world lines that form closed loops in spacetime, allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves, such as Gödel spacetime, but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain. Many in the scientific community believe that backward time travel is highly unlikely. Any theory that would allow time travel would introduce potential problems of causality. The classic example of a problem involving causality is the "grandfather paradox," which involves travelling to the past and intervening in the conception of one's ancestors (causing the death of an ancestor before said conception being frequently cited). Some physicists, such as Novikov and Deutsch, suggested that these sorts of temporal paradoxes can be avoided through the Novikov self-consistency principle or a variation of the many-worlds interpretation with interacting worlds. General relativity Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives. The theory of general relativity does suggest a scientific basis for the possibility of backward time travel in certain unusual scenarios, although arguments from semiclassical gravity suggest that when quantum effects are incorporated into general relativity, these loopholes may be closed. These semiclassical arguments led Stephen Hawking to formulate the chronology protection conjecture, suggesting that the fundamental laws of nature prevent time travel, but physicists cannot come to a definite judgment on the issue without a theory of quantum gravity to join quantum mechanics and general relativity into a completely unified theory. Different spacetime geometries The theory of general relativity describes the universe under a system of field equations that determine the metric, or distance function, of spacetime. There exist exact solutions to these equations that include closed time-like curves, which are world lines that intersect themselves; some point in the causal future of the world line is also in its causal past, a situation that can be described as time travel. Such a solution was first proposed by Kurt Gödel, a solution known as the Gödel metric, but his (and others') solution requires the universe to have physical characteristics that it does not appear to have, such as rotation and lack of Hubble expansion. Whether general relativity forbids closed time-like curves for all realistic conditions is still being researched. Wormholes