Quantum Time Travel as a Category Mistake

Maria Violaris asks: has quantum physics made time travel possible? The answer depends less on physics than on ontology — on how we construe the relation between theory, experiment, and metaphor.

The discourse around “quantum time loops” repeatedly blurs three distinct levels of construal:

1. Systemic theory — general relativity and quantum mechanics as structured potentials for possible events.

2. Experimental construal — teleportation protocols and selective measurement as engineered instantiations of those potentials.

3. Metaphorical extension — talk of “time loops,” “discarding paradoxes,” and “sending particles to the past,” where systemic models are reimagined as literal phenomena.

The trouble begins when level three migrates back into level two. We are told: “the experimental results look identical to those from a real time loop.” But experimental results are not loops in spacetime. They are phenomena — construed outcomes of measurement within an engineered protocol. To treat them as equivalent is a category mistake.

What is actually happening?

• Teleportation protocols cut across entangled states, probabilistically constrained by measurement.

• Discarding failed outcomes is not nature “resolving paradoxes,” but the researcher filtering results to sustain consistency with an imagined systemic behaviour.

• The appearance of a time loop is not evidence of temporal travel, but an artefact of construal: the alignment of selective outcomes with a metaphor imported from relativity.

From a relational ontology perspective, “time travel” here is not a possible phenomenon but a shift of metaphor. The supposed paradox-resolution is not in the universe — it is in the construal.

So the sharper question is not “has quantum physics made time travel possible?” but:

What happens when metaphors from one theoretical system are imported into the construal of experimental events in another?

The answer: we mistake an artefact of construal for an instance of reality.