(ORDO NEWS) — It turns out that time travel to the past is actually pretty easy. All you have to do is make the universe spin.
The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel was a friend and colleague of Albert Einstein at Princeton University. He became incredibly interested in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was and remains our modern formulation of the gravitational force.
This theory relates the presence of matter and energy to the bending and curvature of space and time, and then relates this bending and curvature to the behavior of matter and energy.
Gödel was interested to know if relativity could allow time travel into the past.
Einstein’s theory claimed to be the ultimate theory of the nature of space and time, and as far as was known, time travel to the past was impossible. So Gödel felt that general relativity should automatically exclude this.
And Gödel discovered that, in fact, general relativity does allow for time travel into the past. The trick is to set the universe in motion.
Gödel built a relatively simple and artificial model of the universe to prove his point. This universe is spinning and contains only one ingredient.
This ingredient is the negative cosmological constant, which opposes the centrifugal force of rotation and keeps the universe static.
Gödel discovered that if you follow a certain path in a spinning universe, you can find yourself in your own past. To do this, you have to go incredibly far, billions of light years, but it can be done.
During the journey, you will fall into the rotation of the universe.
It is the rotation not only of things in space, but also of space and time itself. In essence, the rotation of the universe will change your potential paths forward so much that those paths will return to where you started.
When you go on a journey, you can never go faster than the speed of light and end up right where you started, but in your own past.
The possibility of time travel back creates paradoxes and disrupts our understanding of causation.
Fortunately, all observations show that the universe does not rotate, so we are immune to Gödel’s problem of backward time travel.
But it is still a mystery why general relativity does not object to this seemingly impossible phenomenon. Gödel used the rotating universe to prove that general relativity is incomplete, and he may be right.
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