(L-\) outweighs the constraint that the same data go into \(L+\), instead of paradox we get an embarrassment of riches: many solution consistent with the data on \(S\), or many possible books. To see a case where the constraint “outweighs” the freedom, we need to construct a very particular, and frankly artificial, dynamics and topology. Consider the space of all linear dynamics for a scalar field on a lattice. (The lattice can be though of as a simple discrete space-time.) We will depict the space-time lattice as a directed graph. There is to be a scalar field defined at every node of the graph, whose value at a given node depends linearly on the values of the field at nodes which have arrows which lead to it. Each edge of the graph can be assigned a weighting factor which determines how much the field at the input node contributes to the field at the output node. If we name the nodes by the letters a , b , c , etc., and the edges by their endpoints in the obvious way, then we can label the weighting factors by the edges they are associated with in an equally obvious way.

Suppose that the graph of the space-time lattice is acyclic , as in figure 7 . (A graph is Acyclic if one can not travel in the direction of the arrows and go in a loop.)

Figure 7: An Acyclic Lattice. [An extended description of figure 7 is in the supplement.]

It is easy to regard a set of nodes as the analog of a Cauchy surface, e.g., the set \(\{a, b, c\}\), and it is obvious if arbitrary data are put on those nodes the data will generate a unique solution in the future. [ 3 ] If the value of the field at node \(a\) is 3 and at node \(b\) is 7, then its value at node \(d\) will be \(3W_{ad}\) and its value at node \(e\) will be \(3W_{ae} + 7W_{be}\). By varying the weighting factors we can adjust the dynamics, but in an acyclic graph the future evolution of the field will always be unique.

Let us now again artificially alter the topology of the lattice to admit CTCs, so that the graph now is cyclic. One of the simplest such graphs is depicted in figure 8 : there are now paths which lead from \(z\) back to itself, e.g., \(z\) to \(y\) to \(z\).

Figure 8: Time Travel on a Lattice. [An extended description of figure 8 is in the supplement.]

Can we now put arbitrary data on \(v\) and \(w\), and continue that data to a global solution? Will the solution be unique?

In the generic case, there will be a solution and the solution will be unique. The equations for the value of the field at \(x, y\), and \(z\) are:

Solving these equations for \(z\) yields

which gives a unique value for \(z\) in the generic case. But looking at the space of all possible dynamics for this lattice (i.e., the space of all possible weighting factors), we find a singularity in the case where \(1-W_{zx}W_{xz} - W_{zy}W_{yz} = 0\). If we choose weighting factors in just this way, then arbitrary data at \(v\) and \(w\) cannot be continued to a global solution. Indeed, if the scalar field is everywhere non-negative, then this particular choice of dynamics puts ironclad constraints on the value of the field at \(v\) and \(w\): the field there must be zero (assuming \(W_{vx}\) and \(W_{wy}\) to be non-zero), and similarly all nodes in their past must have field value zero. If the field can take negative values, then the values at \(v\) and \(w\) must be so chosen that \(vW_{vx}W_{xz} = -wW_{wy}W_{yz}\). In either case, the field values at \(v\) and \(w\) are severely constrained by the existence of the CTC region even though these nodes lie completely to the past of that region. It is this sort of constraint which we find to be unlike anything which appears in standard physics.

Our toy models suggest three things. The first is that it may be impossible to prove in complete generality that arbitrary data on a partial Cauchy surface can always be continued to a global solution: our artificial case provides an example where it cannot. The second is that such odd constraints are not likely to be generic: we had to delicately fine-tune the dynamics to get a problem. The third is that the opposite problem, namely data on a partial Cauchy surface being consistent with many different global solutions, is likely to be generic: we did not have to do any fine-tuning to get this result.

This third point leads to a peculiar sort of indeterminism, illustrated by the case of the unwritten book: the entire state on \(S\) does not determine what will happen in the future even though the local dynamics is deterministic and there are no other “edges” to space-time from which data could influence the result. What happens in the time travel region is constrained but not determined by what happens on \(S\), and the dynamics does not even supply any probabilities for the various possibilities. The example of the photographic negative discussed in section 2, then, seems likely to be unusual, for in that case there is a unique fixed point for the dynamics, and the set-up plus the dynamical laws determine the outcome. In the generic case one would rather expect multiple fixed points, with no room for anything to influence, even probabilistically, which would be realized. (See the supplement on

Remarks and Limitations on the Toy Models .

It is ironic that time travel should lead generically not to contradictions or to constraints (in the normal region) but to underdetermination of what happens in the time travel region by what happens everywhere else (an underdetermination tied neither to a probabilistic dynamics nor to a free edge to space-time). The traditional objection to time travel is that it leads to contradictions: there is no consistent way to complete an arbitrarily constructed story about how the time traveler intends to act. Instead, though, it appears that the more significant problem is underdetermination: the story can be consistently completed in many different ways.

Echeverria, Klinkhammer, and Thorne (1991) considered the case of 3-dimensional single hard spherical ball that can go through a single time travel wormhole so as to collide with its younger self.

