THE POSSIBILITIES OF CAUSALITY VIOLATION

CAUSALITY VIOLATION: CAN IT BE DONE? RESEARCHERS SEEM TO THINK SO, BUT WHY?

WHAT IS CAUSALITY VIOLATION?

"Causality violation" is a term considered politically correct among experts for the phenomenon more commonly known as "time travel".

THE HISTORY OF CAUSALITY VIOLATION

For years, we have read about these possibilities in the realm of science fiction. The idea of time as the fourth dimension, on that same plane as three-dimensional space, is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein with the Theory of Special Relativity, but was first realized by HG Wells in The Time Machine. The book was first published in 1995, but is not itself the first instance of the idea of time travel. For that, we go back to around 400 BCE.

CAUSALITY VIOLATION IN THE 1960S

In the 1960s, Roger Penrose proved the existence of a point at the centre of black holes, where all matter drawn in to that point is crushed out of existence, known as the singularity. In the same decade, Roy Kerr, a mathematician from New Zealand, showed that with a rotating black hole, the singularity becomes a ring that can be likened in shape to a LifeSavers hard candy. If something were to travel through that ring of singularity, it would pass into—and through—what we commonly identify as a wormhole.

WHAT ARE THE PHYSICS OF IT ALL?

Theoretically speaking, if a black hole with enough mass started spinning, it could potentially bend the fabric of existence, bending space-time back on itself in the process, creating a “closed time-like curve”, or CTC, which is a loop through which an object—or person—can travel backward or forward in time.

WORMHOLES AND CTC’S

When a CTC, or closed time-like circuit is created by a rotating black hole, the point at the centre of the singularity would extend to join the extension of the other side, creating a wormhole, and completing the loop.

SAY IT IS POSSIBLE: WHAT ABOUT PARADOXES?

Well, that’s where Hugh Everett III’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics comes in. Everett believed that for every decision that was made by man or by nature, there was an outcome in this universe, but once that outcome was determined, other universes, in which all other possible outcomes happened, branch off from this one, thus creating an infinite web of alternate universes to our own. It’s possible, even, that there is a universe somewhere in that web that we commonly call the multiverse where we are sitting in this same situation, except we are all penguins.

PARADOXES AND THE MANY-WORLDS THEORYWith the multiverse theory, paradoxes—such as the infamous Grandfather paradox, most commonly described as where the time traveler goes back in time and kills his grandfather, thus preventing the traveler from being born, but then he was never born, so he couldn’t have gone back in time to kill his grandfather—end up not being possible, as after such an event as a time traveler killing his own grandfather, there are now two separate universes: one where he killed his grandfather, and one where he didn’t. In one universe, there was no time traveler, and in the other, the time traveler lives on.

CAUSALITY VIOLATION IN BODILY FUNCTIONS

Whether you know it or not, you have already heard me saying each word before you think you did in this entire talk. I know, it seemed like you heard it right when I said it. Actually, when you thought you heard it… is when your brain perceived it. The sound waves coming from my voice box travelled through the air, and hit your ear drums. Then, the electrical signal was sent to your brain to realise, “Hey, he just said a word! I should probably pay attention!” Though it seemed instantaneous (I said it, you perceived it), there was actually a fraction of a second from the point my voice hit your ears to the point your brain perceived the electrical signal. We all live a fraction of a second in the past, and don’t even realise it until someone points it out.

MENTAL CAUSALITY VIOLATION

When people typically think of time travel, they think of the TARDIS or the DeLorean, or maybe even the first one to be called a ‘time machine’, the one used by the Time Traveller in HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Not very many think of the human consciousness in those terms. Consider this: when you read a book that dips into the past, do you tend to visualise the setting as it would have looked back then? Or when you’re reading a novella that delves into the future, do you imagine what it might look like based on past speculations? When you do that, you are traveling through time in your mind. There are people, though, who can legitimately see the future—most often the near future. We call them psychos (I mean psychics). Not all of them are phonies, though; it’s mostly the ones who try to make a profit from their supposed “gift”. I have experienced precognition, or the foreknowledge of an event, in my dreams on occasion.

THE TAKEAWAY?

What do I want you to take away from all this? I want you to do your own research into the possibilities of causality violation, or time travel, and create your own opinions on this fascinating subject. I will say this: there is an enormous amount of technical jargon in the majority of the articles you will find, and if you don’t know a majority of the terms they use, simply do a Google search for “quantum physics in layman’s terms”, “the possibilities of time travel in layman’s terms”, or something to that effect.