I Could many worlds be a solution to time travel paradoxes?

bland
Messages
149
Reaction score
44
TL;DR Summary
Time travel to the past appears impossible due to the inevitable paradoxes. However while contemplating whether many worlds was in fact metaphysics, it may be a solution to the paradoxes.
And also an answer to 'where are the future time travellers?'. Let's say hypothetically that in the future time travel into the past is invented. To me many worlds looks like metaphysics, but it appears to be taken seriously by physicists, therefore, what if after traveling backwards in time as the traveller arrives could we postulate that his arrival creates a many worlds split so that person is now in that timeline so whatever happens does not affect the timeline whence he came?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
This seems to be a highly speculative solution to a non-problem. It also appears not to be science. How would you test this?
 
  • Like
Likes vanhees71
Please do not misunderstand. I'm not offering a solution to any problem, I was just looking for some way to make sense of the Many Worlds, conjecture. I mean is that science? I know the math is, but if we are allowed to accept an infinity of infinities of variations of the same universe that somehow exist in a way that we can never come into contact or interact with, then I thought it would be OK to take it seriously and offer it as a speculative solution to backwards time travel that would solve the problem of killing your grandfather.

I mean it seems to be OK to postulate there there is some unknown built in thing that stops these paradoxes, which also is beyond testing.
 
bland said:
I was just looking for some way to make sense of the Many Worlds, conjecture.
This will require to study quantum field theory. It is only an interpretation of the results in that field. Up to now there is no evidence at all that any information could pass between the worlds. I suggest to read in our neighbour forum https://www.physicsforums.com/forums/quantum-interpretations-and-foundations.292/.

There is not really a way to answer your question, except: If you cut the causal chain, anything is thinkable. Whether it's possible is another problem.
 
I would like to know the validity of the following criticism of one of Zeilinger's latest papers https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.07756 "violation of bell inequality with unentangled photons" The review is by Francis Villatoro, in Spanish, https://francis.naukas.com/2025/07/26/sin-entrelazamiento-no-se-pueden-incumplir-las-desigualdades-de-bell/ I will translate and summarize the criticism as follows: -It is true that a Bell inequality is violated, but not a CHSH inequality. The...
I understand that the world of interpretations of quantum mechanics is very complex, as experimental data hasn't completely falsified the main deterministic interpretations (such as Everett), vs non-deterministc ones, however, I read in online sources that Objective Collapse theories are being increasingly challenged. Does this mean that deterministic interpretations are more likely to be true? I always understood that the "collapse" or "measurement problem" was how we phrased the fact that...
This is not, strictly speaking, a discussion of interpretations per se. We often see discussions based on QM as it was understood during the early days and the famous Einstein-Bohr debates. The problem with this is that things in QM have advanced tremendously since then, and the 'weirdness' that puzzles those attempting to understand QM has changed. I recently came across a synopsis of these advances, allowing those interested in interpretational issues to understand the modern view...

Similar threads

Back
Top