Figure 9 [An extended description of figure 9 is in the supplement.]

The threat of paradox in this case arises in the following form. Consider the initial trajectory of a ball as it approaches the time travel region. For some initial trajectories, the ball does not undergo a collision before reaching mouth 1, but upon exiting mouth 2 it will collide with its earlier self. This leads to a contradiction if the collision is strong enough to knock the ball off its trajectory and deflect it from entering mouth 1. Of course, the Wheeler-Feynman strategy is to look for a “glancing blow” solution: a collision which will produce exactly the (small) deviation in trajectory of the earlier ball that produces exactly that collision. Are there always such solutions? [ 4 ]

Echeverria, Klinkhammer & Thorne found a large class of initial trajectories that have consistent “glancing blow” continuations, and found none that do not (but their search was not completely general). They did not produce a rigorous proof that every initial trajectory has a consistent continuation, but suggested that it is very plausible that every initial trajectory has a consistent continuation. That is to say, they have made it very plausible that, in the billiard ball wormhole case, the time travel structure of such a wormhole space-time does not result in constraints on states on spacelike surfaces in the non-time travel region.

In fact, as one might expect from our discussion in the previous section, they found the opposite problem from that of inconsistency: they found underdetermination. For a large class of initial trajectories there are multiple different consistent “glancing blow” continuations of that trajectory (many of which involve multiple wormhole traversals). For example, if one initially has a ball that is traveling on a trajectory aimed straight between the two mouths, then one obvious solution is that the ball passes between the two mouths and never time travels. But another solution is that the younger ball gets knocked into mouth 1 exactly so as to come out of mouth 2 and produce that collision. Echeverria et al. do not note the possibility (which we pointed out in the previous section) of the existence of additional balls in the time travel region. We conjecture (but have no proof) that for every initial trajectory of \(A\) there are some, and generically many, multiple-ball continuations.

Friedman, Morris, et al. (1990) examined the case of source-free non-self-interacting scalar fields traveling through such a time travel wormhole and found that no constraints on initial conditions in the non-time travel region are imposed by the existence of such time travel wormholes. In general there appear to be no known counter examples to the claim that in “somewhat realistic” time-travel space-times with a partial Cauchy surface there are no constraints imposed on the state on such a partial Cauchy surface by the existence of CTC’s. (See, e.g., Friedman & Morris 1991; Thorne 1994; Earman 1995; Earman, Smeenk, & Wüthrich 2009; and Dowe 2007.)

How about the issue of constraints in the time travel region \(T\)? Prima facie , constraints in such a region would not appear to be surprising. But one might still expect that there should be no constraints on states on a spacelike surface, provided one keeps the surface “small enough”. In the physics literature the following question has been asked: for any point \(p\) in \(T\), and any space-like surface \(S\) that includes \(p\) is there a neighborhood \(E\) of \(p\) in \(S\) such that any solution on \(E\) can be extended to a solution on the whole space-time? With respect to this question, there are some simple models in which one has this kind of extendability of local solutions to global ones, and some simple models in which one does not have such extendability, with no clear general pattern. The technical mathematical problems are amplified by the more conceptual problem of what it might mean to say that one could create a situation which forces the creation of closed timelike curves. (See, e.g., Yurtsever 1990; Friedman, Morris, et al. 1990; Novikov 1992; Earman 1995; and Earman, Smeenk, & Wüthrich 2009). What are we to think of all of this?

The toy models above all treat billiard balls, fields, and other objects propagating through a background spacetime with CTCs. Even if we can show that a consistent solution exists, there is a further question: what kind of matter and dynamics could generate CTCs to begin with? There are various solutions of Einstein’s equations with CTCs, but how do these exotic spacetimes relate to the models actually used in describing the world? In other words, what positive reasons might we have to take CTCs seriously as a feature of the actual universe, rather than an exotic possibility of primarily mathematical interest?

We should distinguish two different kinds of “possibility” that we might have in mind in posing such questions (following Stein 1970). First, we can consider a solution as a candidate cosmological model, describing the (large-scale gravitational degrees of freedom of the) entire universe. The case for ruling out spacetimes with CTCs as potential cosmological models strikes us as, surprisingly, fairly weak. Physicists used to simply rule out solutions with CTCs as unreasonable by fiat, due to the threat of paradoxes, which we have dismantled above. But it is also challenging to make an observational case. Observations tell us very little about global features, such as the existence of CTCs, because signals can only reach an observer from a limited region of spacetime, called the past light cone. Our past light cone—and indeed the collection of all the past light cones for possible observers in a given spacetime—can be embedded in spacetimes with quite different global features (Malament 1977, Manchak 2009). This undercuts the possibility of using observations to constrain global topology, including (among other things) ruling out the existence of CTCs.

