Mathematician Reveals Strange New Enigmas for Time Travelers
First, the good news for time travelers. Physicists have long recognized that nothing in the laws of physics specifically forbids time travel. As far as they can tell, these laws don’t care whether time is running forwards or backwards; they work just as well either way.
That recognition has spawned numerous studies, some of them surprisingly serious, to test the limits of causality. In this work, physicists have tried everything from bending the fabric of spacetime to exploiting quantum uncertainty to travel back and forth in time. They have even tested some of these ideas. But nothing seems to work. Indeed, some of the schemes require decidedly unphysical conditions that make them unlikely to ever be tested.
Now the bad news, which comes from Lorenzo Gavassino, a mathematician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Gavassino has discovered some previously unknown side effects of time travel.
He says the laws of physics may not forbid it but if it is possible, these laws lead to some outlandish consequences, one of which is that any human who made the journey would not be able to remember it. The laws of physics suggest this person’s memory would be wiped clean as soon as they returned to the present.
