STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine

Daily Mail ^ | 05/05/2010 | Stephen Hawking

[SeekAndFind]

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

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. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.

[SeekAndFind]

[SeekAndFind]

For the above illustration :

A wormhole is a theoretical 'tunnel' or shortcut, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, that links two places in space-time - visualised above as the contours of a 3-D map, where negative energy pulls space and time into the mouth of a tunnel, emerging in another universe. They remain only hypothetical, as obviously nobody has ever seen one, but have been used in films as conduits for time travel - in Stargate (1994), for example, involving gated tunnels between universes, and in Time Bandits (1981), where their locations are shown on a celestial map

[SeekAndFind]

Stephen Hawking in a scene from Star Trek with dinner guests from the past, and future: (from left) Albert Einstein, Data and Isaac Newton

[Snickering Hound]

Uncle Rico already tried it, it doesn't work.

[SeekAndFind]

All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast

'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?'

[Jeff Chandler]

If we had a time machine, would could give his mother birth control pills.

[edcoil]

It’s official: he is a crank.

[mlocher]

I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

How do we know that Stephen Hawking is not here from a later instant of time visiting us now?

[TheVitaminPress]

Ping

[ßuddaßudd]

Awesome Dude . .

[Jim W N]

Stephen Hawking is a very intelligent person who doesn't seem to have the faith he needs.

The "time machine" he's looking for is really the "timeless" machine and we already have one and it’s a person - Jesus Christ. One of these days He's coming to transport us all out of here just before all hell breaks loose. This is what Steven Hawking is looking for.

[TBP]

Simple. Get an old DeLorean and a flux capacitor.

[Brett66]

That suuuucked!

[greatdefender]

[mlocher]

Stephen Hawking has done much research on the event horizon around black holes. I wish he would be describe what happens to our tax dollars as they vanish across the event horizon into the large black hole known as the federal government.

[KarlInOhio]

Can his wheelchair hit 88 miles per hour?

[OldDeckHand]

I'm glad that Hawking speaks about Einstein's theory of time dilation. When people mock theoretical science, I often point back to Einstein and this very theory, that he established almost 80 years before it was actually proven by experimentation.

The concept that time moves at varying speeds was almost heretical back in Einstein's day. But, there it is, proven completely accurate. Just because science is unable to prove a particular theory accurate do to technological limitation, doesn't necessarily mean the theory is flawed, even though it may contradict well-accepted scientific and philosophical principles.

[ShadowAce]

For someone who’s supposed to be so smart, he’s pretty stupid.

[OldDeckHand]

"Stephen Hawking has done much research on the event horizon around black holes. I wish he would be describe what happens to our tax dollars as they vanish across the event horizon into the large black hole known as the federal government."

I'm not a theoretical physicist, but I can tell you what happens to those dollars. Most of them are consumed by this man...