Yet the case in favor of taking cosmological models with CTCs seriously is also not particularly strong. Some solutions used to describe black holes, which are clearly relevant in a variety of astrophysical contexts, include CTCs. But the question of whether the CTCs themselves play an essential representational role is subtle: the CTCs arise in the maximal extensions of these solutions, and can plausibly be regarded as extraneous to successful applications. Furthermore, many of the known solutions with CTCs have symmetries, raising the possibility that CTCs are not a stable or robust feature. Slight departures from symmetry may lead to a solution without CTCs, suggesting that the CTCs may be an artifact of an idealized model.

The second sense of possibility regards whether “reasonable” initial conditions can be shown to lead to, or not to lead to, the formation of CTCs. As with the toy models above, suppose that we have a partial Cauchy surface \(S\), such that all the temporal funny business lies to the future. Rather than simply assuming that there is a region with CTCs to the future, we can ask instead whether it is possible to create CTCs by manipulating matter in the initial, well-behaved region—that is, whether it is possible to build a time machine. Several physicists have pursued “chronology protection theorems” aiming to show that the dynamics of general relativity (or some other aspects of physics) rules this out, and to clarify why this is the case. The proof of such a theorem would justify neglecting solutions with CTCs as a source of insight into the nature of time in the actual world. But as of yet there are several partial results that do not fully settle the question. One further intriguing possibility is that even if general relativity by itself does protect chronology, it may not be possible to formulate a sensible theory describing matter and fields in solutions with CTCs. (See SEP entry on Time Machines; Smeenk and Wüthrich 2011 for more.)

There is a different question regarding the limitations of these toy models. The toy models and related examples show that there are consistent solutions for simple systems in the presence of CTCs. As usual we have made the analysis tractable by building toy models, selecting only a few dynamical degrees of freedom and tracking their evolution. But there is a large gap between the systems we have described and the time travel stories they evoke, with Kurt traveling along a CTC with murderous intentions. In particular, many features of the manifest image of time are tied to the thermodynamical properties of macroscopic systems. Rovelli (unpublished) considers a extremely simple system to illustrate the problem: can a clock move along a CTC? A clock consists of something in periodic motion, such as a pendulum bob, and something that counts the oscillations, such as an escapement mechanism. The escapement mechanism cannot work without friction; this requires dissipation and increasing entropy. For a clock that counts oscillations as it moves along a time-like trajectory, the entropy must be a monotonically increasing function. But that is obviously incompatible with the clock returning to precisely the same state at some future time as it completes a loop. The point generalizes, obviously, to imply that anything like a human, with memory and agency, cannot move along a CTC.

Since it is not obvious that one can rid oneself of all constraints in realistic models, let us examine the argument that time travel is implausible, and we should think it unlikely to exist in our world, in so far as it implies such constraints. The argument goes something like the following. In order to satisfy such constraints one needs some pre-established divine harmony between the global (time travel) structure of space-time and the distribution of particles and fields on space-like surfaces in it. But it is not plausible that the actual world, or any world even remotely like ours, is constructed with divine harmony as part of the plan. In fact, one might argue, we have empirical evidence that conditions in any spatial region can vary quite arbitrarily. So we have evidence that such constraints, whatever they are, do not in fact exist in our world. So we have evidence that there are no closed time-like lines in our world or one remotely like it. We will now examine this argument in more detail by presenting four possible responses, with counterresponses, to this argument.

Response 1. There is nothing implausible or new about such constraints. For instance, if the universe is spatially closed, there has to be enough matter to produce the needed curvature, and this puts constraints on the matter distribution on a space-like hypersurface. Thus global space-time structure can quite unproblematically constrain matter distributions on space-like hypersurfaces in it. Moreover we have no realistic idea what these constraints look like, so we hardly can be said to have evidence that they do not obtain.

Counterresponse 1. Of course there are constraining relations between the global structure of space-time and the matter in it. The Einstein equations relate curvature of the manifold to the matter distribution in it. But what is so strange and implausible about the constraints imposed by the existence of closed time-like curves is that these constraints in essence have nothing to do with the Einstein equations. When investigating such constraints one typically treats the particles and/or field in question as test particles and/or fields in a given space-time, i.e., they are assumed not to affect the metric of space-time in any way. In typical space-times without closed time-like curves this means that one has, in essence, complete freedom of matter distribution on a space-like hypersurface. (See response 2 for some more discussion of this issue). The constraints imposed by the possibility of time travel have a quite different origin and are implausible. In the ordinary case there is a causal interaction between matter and space-time that results in relations between global structure of space-time and the matter distribution in it. In the time travel case there is no such causal story to be told: there simply has to be some pre-established harmony between the global space-time structure and the matter distribution on some space-like surfaces. This is implausible.

