PeterDonis
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Stephen Tashi said:I return to the question of what state space is being discussed in the notion of time travel.
Remember that we're discussing this in the context of GR, where spacetime is a single 4-dimensional manifold. We're discussing the case where this manifold happens to have timelike paths that loop back around so that they intersect the same spacelike hypersurface more than once. But each spacelike hypersurface, which is the closest thing to a "state of the universe" in this model, is what it is: a given timelike curve intersects it a well-defined number of times, and that is an invariant fact about the spacetime.
Stephen Tashi said:Does going back in time mean going to a previous state of the universe, where "state" means a complete physical description of the universe? - including the detail of whether the time traveller is present in that state?
It should be evident from the above that the answer to this is "yes" (reading "state" to mean "spacelike hypersurface").