Time Travel and Butterfly Effect Together in Brief

“People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” – Albert Einstein

My primary goal of this post is to see the possibility of time travel through the window of the Butterfly Effect.

But first, let us know something about the time travel and the butterfly effect respectively.
In modern theoretical physics and cosmic sciences, Time Travel is an interesting topic to discuss. Many Physicists and authors have shed light on various possibilities of time travel. Whether it is to Past or Future. My personal favorite physicist, cosmologist, and the author is Dr. Stephin Hawking (1942 - 2018). According to him, there are mainly three ways of time travel. One of the three ways gives us the possibility to travel to the past, as well as to the future and the other two are able to facilitate future time travel only. We will come to this in a moment.

Now for understanding time travel from scratch, we have to treat TIME as the fourth dimension in our three-dimensional world, which modern-day science believes, and the combination of these three dimensions of space and one dimension of time is called the space-time.

So, consider a situation where you have to tell the position of any object in our physical world. What we will do, we will tell the values of its three dimensions, that is, X, Y, and Z axes. All these dimensions will tell us the physical position of that object. But if we have to find the actual position of the object, we must consider the fact that the object has a specific location in the time dimension also. That means along with the values of X, Y and Z axis, we also have to specify the time at which the object is present on those three coordinates.

In the physical world, we move all the time along the three dimensions at our desired speed. But in case of time, we don't choose our desired speed. The speed in which we are moving along time dimension is fixed, which is at the rate of 1 minute per 60 seconds.

The question now is, what is all the fuss about time travel?

Time travel is going back to the past or to the future at the desired speed. That means we can move back and forth the timeline whenever we want, wherever we want. We can go to the past and see whether the Darwinian theory of evolution of man is correct or not. Also, we can go to the future and see how our grandchildren will look like.

There are many theoretical ways of time travel suggested by scientists, which I am not going to discuss in this blog. Maybe that will be a topic for the future or you can search for yourself.
Now another interesting question is that, can we manipulate the timeline? That is, can we go to the past and correct some mistakes that we made, or make some new ones. Also, can we go to the future and warn our future selves what is coming. Before coming to this, lets first see what is Butterfly Effect.

The butterfly effect is an idea that shows that a small change can make much bigger changes happen; that one small incident can have a big impact in the future. The flapping of a butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world. While this may not generally be the case, it's a good example of the butterfly effect or the idea that tiny changes in complex systems can cause huge effects.

So far so, we have understood the general concept of Time Travel and Butterfly Effect.
Lets put them both together and see what comes out.

There is a popular paradox that everyone discusses while talking about time travel, the "grandfather paradox". The grandfather paradox is a potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to the past time. The name comes from the idea that if a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their own birth impossible. So, if time travel is possible, and the person killed his grandfather, then he will be never born, hence he will not exist in the future. So, if he doesn't exist, who traveled back to time and killed the grandfather. Needs some brainwork..!

One answer (Call it "Solution A") to this problem is that if a person travels back to the time and tries to manipulate the events that already happened, somehow, the precisely determined laws of physics will not let him do so. Maybe, he will not be able to do such a thing which can disturb the timeline. If he tries to shot his grandfather, he might miss or the gun will not fire. Now this answer does not make much sense. It would make sense if the laws of physics were considered probabilistic, rather than precisely determined, it opens the possibility of multiple outcomes from a trip back in time, some of which may not be contradictory.

Another answer (Call it "Solution B") to the problem is the concept of multiple timelines. This means that if a person makes some changes in the past, an alternate timeline will be made running along with the original timeline. So, the original timeline will face no changes and everything will be fine and smooth, as will be the grandfather and his offsprings. In another timeline, just created by the time-traveler, grandfather will be dead, and the things after that point will be totally different. This makes a little sense than the previous one. But Wait..!

Lets put forward our player aka BUTTERFLY EFFECT in the show.

As the butterfly effect says, the person traveling back to the time will make a lot of changes just by traveling to a specific time and standing still. The breath he takes will also make a big impact on the timeline. The footprints he makes will change a lot in the future. Every single action of his can lead to a local or global catastrophe. So he does not need to kill anyone to change the timeline, rather his just traveling back to time will do the job.

Now as we discussed let's try to prevent this by the above two ways.

Solving this problem using Solution A will not even let the traveler travel back to the time at all. Because of his every tiny action can create chaos, even his just traveling back and doing nothing can prove more than nothing. So as per Solution A, he will be prevented by doing the time travel by the laws of physics.

If we take Solution B, that is the concept of multiple universes, time traveler will be creating an enormous amount of universes. His every tiniest action (even his every breath) will create another timeline to prevent any mishap in the original timeline.

We conclude both solutions are not able to give a perfect and feasible solution to the problem of the butterfly effect in time travel. So the problem remains until there comes any other solution which can be considered.

At last, I request every reader of this post to share their thoughts regarding the problem. And also corrections are appreciated.

Thank You for your time.