Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon

by Michael P. Masters

Hawking and many other physicists find CTCs abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down. In a model proposed by the theorist David Deutsch in 1991, however, the paradoxes created by CTCs could be avoided at the quantum scale because of the behavior of fundamental particles, which follow only the fuzzy rules of probability rather than strict determinism.

In spite of Stephen Hawking’s strong belief in the incredible ability of the human race and the continued advancement of our species—which was echoed in his “message of hope” for the 1994 BT Group television advertisement—Hawking, somewhat inexplicably, fervently opposed the notion that we will ever develop the knowledge and technology necessary to achieve time travel to the past. With all due respect to one of the most resolute individuals and amazing minds of our time, this inconsistency is somewhat of a paradox unto itself.21 To advocate that humans will never come to possess a deep enough understanding of time, nor the mechanisms with which to alter our position within it, is to deny millions of years of cerebral, cognitive, and cultural advancement across the collective whole of hominin evolution.

If you met up with an older version of yourself, we know with absolute certainty that once you age into that older self, you will be there to meet your younger self. That is because, from your personal point of view, that meet-up happened, and there is no way to make it un-happen, any more than we can change the past without any time travel complications. There may be more than one consistent set of things that could happen at the various events in space-time, but one and only one set of things actually does occur.

For those of us who move linearly through four-dimensional spacetime, a time traveler who appears out of nowhere creates the impression that something has been created from nothing. Furthermore, a sudden appearance such as this would seem to violate the law of conservation of mass, which states that matter can be neither created nor destroyed, and that the mass of a system must remain constant over time. However, time travel does not actually create or destroy any matter, nor does it violate any physical laws, even at the level of quantum particles as shown previously. Rather, this is simply a rearrangement of existing matter in and around different regions of the block universe. Moving people and things through spacetime by means of a high-energy device capable of forming CTCs merely changes when things are relative to one another. So, despite the perception that something is suddenly popping into existence, this aspect of time travel is better understood as a mere relocation of existing matter, within a much larger system that extends well beyond the present. As such, this perceived paradox may also stem from our tendency to regard time as linear and the present as a closed system, as opposed to one that encompasses the entire universe and the whole of four-dimensional spacetime.

It is also important to consider that when a person, an apple, or anything else goes back in time, as mentioned above, it ceases to persist into the future, following the time from which it left for the past. This represents something of a four-dimensional zero-sum game. In other words, if we enter a spinning disc and go back in time to meet an earlier version of ourselves—despite their now being two copies of us in the past—there are no longer any copies of us directly following when we left to visit ourselves in that past. So even though there are now two versions of the same person existing concurrently in the past (1 + 1 = 2), there are no longer any versions of that individual in the future after they left for the past (1 – 1 = 0), and when averaged across the entire system, the result is still just one individual.