Related papers: Paradoxes of time travel
Scientists continue to wrestle with the enigma of time. Is time a dynamic or a fundamental property of spacetime? Why does it have an arrow pointing from past to future? Why are physical laws time-symmetric in a universe with broken…
We discuss different arguments that have been raised against the viability of the big trip process, reaching the conclusions that this process can actually occur by accretion of phantom energy onto the wormholes and that it is stable and…
The Braess paradox describes the counterintuitive situation that the addition of new roads to road networks can lead to higher travel times for all network users. Recently we could show that user optima leading to the paradox exist in…
We present a novel paradox in special relativity together with its solution. We call it the four particles paradox. The purpose of this paradox is pedagogical and therefore directed towards students and lecturers of physics. Even if most…
In the rod and hole paradox as described by Rindler (1961 Am. J. Phys. 29 365-6), a rigid rod moves at high speed over a table towards a hole of the same size. Observations from the inertial frames of the rod and slot are widely different.…
There exists a variety of physically interesting situations described by continuous maps that are nondifferentiable on some surface in phase space. Such systems exhibit novel types of bifurcations in which multiple coexisting attractors can…
It has been proposed that wormholes can be made to function as time-machines. This opens up the question of whether this can be accomodated within a self-consistent physics or not. In this contribution we present some quantum mechanical…
The phenomenon of local dynamical inhomogeneity of time is predicted, which implies that the course of time along the trajectory of motion of a particle in the inertial reference frames moving relative to each other depends on the state of…
We consider the action principle to derive the classical, non-relativistic motion of a self-interacting particle in a 4-D Lorentzian spacetime containing a wormhole and which allows the existence of closed time-like curves. For the case of…
We present a generic way of thinking about time machines from the view of a far away observer. In this model the universe consists of three (or more) regions: One containing the entrance of the time machine, another the exit and the…
Commonly, normal diffusive behavior is characterized by a linear dependence of the second central moment on time, $< x^2(t) >\propto t$, while anomalous behavior is expected to show a different time dependence, $ < x^2(t) > \propto…
The subject is brake orbits for the 3-body problem: orbits where all velocities are zero at some instant. We extract a paradox and a mystery out of a recent database of 30 non-collision periodic brake orbits for the equal mass 3-body…
Some principles underpinning the running of the Universe are discussed. The most important, the machine principle, states that the Universe is a fully autonomous, self-organizing and self-testing quantum automaton. Continuous space and…
It is postulated there is not a precise static instant in time underlying a dynamical physical process at which the relative position of a body in relative motion or a specific physical magnitude would theoretically be precisely determined.…
This relativistic, time-travel spacetime is everywhere metrically flat, excepting a conical singularity. Observers following timelike geodesics can eventually encounter their past selves, aging in the opposite time sense. The spacetime is…
Conventional wisdom, based on kinematic (flat-space) intuition, tell us that a static twin is aging faster than his traveling twin brother. However, such a situation could be exactly inverted if the two twins are embedded in an external…
Two losing gambling games, when alternated in a periodic or random fashion, can produce a winning game. This paradox has been inspired by certain physical systems capable of rectifying fluctuations: the so-called Brownian ratchets. In this…
We show that a genuine Parrondo paradox can emerge in two-state quantum walks without resorting to experimentally intricate high-dimensional coins. To achieve such goal we employ a time-dependent coin operator without breaking the…
A ring resonator involves a scattering process where a part of the output is fed again into the input. The same formal structure is encountered in the problem of time travel in a neighborhood of a closed timelike curve (CTC). We know how to…
A particle subject to successive, random displacements is said to execute a random walk (in position or some other coordinate). The mathematical properties of random walks have been very thoroughly investigated, and the model is used in…