Time travel is a dream shared by pretty much all of us.
But the dearth of visitors from the future – and the dismal turnout at the famed time traveler party – is alarming for hopefuls.
Still, hypothetical time travel ideas abound, including traversable wormholes propped open by undiscovered exotic states of matter, and a rocket ship skirting billions of light-years around a spinning Universe to end up back in its past.
But a new study presents a surprisingly simple numerical basis for ruling out closed time loops in a wide class of possible universes, based on a single mathematical proof.
In yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted to the preprint repository arXiv, physicist Hongsheng Zhang from the University of Jinan in China repurposed a long-standing equation to offer a new numerical prohibition against time travel – further dashing our hopes of a history-bending romp as promised by Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
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