I remember writing about this topic a long time back and today I read that two physicists from the Perimeter Institute in Canada have come up with a paper claiming that it could be possible to time travel using parallel universes which wouldn't cause any paradoxes.

If you are confused as to what I just said, let me explain. So, we have all seen the phenomenon of time travel in movies and tv shows and some of them have delved really deep into the workings of time.

While travelling into the future could be possible without breaking the laws of Physics, time travel to the past is considered something of an impossibility. This is because it would cause all sorts of paradoxes. The grandfather paradox is one of the most popular ones.

Basically, the idea is that, if you travel to the past and kill your grandfather, that means your father was never born and so you were not born either. But, if you were never born, you never time travelled to the past and never killed your grandfather. If you never killed your grandfather, then you are alive which means you did go to the past and kill him. See the paradox?

Parallel Universes To The Rescue

Up until now, the idea of solving this paradox using parallel universes (or timelines as they call it in the movies) was more of a thought experiment. But the two physicists say that this idea is mathematically possible.

What they propose is that there is a large number of parallel universes out there which are "roughly the same, and each one is mathematically on a separate space-time manifold."

So, theoretically, you could step into a wormhole and travel to the past of a different timeline and kill your grandfather. This wouldn't have any effect on your timeline but in that timeline, you will not be born!

While this would solve the paradox, and establish that time travel to the past could be possible, there is one major drawback that everybody seems to be pointing out. Nothing will change in our original timeline, so what's the point in changing events in some other timeline? Well, unless of course, you want to permanently relocate in that new timeline!!