The problem with that article is it goes down the route of describing a wormhole being manufactured, then manipulated so that travel in at one end (kept 'young' by relativity effects) lets you emerge from the other earlier in time (when it was 'naturally' that young).
It doesn't let you go back to arbitrary times-past. In that form it is never before the time you built the wormhole (and, as you spend more time pondering the "future: in" side, the "past: out" end keeps on aging) so creating a workhole/timehole can't 'solve' any prior problematic event (even assuming that you can[1]), only things that happen since you set up the whole temporal-backspace. (You could set it up to emerge in the past and then immediately go into the (even younger) artificially-young-end to emerge even earlier-earlier from the other [to again ... [to again ... [...]]], but this needs it to have already been set up (and, indeed, used by visiting future-you(s)) and still only makes it possible to have a rather busy time arbitrarily close to the earliest possible time-differential time[2].
You are perfectly entitled to imagine a pre-existing ('natural', or maybe precursor-created) wormhole-system that you
can use to get from 'now' (post-discovery) to 'then' (pre-discovery), but that still requires that the then-end be arbitrarily popping out future now-end traversals. Or, if you wish, you discover an active then-end, pop (or peep) through to see what the future-now-end is fully knowledgable of (things of your natural future) and then withdraw to make use of this future-grabbed information. What you do with this information is surely then part of what forms (your impression of) your future, if it is not partly or entirely disconnected by a separate trouserleg of time (in which case it is a low value temporal foreshadowing and can be dismissed as not serving the original purpose).
I might declare this a "
Soft Chronological Protection Conjecture". There's nothing to actually stop you popping back in time and making things happen, given the initial means to do so, but the universe can only tolerate a future step-back in which a current arrival into the present ontologically begets that precise future step-back. "Only self-supporting paradoces need apply!", as it were. (How this is accomplished, I leave to the universe. Or perhaps metaverse. There are a number of options, from messy (Timecop?) to elegant (12 Monkeys).)
A brief example might be the attempt to take a recorded run of roulette-wheel results and make use of them in advance. In a consistent scenario, you may (or may not) have also witnessed your perfect run that kept pace with these same outcomes. The croupier's throw of the ball will be party to an effect for which the bet you place is the immediate prior cause, and subserviant to it. A glance to the bet placed upon Black (or Even, or 13 or Zero) begets a chaotically-derived result that, in conjunction with all the other myriad influences woven into that moment, causes it to be Black(/Even/13/0).
Should you explicitly have observed your (future) failure, rather than not having seen your successes by trivial omission overlooking the facts, then we must therefore be upon a malleable/branchable chronology. You saw yourself bet Black, to lose to Red and now bet Red (potentially to lose to Black, as you saw only where the ball went in response to a Black bet). So we're in a situation where (as it were) "all bets are off".
If the universe doesn't play with you and happily 'try' your attempt to exploit the feedback... You observe your failure with 13 (it was 15), so try a 15. Some new version of yourself observes 15 and creates the outcome of 20. Observing the 20, you cause an 8 to happen. An 8 then... produces the result of an 8! Which is then cemented into the non-meta timeline as the one
and only way it can ever go. It gets more complicated if you need to continue the trend of results beyond the first, but (like back-solving a particularly complicated hash function) there can indeed be feedback-induced consistency under most circumstances.
Where it potentially falls down is if your
intention is to be counterfactually paradoxical (whatever you see as your future action, you deliberately do otherwise), in order to 'bend, if not break' the universe. Assuming that there's not the possibility of a bistable metastability (one reality takes its perverse cue from another reality's outcome, and vice-versa, so you do Red where it should be Black
and Black where it should be Red), you are surely now subject to future you's fate being
misconstrued towards an actually self-supporting end... e.g. becoming worried enough (having done the past deed) to now decide to have the outcome turn out one way whilst declaring loudly (in the direction of your past self's inconveniently eavesdropping wormhole) that the 'avoided' outcome occured, which is thus 'avoided' in the direction of the actually-inevitable outcome.
Or, simpler than all of this, that with the stability of a wormhole relying upon currently almost entirely unknown physical mechanisms (the precise coraling of dark energy/exotic matter/etc), the meta-feedback mechanism that 'vets' any attempt (or avoidance of) stable timelooping interposes itself into the (also causality-dependant) process of propping open the hole itself and disrupts the hole prior to any infonvenient paradoxical misuse. "I will first bet the way I should." <looks into past-end of hole, sees Black occurance> "It looks like I'll bet Black, so I will first bet Black..." <bets Black, fully visible to future-end of hole> "Yes, that works. Next I will bet against the way I should." <looks into past-end, to see it collapse> "It looks like I'll bet... darn, it stopped." <ponders what to do now, fully visible to future-end as it collapses>
Of course, until we even
have a suitable wormhole-creating means. Or a handy primordeal one, hanging around for casual use by some potentially reckless (or potentially unintentionally consistent). So it remains pure speculation as to how it might ever truly resolve itself, and it could be far simpler
or more incomprehensible if/when we get to the point of ever witnessing such a resolution. (Branching multiverses that handily make use of zero-point fluctuations, such as that which the universe itself Big Banged from, could just give every "poke into the past" a completely fresh and uninteracting copy whilst leaving the 'original' timeline unaffected by anything other than the further pokes-from-beyond that spawned
it into creation. For example.)
So, anyway. That article seems likely to miss the point, a bit.
[1] Other than "what you go back and do, you already came back and did".
[2] After you start slowing down one end, but only after you bring it close enough to the other for your reverse-echoes to start (or, rather, finish) jumping across the gap in less time than the rewind-time takes one back. ...all in all, it would be a headache to witness, especially if you hadn't actually planned to do anything like this but now are watching yourself having now (thus inevitably in the future) set about to do it.
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Topic: The opposite of alternate dimensions time travel (Read 1610 times)