Response 2. Constraints upon matter distributions are nothing new. For instance, Maxwell’s equations constrain electric fields \(\boldsymbol{E}\) on an initial surface to be related to the (simultaneous) charge density distribution \(\varrho\) by the equation \(\varrho = \text{div}(\boldsymbol{E})\). (If we assume that the \(E\) field is generated solely by the charge distribution, this conditions amounts to requiring that the \(E\) field at any point in space simply be the one generated by the charge distribution according to Coulomb’s inverse square law of electrostatics.) This is not implausible divine harmony. Such constraints can hold as a matter of physical law. Moreover, if we had inferred from the apparent free variation of conditions on spatial regions that there could be no such constraints we would have mistakenly inferred that \(\varrho = \text{div}(\boldsymbol{E})\) could not be a law of nature.

Counterresponse 2. The constraints imposed by the existence of closed time-like lines are of quite a different character from the constraint imposed by \(\varrho = \text{div}(\boldsymbol{E})\). The constraints imposed by \(\varrho = \text{div}(\boldsymbol{E})\) on the state on a space-like hypersurface are:

• local constraints (i.e., to check whether the constraint holds in a region you just need to see whether it holds at each point in the region),
• quite independent of the global space-time structure,
• quite independent of how the space-like surface in question is embedded in a given space-time, and
• very simply and generally stateable.

On the other hand, the consistency constraints imposed by the existence of closed time-like curves (i) are not local, (ii) are dependent on the global structure of space-time, (iii) depend on the location of the space-like surface in question in a given space-time, and (iv) appear not to be simply stateable other than as the demand that the state on that space-like surface embedded in such and such a way in a given space-time, do not lead to inconsistency. On some views of laws (e.g., David Lewis’ view) this plausibly implies that such constraints, even if they hold, could not possibly be laws. But even if one does not accept such a view of laws, one could claim that the bizarre features of such constraints imply that it is implausible that such constraints hold in our world or in any world remotely like ours.

Response 3. It would be strange if there are constraints in the non-time travel region. It is not strange if there are constraints in the time travel region. They should be explained in terms of the strange, self-interactive, character of time travel regions. In this region there are time-like trajectories from points to themselves. Thus the state at such a point, in such a region, will, in a sense, interact with itself. It is a well-known fact that systems that interact with themselves will develop into an equilibrium state, if there is such an equilibrium state, or else will develop towards some singularity. Normally, of course, self-interaction isn’t true instantaneous self-interaction, but consists of a feed-back mechanism that takes time. But in time travel regions something like true instantaneous self-interaction occurs. This explains why constraints on states occur in such time travel regions: the states “ ab initio ” have to be “equilibrium states”. Indeed in a way this also provides some picture of why indeterminism occurs in time travel regions: at the onset of self-interaction states can fork into different equi-possible equilibrium states.

Counterresponse 3. This is explanation by woolly analogy. It all goes to show that time travel leads to such bizarre consequences that it is unlikely that it occurs in a world remotely like ours.

Response 4. All of the previous discussion completely misses the point. So far we have been taking the space-time structure as given, and asked the question whether a given time travel space-time structure imposes constraints on states on (parts of) space-like surfaces. However, space-time and matter interact. Suppose that one is in a space-time with closed time-like lines, such that certain counterfactual distributions of matter on some neighborhood of a point \(p\) are ruled out if one holds that space-time structure fixed. One might then ask

Why does the actual state near \(p\) in fact satisfy these constraints? By what divine luck or plan is this local state compatible with the global space-time structure? What if conditions near \(p\) had been slightly different?

And one might take it that the lack of normal answers to these questions indicates that it is very implausible that our world, or any remotely like it, is such a time travel universe. However the proper response to these question is the following. There are no constraints in any significant sense. If they hold they hold as a matter of accidental fact, not of law. There is no more explanation of them possible than there is of any contingent fact. Had conditions in a neighborhood of \(p\) been otherwise, the global structure of space-time would have been different. So what? The only question relevant to the issue of constraints is whether an arbitrary state on an arbitrary spatial surface \(S\) can always be embedded into a space-time such that that state on \(S\) consistently extends to a solution on the entire space-time.

But we know the answer to that question. A well-known theorem in general relativity says the following: any initial data set on a three dimensional manifold \(S\) with positive definite metric has a unique embedding into a maximal space-time in which \(S\) is a Cauchy surface (see, e.g., Geroch & Horowitz 1979: 284 for more detail), i.e., there is a unique largest space-time which has \(S\) as a Cauchy surface and contains a consistent evolution of the initial value data on \(S\). Now since \(S\) is a Cauchy surface this space-time does not have closed time like curves. But it may have extensions (in which \(S\) is not a Cauchy surface) which include closed timelike curves, indeed it may be that any maximal extension of it would include closed timelike curves. (This appears to be the case for extensions of states on certain surfaces of Taub-NUT space-times. See Earman, Smeenk, & Wüthrich 2009). But these extensions, of course, will be consistent. So properly speaking, there are no constraints on states on space-like surfaces. Nonetheless the space-time in which these are embedded may or may not include closed time-like curves.

Counterresponse 4. This, in essence, is the stonewalling answer which we indicated in section 1. However, whether or not you call the constraints imposed by a given space-time on distributions of matter on certain space-like surfaces “genuine constraints”, whether or not they can be considered lawlike, and whether or not they need to be explained, the existence of such constraints can still be used to argue that time travel worlds are so bizarre that it is implausible that our world or any world remotely like ours is a time travel world.

