Time travel proven to be real - but there's a catch

A researcher has claimed time travel may actually be possible – and says he has the math to prove it.

Time travel is a concept that has fascinated scientists for some time. It's the idea that one can move to specific points in time, often seen in popular TV shows and films such as Donnie Darko, Back to the Future andNetflix's The Umbrella Academy.

Some believers say there'san added complication known as the Grandfather Paradox, which attests that if the person travels back to a time before their grandfather had children, it will prevent their own birth.

Physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland, claimed he had found a loophole around this by figuring out how to "square the numbers" to avoid paradoxes.

"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," said Tobar a few years back.

"However, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head."

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Tobar's work relies on the theory of relativity's deterministic processes. With general relativity, every event is continuous, deterministic – and every cause has an effect.

"The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction," physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland, who supervised the research, told Science Alert.

"Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves to avoid any inconsistency," Costa said.

"The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our Universe without any paradox."

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