Stephen Hawking Says We Could Build A Time Machine
Ana Fri, 07 May 2010 11:10 0 comments
In a fascinating article, Stephen Hawking goes LOST on us (after having warned us about hostile extraterrestrials) and takes a stab at deconstructing time travel. His conclusion? Time travel--into the future, anyway--is not all science fiction. All we need to do is build a really, really, big and super-fast machine.
It's tricky stuff to get your head around, but Hawking takes us step-by-step through his theory. Here are the key points of his article in the Daily Mail.:
Thinking beyond the third dimension:
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length. But there is another kind of length, a length in time.Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
Perhaps a wormhole...
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time.This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.
None of that Back to the Future stuff, though:
Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot? Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future.
What about a black hole? Not practical:
Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it's not exactly practical. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine. You just have to travel very, very fast. There's a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.
H.G. Well's Victorian-era time machine
And why does Hawking puzzle over the wackiest pursuits? That must be best quote in the entire piece: "I like simple experiments, and champagne."
Cheers to that. Happy Friday!