Suppose that one is in a time travel world. Suppose that given the global space-time structure of this world, there are constraints imposed upon, say, the state of motion of a ball on some space-like surface when it is treated as a test particle, i.e., when it is assumed that the ball does not affect the metric properties of the space-time it is in. (There is lots of other matter that, via the Einstein equation, corresponds exactly to the curvature that there is everywhere in this time travel worlds.) Now a real ball of course does have some effect on the metric of the space-time it is in. But let us consider a ball that is so small that its effect on the metric is negligible. Presumably it will still be the case that certain states of this ball on that space-like surface are not compatible with the global time travel structure of this universe.

This means that the actual distribution of matter on such a space-like surface can be extended into a space-time with closed time-like lines, but that certain counterfactual distributions of matter on this space-like surface can not be extended into the same space-time. But note that the changes made in the matter distribution (when going from the actual to the counterfactual distribution) do not in any non-negligible way affect the metric properties of the space-time. (Recall that the changes only effect test particles.) Thus the reason why the global time travel properties of the counterfactual space-time have to be significantly different from the actual space-time is not that there are problems with metric singularities or alterations in the metric that force significant global changes when we go to the counterfactual matter distribution. The reason that the counterfactual space-time has to be different is that in the counterfactual world the ball’s initial state of motion starting on the space-like surface, could not “meet up” in a consistent way with its earlier self (could not be consistently extended) if we were to let the global structure of the counterfactual space-time be the same as that of the actual space-time. Now, it is not bizarre or implausible that there is a counterfactual dependence of manifold structure, even of its topology, on matter distributions on spacelike surfaces. For instance, certain matter distributions may lead to singularities, others may not. We may indeed in some sense have causal power over the topology of the space-time we live in. But this power normally comes via the Einstein equations. But it is bizarre to think that there could be a counterfactual dependence of global space-time structure on the arrangement of certain tiny bits of matter on some space-like surface, where changes in that arrangement by assumption do not affect the metric anywhere in space-time in any significant way . It is implausible that we live in such a world, or that a world even remotely like ours is like that.

Let us illustrate this argument in a different way by assuming that wormhole time travel imposes constraints upon the states of people prior to such time travel, where the people have so little mass/energy that they have negligible effect, via the Einstein equation, on the local metric properties of space-time. Do you think it more plausible that we live in a world where wormhole time travel occurs but it only occurs when people’s states are such that these local states happen to combine with time travel in such a way that nobody ever succeeds in killing their younger self, or do you think it more plausible that we are not in a wormhole time travel world? [ 5 ]

An alternative approach to time travel (initiated by Deutsch 1991) abstracts away from the idealized toy models described above. [ 6 ] This computational approach considers instead the evolution of bits (simple physical systems with two discrete states) through a network of interactions, which can be represented by a circuit diagram with gates corresponding to the interactions. Motivated by the possibility of CTCs, Deutsch proposed adding a new kind of channel that connects the output of a given gate back to its input —in essence, a backwards-time step. More concretely, given a gate that takes \(n\) bits as input, we can imagine taking some number \(i \lt n\) of these bits through a channel that loops back and then do double-duty as inputs. Consistency requires that the state of these \(i\) bits is the same for output and input. (We will consider an illustration of this kind of system in the next section.) Working through examples of circuit diagrams with a CTC channel leads to similar treatments of Consistency and Underdetermination as the discussion above (see, e.g., Wallace 2012: § 10.6). But the approach offers two new insights (both originally due to Deutsch): the Easy Knowledge paradox, and a particularly clear extension to time travel in quantum mechanics.

A computer equipped with a CTC channel can exploit the need to find consistent evolution to solve remarkably hard problems. (This is quite different than the first idea that comes to mind to enhance computational power: namely to just devote more time to a computation, and then send the result back on the CTC to an earlier state.) The gate in a circuit incorporating a CTC implements a function from the input bits to the output bits, under the constraint that the output and input match the i bits going through the CTC channel. This requires, in effect, finding the fixed point of the relevant function. Given the generality of the model, there are few limits on the functions that could be implemented on the CTC circuit. Nature has to solve a hard computational problem just to ensure consistent evolution. This can then be extended to other complex computational problems—leading, more precisely, to solutions of NP -complete problems in polynomial time (see Aaronson 2013: Chapter 20 for an overview and further references). The limits imposed by computational complexity are an essential part of our epistemic situation, and computers with CTCs would radically change this.

We now turn to the application of the computational approach to the quantum physics of time travel (see Deutsch 1991; Deutsch & Lockwood 1994). By contrast with the earlier discussions of constraints in classical systems, they claim to show that time travel never imposes any constraints on the pre-time travel state of quantum systems. The essence of this account is as follows. [ 7 ]

A quantum system starts in state \(S_1\), interacts with its older self, after the interaction is in state \(S_2\), time travels while developing into state \(S_3\), then interacts with its younger self, and ends in state \(S_4\) (see figure 10 ).

