It’s been a busy month for Stephen Hawking and the making of bold proclamations. First it was about the horrible death that awaits us all at the hands of aliens, and now: time travel. He says it’s gonna happen, but it won’t happen the way you see it in the movies, and you can’t go to the past. Time travel, according to Hawking, can only take us into the future, and you have to travel at near-lightspeed to do it.
Why not travel into the past, you ask? Because of paradoxes. You can’t go into the past because it is impossible to do so, as it would violate a fundamental physics law: causes happen before effects. Hawking’s example is the scientist who goes one minute into the past and shoots himself. If he’s dead, then who traveled in time and fired the shot? You can’t both exist and not exist at the same time. The whole thing brings about a conundrum of head-exploding proportions.
The way time-traveling into the future works is as follows (and I only have a basic comprehension of this, so bear with me; thankfully Hawking writes in very understandable terms): Nothing can travel faster than light (186,000 miles/second), right? It’s one of the most well-established principles in science. Thing is, when you get to that speed, time starts to slow down for you. It continues flowing at the regular rate (for lack of a better term) everywhere else, but if you’re traveling at 99% of lightspeed, time slows down by a huge factor (one day at that speed equals a year on Earth). If time slows down by that much, then you could end up several years in the future while only experiencing a few days of time yourself.
In order to do that, we’d need a massive ship capable of carrying a tremendous amount of fuel, which would have to burn at full power for 6 years before we hit that critical point of velocity. Do we have technology on that scale? No. But we do have the Large Hadron Collider. This is a massive particle accelerator that… well… accelerates particles to near-lightspeed. And it’s been noted that, though these tiny particles (“pi-mesons”) cease to exist after 25 billionths of a second under normal conditions, once accelerated to 99% of lightspeed, they last 30 times longer. Time slows down for those particles at that speed. Now we just need to apply that to human-sized models, and off we go. You know, that’s all.
There’s even more about all this, and it deals with wormholes, but my mind is already blown enough. For Hawking’s full article, go here. These points and more can be seen on Stephen Hawking’s Universe, airing May 9 on Discovery.
Seems to me that more and more, the things that were science-fiction are becoming reality. And that’s just fine with me.
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