If you were offered the chance to travel through time with the condition that when you return to the present you can’t remember anything – would you take it? This is a real consequence that time travelers could face, a new study suggests.
So far, scientists have mostly focused on science and the possibility of time travel, but there is almost no discussion of what happens to a person once they are back in the present.
Study author Lorenzo Gavassino, who is a mathematician and postdoctoral student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, argues that time travel actually comes with some strange side effects.
For example, a major consequence of time travel could be that “any memory collected along the closed time curve will be erased before the end of the loop,” Gassavino said. Which simply means that as soon as a person returns from the past to the present, the memories of their journey will be erased – but why?
A closed curve time (CTC) is a concept in general relativity where, under certain conditions, spacetime forms loops. These loops lead to the creation of paths in space-time that return to their starting point, allowing the possibility to travel back in time to an earlier point in time.
A major consequence of time travel
However, time travel is not beyond science, and therefore a person’s journey along the CTC will also be governed by the laws of physics.
For example, when a person travels back in time and returns to the present, according to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, or the degree of disorder in a system, always increases with time.
However, when a person travels along the CTC, going from the present to the past and then back to the present, their entropy should first increase, reach a peak, and then return to the same level.
Travel basically works like the Poincaré cycle, a concept in mathematics that describes a cyclical process that repeats itself. It refers to a situation where a system goes through a series of states and eventually returns to its initial state. Gassavino suggests that after entropy peaks and a traveler returns to the present, disorder begins to decrease and, as a result, “all thermodynamic processes, including biological processes such as memory formation and aging, are reversed.”
Thus, unlike how it is depicted in the movies, it is unlikely that a time traveler would remember anything from his trip to the past, as his memories would be erased by the time he returned to the present.
Other side effects of time travel
Furthermore, since the second law of thermodynamics applies not only to living systems such as humans, but also to cars and other objects, if a time traveler stores data on a computer or smartphone while traveling, it is very likely that it will be deleted as soon as the trip ends, it says InterestingEngineering.
Furthermore, Gassavino suggests that our clocks can also show the incorrect time while traveling because they are designed to tick only linearly. The same rule applies to how atoms and molecules vibrate, so going back in time could completely disrupt the natural behavior of matter.
These possibilities sound quite interesting, but unfortunately there is no way to confirm them yet.
The study is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
