Time Travel, the Multiverse, and Free Will: Untangling Reality with Dr. Paul Sutter | Unexplained

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Time Travel, the Multiverse, and Free Will: Untangling Reality with Dr. Paul Sutter

If you’ve ever dreamed of zipping through the centuries, you’re not alone. Time travel and the multiverse captivate sci-fi fans, doomscrollers, and theoretical physicists alike. Few explain the tangled web of hype and…

May 23, 2025 • 3 min read • Art Grindstone

Art Grindstone is the hard-nosed storyteller behind Unexplained.co, a veteran investigator whose life’s work sits at the crossroads of the paranormal, fringe science, and the shadows most people try not to look into. With decades spent chasing impossible stories — black-budget psychic programs, vanished Cold War experiments, desert rituals that sparked UFO waves, and the strange phenomena buried in America’s forgotten backroads — Art brings a rare combination of skepticism, awe, and journalistic precision. He’s not here to debunk. He’s not here to blindly believe. He follows the evidence wherever it leads — even when it leads someplace deeply uncomfortable. Known for his immersive, cinematic style and his ability to turn obscure research into gripping narrative, Art has built a devoted following across podcasts, long-form features, documentaries, and serialized investigations. His interviews are direct. His analysis is unflinching. His voice has become a staple in the modern paranormal renaissance — the guy people turn to when a story is too strange, too complex, or too dangerous for anyone else to touch. Off-mic, Art works with a distributed network of researchers, archivists, and field operatives who help surface the stories mainstream media ignores. On-mic, he transforms their findings into meticulous, high-impact reporting that refuses to insult the intelligence of true believers. His philosophy is simple: Take the phenomenon seriously. Treat the audience with respect. Tell the story as if the world depends on it — because sometimes it does. When Art Grindstone digs into a case, he isn’t just chasing a mystery. He’s tracing the fault lines of reality itself.

In This Report(4)

If you’ve ever dreamed of zipping through the centuries, you’re not alone. Time travel and the multiverse captivate sci-fi fans, doomscrollers, and theoretical physicists alike. Few explain the tangled web of hype and reality better than Dr. Paul Sutter—NASA consultant, cosmologist, and self-described science communicator, whose career merges hard math with wild imagination.

In his latest podcast, Dr. Sutter lays down the truth: “Time travel, as you know it from fiction, is almost certainly impossible.” But don’t let that extinguish your curiosity. The physics we understand is stranger and more thrilling than most screenwriters dare to depict. Prepare for a philosophical dive into free will that rivals the weirdest alternate realities imaginable.

The Science and Fiction of Time Travel

The term “time travel” evokes images of humming DeLoreans and wormhole-spanning portals, yet Dr. Sutter skips the fantasy. According to mainstream physics, time is a dimension tightly woven with space. Einstein’s theories of relativity connect them. Moving forward in time actually occurs, albeit on minuscule scales. The faster you move or the stronger gravity’s pull, the slower your clock ticks compared to the universe. Astronauts age slightly slower than ground-bound mortals—a phenomenon you can explore via Wikipedia’s entry on time travel.

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But traveling backward? That’s a different story. Some solutions, like rotating black holes or wormholes, may allow for travel to the past. Yet generating or surviving these cosmic wonders would require technology beyond NASA’s imagination. The current consensus, as Sutter notes, is that physics offers mathematical models for backward time travel, but reality may deny it.

Multiverse Theories: Bubble Universes and Cosmic Speculation

Mention the multiverse, and debates spark faster than the Large Hadron Collider on test day. Dr. Sutter clarifies the reality: while theoretical physics doesn’t rule out multiple universes, there’s currently no experimental evidence supporting their existence. In this feature at Discover Magazine, he explains that the multiverse logically follows some cosmological inflation models. There could be infinite bubbles, each with its own laws of physics—one universe featuring Bigfoot, another where gravity operates in reverse. For more mind-bending speculation, see his science columns in Popular Mechanics.