No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists, ScienceAlert reported.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

“Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system,” says Tobar.

“However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head.”

What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes.

To use a topical example, imagine a time traveller journeying into the past to stop a disease from spreading – if the mission was successful, the time traveller would have no disease to go back in time to defeat.

Tobar’s work suggests that the disease would still escape some other way, through a different route or by a different method, removing the paradox. Whatever the time traveller did, the disease wouldn’t be stopped.

Tobar’s work isn’t easy for non-mathematicians to dig into, but it looks at the influence of deterministic processes (without any randomness) on an arbitrary number of regions in the space-time continuum, and demonstrates how both closed timelike curves (as predicted by Einstein) can fit in with the rules of free will and classical physics.

“The maths checks out – and the results are the stuff of science fiction,” says physicist Fabio Costa from the University of Queensland, who supervised the research.

The new research smooths out the problem with another hypothesis, that time travel is possible but that time travellers would be restricted in what they did, to stop them creating a paradox. In this model, time travellers have the freedom to do whatever they want, but paradoxes are not possible.

While the numbers might work out, actually bending space and time to get into the past remains elusive – the time machines that scientists have devised so far are so high-concept that for they currently only exist as calculations on a page.

We might get there one day – Stephen Hawking certainly thought it was possible – and if we do then this new research suggests we would be free to do whatever we wanted to the world in the past: it would readjust itself accordingly.

“Try as you might to create a paradox, the events will always adjust themselves, to avoid any inconsistency,” says Costa. “The range of mathematical processes we discovered show that time travel with free will is logically possible in our universe without any paradox.”

The idea of a wormhole that can transport you through space and time may sound like an idea from a science fiction blockbuster.

But a new study claims that these wormholes ‘could be possible’ in reality, the Mirror reported.

Researchers from Princeton University have used quantum mechanics to theorize conditions that could result in large enough wormholes.

In the study, published on the preprint server arXiv, the researchers, led by Juan Maldacena explained: “From the outside they resemble intermediate mass charged black holes.

“Their big size comes from demanding that a human traveler can survive the tidal forces. They take a very short proper time to traverse, but a long time as seen from the outside.

“The traveler acquires a very large boost factor, γ, as it goes through the center of the wormhole. We have argued this most clearly for the case that the wormhole exists in a cold and flat ambient space.

“We have not given any plausible mechanism for their formation. We have only argued that they are configurations allowed by the equations.”

The researchers suggest that such wormholes could allow time-travelers to travel between distant points in our galaxy within seconds.

They added: “This model allows for large enough wormholes that could be traversed humanely, i.e. surviving the tidal forces.

“Using them, one could travel in less than a second between distant points in our galaxy.

“A second for the observer that goes through the wormhole. It would be tens of thousands of years for somebody looking from the outside.”

While the new study indicates that wormholes could exist, finding them may be a challenge.

Speaking to LiveScience back in 2012, Professor Stephen Hsu from the University of Oregon, said: “You would need some of super-super-advanced technology. Humans won’t be doing this any time in the near future.”