Time-travelling billiard-ball clocks: a quantum model

Abstract

We present a novel quantum circuit formulation of the time-travelling billiard ball paradox. We show how the indeterministic histories of the paradox may be emulated via the incorporation of a vacuum state into the circuit's Hilbert space. By employing a quantum clock state, we demonstrate how the multiple self-consistent trajectories of the billiard ball through the chronology-violating region can be distinguished. This technique enables us to rigorously probe the mechanisms of the two foremost quantum theories of time travel: Deutsch's model (D-CTCs) and post-selected teleportation (P-CTCs). The results of this method when applied to our billiard ball paradox circuit prove to be nontrivial. These include observations such as how the suppression of the vacuum subspace forces a particle (clock) to be on the CTC (thereby constraining all trajectories through the circuit to interact with the CTC under both prescriptions), while the inclusion of a vacuum causes the P-CTCs and D-CTCs output states to become a superposition and mixture respectively of the CTC-interacting and CTC-noninteracting histories. We also demonstrate that under certain conditions the P-CTCs results agree with a conjecture made by Friedman et al.