Figure 10 [An extended description of figure 10 is in the supplement.]

Deutsch assumes that the set of possible states of this system are the mixed states, i.e., are represented by the density matrices over the Hilbert space of that system. Deutsch then shows that for any initial state \(S_1\), any unitary interaction between the older and younger self, and any unitary development during time travel, there is a consistent solution, i.e., there is at least one pair of states \(S_2\) and \(S_3\) such that when \(S_1\) interacts with \(S_3\) it will change to state \(S_2\) and \(S_2\) will then develop into \(S_3\). The states \(S_2, S_3\) and \(S_4\) will typically be not be pure states, i.e., will be non-trivial mixed states, even if \(S_1\) is pure. In order to understand how this leads to interpretational problems let us give an example. Consider a system that has a two dimensional Hilbert space with as a basis the states \(\vc{+}\) and \(\vc{-}\). Let us suppose that when state \(\vc{+}\) of the young system encounters state \(\vc{+}\) of the older system, they interact and the young system develops into state \(\vc{-}\) and the old system remains in state \(\vc{+}\). In obvious notation:

Similarly, suppose that:

Let us furthermore assume that there is no development of the state of the system during time travel, i.e., that \(\vc{+}_2\) develops into \(\vc{+}_3\), and that \(\vc{-}_2\) develops into \(\vc{-}_3\).

Now, if the only possible states of the system were \(\vc{+}\) and \(\vc{-}\) (i.e., if there were no superpositions or mixtures of these states), then there is a constraint on initial states: initial state \(\vc{+}_1\) is impossible. For if \(\vc{+}_1\) interacts with \(\vc{+}_3\) then it will develop into \(\vc{-}_2\), which, during time travel, will develop into \(\vc{-}_3\), which inconsistent with the assumed state \(\vc{+}_3\). Similarly if \(\vc{+}_1\) interacts with \(\vc{-}_3\) it will develop into \(\vc{+}_2\), which will then develop into \(\vc{+}_3\) which is also inconsistent. Thus the system can not start in state \(\vc{+}_1\).

But, says Deutsch, in quantum mechanics such a system can also be in any mixture of the states \(\vc{+}\) and \(\vc{-}\). Suppose that the older system, prior to the interaction, is in a state \(S_3\) which is an equal mixture of 50% \(\vc{+}_3\) and 50% \(\vc{-}_3\). Then the younger system during the interaction will develop into a mixture of 50% \(\vc{+}_2\) and 50% \(\vc{-}_2\), which will then develop into a mixture of 50% \(\vc{+}_3\) and 50% \(\vc{-}_3\), which is consistent! More generally Deutsch uses a fixed point theorem to show that no matter what the unitary development during interaction is, and no matter what the unitary development during time travel is, for any state \(S_1\) there is always a state \(S_3\) (which typically is not a pure state) which causes \(S_1\) to develop into a state \(S_2\) which develops into that state \(S_3\). Thus quantum mechanics comes to the rescue: it shows in all generality that no constraints on initial states are needed!

One might wonder why Deutsch appeals to mixed states: will superpositions of states \(\vc{+}\) and \(\vc{-}\) not suffice? Unfortunately such an idea does not work. Suppose again that the initial state is \(\vc{+}_1\). One might suggest that that if state \(S_3\) is

one will obtain a consistent development. For one might think that when initial state \(\vc{+}_1\) encounters the superposition

it will develop into superposition

and that this in turn will develop into

as desired. However this is not correct. For initial state \(\vc{+}_1\) when it encounters

will develop into the entangled state

In so far as one can speak of the state of the young system after this interaction, it is in the mixture of 50% \(\vc{+}_2\) and 50% \(\vc{-}_2\), not in the superposition

So Deutsch does need his recourse to mixed states.

This clarification of why Deutsch needs his mixtures does however indicate a serious worry about the simplifications that are part of Deutsch’s account. After the interaction the old and young system will (typically) be in an entangled state. Although for purposes of a measurement on one of the two systems one can say that this system is in a mixed state, one can not represent the full state of the two systems by specifying the mixed state of each separate part, as there are correlations between observables of the two systems that are not represented by these two mixed states, but are represented in the joint entangled state. But if there really is an entangled state of the old and young systems directly after the interaction, how is one to represent the subsequent development of this entangled state? Will the state of the younger system remain entangled with the state of the older system as the younger system time travels and the older system moves on into the future? On what space-like surfaces are we to imagine this total entangled state to be? At this point it becomes clear that there is no obvious and simple way to extend elementary non-relativistic quantum mechanics to space-times with closed time-like curves: we apparently need to characterize not just the entanglement between two systems, but entanglement relative to specific spacetime descriptions.

