The parallel timeline travel hypothesis was proposed by Canadian physicist Barak Shoshani, writes Lenta.ru
Shoshani works at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo. He acknowledged that time travel might be possible, but with one condition: if you travel in parallel timelines. Shoshani’s findings were published in the SciPost Physics Lecture Notes.
The physicist writes that time travel has two main problems. As the researchers suggest, the time machine requires matter with negative energy. Theoretically, it can be created, but in scanty quantities. And at the same time, no one has proven that this matter cannot be obtained in an amount that is enough for time travel. And it has not been proven that it is impossible to do without it at all.
Another problem is that time travel creates paradoxes. The most famous is the paradox of consistency – when something happens that changes the past, but the change itself prevents this event.
But paradoxes, as Shoshani notes, are only a theoretical concept that points to the failure of the theory.
The time traveler’s paradoxes imply that travel is impossible. An attempt to eliminate them was made by cosmologist Igor Novikov. He proposed the principle of self-consistency. Novikov claims that it is possible to travel to the past, but it cannot be changed.
However, Barak Shoshani showed that there are paradoxes that cannot be resolved by following Novikov’s principles as well. However, this can be done if we assume that there are many parallel timelines.
That is, the time traveler enters the past, which is in a different timeline. There he can do whatever he wants and at the same time the events in the original timeline will not change.