How does Deutsch avoid these complications? Deutsch assumes a mixed state \(S_3\) of the older system prior to the interaction with the younger system. He lets it interact with an arbitrary pure state \(S_1\) younger system. After this interaction there is an entangled state \(S'\) of the two systems. Deutsch computes the mixed state \(S_2\) of the younger system which is implied by this entangled state \(S'\). His demand for consistency then is just that this mixed state \(S_2\) develops into the mixed state \(S_3\). Now it is not at all clear that this is a legitimate way to simplify the problem of time travel in quantum mechanics. But even if we grant him this simplification there is a problem: how are we to understand these mixtures?

If we take an ignorance interpretation of mixtures we run into trouble. For suppose that we assume that in each individual case each older system is either in state \(\vc{+}_3\) or in state \(\vc{-}_3\) prior to the interaction. Then we regain our paradox. Deutsch instead recommends the following, many worlds, picture of mixtures. Suppose we start with state \(\vc{+}_1\) in all worlds. In some of the many worlds the older system will be in the \(\vc{+}_3\) state, let us call them A -worlds, and in some worlds, B -worlds, it will be in the \(\vc{-}_3\) state. Thus in A -worlds after interaction we will have state \(\vc{-}_2\) , and in B -worlds we will have state \(\vc{+}_2\). During time travel the \(\vc{-}_2\) state will remain the same, i.e., turn into state \(\vc{-}_3\), but the systems in question will travel from A -worlds to B -worlds. Similarly the \(\vc{+}\) \(_2\) states will travel from the B -worlds to the A -worlds, thus preserving consistency.

Now whatever one thinks of the merits of many worlds interpretations, and of this understanding of it applied to mixtures, in the end one does not obtain genuine time travel in Deutsch’s account. The systems in question travel from one time in one world to another time in another world, but no system travels to an earlier time in the same world. (This is so at least in the normal sense of the word “world”, the sense that one means when, for instance, one says “there was, and will be, only one Elvis Presley in this world.”) Thus, even if it were a reasonable view, it is not quite as interesting as it may have initially seemed. (See Wallace 2012 for a more sympathetic treatment, that explores several further implications of accepting time travel in conjunction with the many worlds interpretation.)

We close by acknowledging that Deutsch’s starting point—the claim that this computational model captures the essential features of quantum systems in a spacetime with CTCs—has been the subject of some debate. Several physicists have pursued a quite different treatment of evolution of quantum systems through CTC’s, based on considering the “post-selected” state (see Lloyd et al. 2011). Their motivations for implementing the consistency condition in terms of the post-selected state reflects a different stance towards quantum foundations. A different line of argument aims to determine whether Deutsch’s treatment holds as an appropriate limiting case of a more rigorous treatment, such as quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. For example, Verch (2020) establishes several results challenging the assumption that Deutsch’s treatment is tied to the presence of CTC’s, or that it is compatible with the entanglement structure of quantum fields.

What remains of the grandfather paradox in general relativistic time travel worlds is the fact that in some cases the states on edgeless spacelike surfaces are “overconstrained”, so that one has less than the usual freedom in specifying conditions on such a surface, given the time-travel structure, and in some cases such states are “underconstrained”, so that states on edgeless space-like surfaces do not determine what happens elsewhere in the way that they usually do, given the time travel structure. There can also be mixtures of those two types of cases. The extent to which states are overconstrained and/or underconstrained in realistic models is as yet unclear, though it would be very surprising if neither obtained. The extant literature has primarily focused on the problem of overconstraint, since that, often, either is regarded as a metaphysical obstacle to the possibility time travel, or as an epistemological obstacle to the plausibility of time travel in our world. While it is true that our world would be quite different from the way we normally think it is if states were overconstrained, underconstraint seems at least as bizarre as overconstraint. Nonetheless, neither directly rules out the possibility of time travel.

If time travel entailed contradictions then the issue would be settled. And indeed, most of the stories employing time travel in popular culture are logically incoherent: one cannot “change” the past to be different from what it was, since the past (like the present and the future) only occurs once. But if the only requirement demanded is logical coherence, then it seems all too easy. A clever author can devise a coherent time-travel scenario in which everything happens just once and in a consistent way. This is just too cheap: logical coherence is a very weak condition, and many things we take to be metaphysically impossible are logically coherent. For example, it involves no logical contradiction to suppose that water is not molecular, but if both chemistry and Kripke are right it is a metaphysical impossibility. We have been interested not in logical possibility but in physical possibility. But even so, our conditions have been relatively weak: we have asked only whether time-travel is consistent with the universal validity of certain fundamental physical laws and with the notion that the physical state on a surface prior to the time travel region be unconstrained. It is perfectly possible that the physical laws obey this condition, but still that time travel is not metaphysically possible because of the nature of time itself. Consider an analogy. Aristotle believed that water is homoiomerous and infinitely divisible: any bit of water could be subdivided, in principle, into smaller bits of water. Aristotle’s view contains no logical contradiction. It was certainly consistent with Aristotle’s conception of water that it be homoiomerous, so this was, for him, a conceptual possibility. But if chemistry is right, Aristotle was wrong both about what water is like and what is possible for it. It can’t be infinitely divided, even though no logical or conceptual analysis would reveal that.

Similarly, even if all of our consistency conditions can be met, it does not follow that time travel is physically possible, only that some specific physical considerations cannot rule it out. The only serious proof of the possibility of time travel would be a demonstration of its actuality. For if we agree that there is no actual time travel in our universe, the supposition that there might have been involves postulating a substantial difference from actuality, a difference unlike in kind from anything we could know if firsthand. It is unclear to us exactly what the content of possible would be if one were to either maintain or deny the possibility of time travel in these circumstances, unless one merely meant that the possibility is not ruled out by some delineated set of constraints. As the example of Aristotle’s theory of water shows, conceptual and logical “possibility” do not entail possibility in a full-blooded sense. What exactly such a full-blooded sense would be in case of time travel, and whether one could have reason to believe it to obtain, remain to us obscure.

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• Echeverria, Fernando, Gunnar Klinkhammer, and Kip S. Thorne, 1991, “Billiard Balls in Wormhole Spacetimes with Closed Timelike Curves: Classical Theory”, Physical Review D , 44(4): 1077–1099. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.44.1077
• Effingham, Nikk, 2020, Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198842507.001.0001
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Adlam, Emily, unpublished, “ Is There Causation in Fundamental Physics? New Insights from Process Matrices and Quantum Causal Modelling ”, 2022, arXiv: 2208.02721. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.2208.02721
• Rovelli, Carlo, unpublished, “ Can We Travel to the Past? Irreversible Physics along Closed Timelike Curves ”, arXiv: 1912.04702. doi:10.48550/ARXIV.1912.04702

causation: backward | determinism: causal | quantum mechanics | quantum mechanics: retrocausality | space and time: being and becoming in modern physics | time machines | time travel

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The learning network | if you could time-travel, where would you go.

If You Could Time-Travel, Where Would You Go?

Critics’ picks: ‘back to the future’.

A. O. Scott explores the existential predicaments that arise in Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 time-travel adventure.

Questions about issues in the news for students 13 and older.

• See all Student Opinion »

Inspired by the fact that today is the day we finally catch up to the tomorrow depicted in “Back to the Future, Part II,” we wonder, if you could time-travel to any year or era past or future, where would you go? Why?

To give you a few ideas, we found this article from last March about “ 5 Ways to Time-Travel (and Party) in New York ”:

When William Faulkner famously mused on the power of history — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he wrote — he probably didn’t have New York foremost in mind. The city, not known for its ability to hold on to old and historic spaces, has often directed its energy manically to the future. But in 2015, a contrarian spirit lives on in the city, and anyone with a passion for the past can plunge into almost any historical period for just a few dollars — and, in some of the more theatrical parties, by also investing in some decent vintage duds.

The article goes on to describe a number of events around the city that celebrate eras and cultures, including…

• The speakeasy era (1920s and ’30s)
• The Victorian era (mid- to late 1800s)
• The Revolutionary War era (1770s)
• The “Mad Men” era (1960s)

Students: Tell us …

— If you could go back or forward in time to make a visit, where would you go, and why?

— In general, are you more interested in visiting the past or visiting the future? Why?

— What do you imagine you might encounter in this visit? What questions do you have?

— What gift(s) for the people of this new time and place would you most like to take on this visit? Why?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment below. All comments are moderated by Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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Time Travel Essay Examples

Comparative analysis of films about time travel: time bandits and back to the future.

Time Bandits directed by Terry Gilliam and Back to the Future directed by Robert Zemeckis are both 1980’s films about time travel, but that’s where the similarities stop. Time Bandits, released in 1981 tells the story of a boy named Kevin and his adventures through...

Mary Pope Osborne’s Magic Tree House and the Theory of Time Travel

Is time travel real? Mary Pope Osborne is the author of the renowned 'Magic Tree House' series. In which Mary writes about a brother (Jack) and sister (Annie) duo, who go on adventures through time to inform the youth who read light novels about that...

Time Travel Narrative and Its Features

Time travel can be viewed as a child's play. Being categorized as science fiction, the concept of this art has been universally known as the act of physically traveling to a different period and tends to involve some sort of transportation machine. Time travel was...

Discussion of Whether Time Travel is Ethical

Time travel is ethical because we can learn about the past, solve unsolved crimes, and visit lost loved ones. Time travel has shown that can be very helpful in most cases. Lacking knowledge about how the future will evolve given changes to the past is...

The Paradoxical Effects of Time Travel

The issue of travelling in time is not new because it has interested people for centuries and continues to be interesting to us today. However, in spite of people's high concern and eagerness to uncover time's mysteries, it still keeps its secrets as it did...

The Hypothesized Nature of Time Travel

Time travel is one of the best/the most interesting topic in science fiction. Time travel is usually depicted in films such as Back to the Future, and Star Trek, you will see people hopping in strange contraptions or using a device that will take them...

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