[Sonsowey]

In the past I thought "Well we don't know what could happen in the future, time travel could be developed I suppose."

The swag with which he proves this is just perfect.

[coverdoc]

I often wondered about this. If you were a time traveler thousands of years into the future what benefit would you have from visiting a personal time travelers party in 2009.

-CD

[Brodiaga]

He should have brought a bunch of top models to the party for guys from the future to show up.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

Of course it will be impossible. All those movies are mental masturbations and nothing more.

[Mage]

When I was 10 years old I concluded that if time travel exists then we should have seen time travelers, but since no one has ever seen time travelers then they apparently don't exist. Am I as smart as Stephen Hawking? Maybe even smarter since I understood that at age of 10?

The truth is I suspect that Hawking is not as big of a genous as we think, he still is a very smart and respectable man for sure, but I suspect he is more about advertising himself in a cetain way, explaining ideas and complex concepts in a popular way that makes the completely unitieded in physics to think he is very smart.

Also the image of a man who is all mind and no body somewhat plays on popular conviction that he must be very smart.

I don't want to say bad things about Hawking he is still very smart in both physics and apparently marketing himself, he also has great willpower to continue living despite his sickness, but sometimes I think his fans go a little overboard and glorify simple things he says as something supergenius when it's just common sense.


Also - maybe time travelers do exist but they keep it secret. Maybe they are what we consider UFO's, aliens, saints, apparitons of Virgin Mary or God/gods. If you can control time and history then you have almost godlike conrol over the world anyway so it could be the same thing.

Maybe time travelers are not eating Pizza, maybe they have evolved into beings whom we wouldn't comprehend even if we see them maybe they are some post singularity entities who don't need no food and wine, with plasma or dark matter bodies who commununicate only telepathicly and can be seen only in ultra ultra violet. Traveling back in time and showing themselves for us could make as much sense for them as it would make sense for us to go back in time and brag about our abilities to the first amphibious vertibrates who first left sea millions of years ago.

[CJ_W]

(06-28-2015 01:51 AM)Mage Wrote:  

The truth is I suspect that Hawking is not as big of a genous

Ok.

[The Beast1]

It would make more sense to find a way to move between dimensions so you can find the particular timeline that has you doing x,y, or z in it. Not time travel in the traditional sense, but still very similar.

This video will explain it: http://youtu.be/p4Gotl9vRGs

[Hades]

(06-28-2015 07:33 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

It would make more sense to find a way to move between dimensions so you can find the particular timeline that has you doing x,y, or z in it. Not time travel in the traditional sense, but still very similar.

This video will explain it: http://youtu.be/p4Gotl9vRGs

So basically the entire premise of Crichton's Timeline?

[The Beast1]

(06-28-2015 07:39 AM)Hades Wrote:  

(06-28-2015 07:33 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

It would make more sense to find a way to move between dimensions so you can find the particular timeline that has you doing x,y, or z in it. Not time travel in the traditional sense, but still very similar.

This video will explain it: http://youtu.be/p4Gotl9vRGs

So basically the entire premise of Crichton's Timeline?

Funny how science fiction tends to do that

[Captainstabbin]

All time travel into the past requires either:

A. Faster than light travel. Not warp drives, but the impossible kind.

B. The creation of an anchor into the past that acts as a permanent bridge between the past (a fixed point) and future (a moving point). There are theories of using wormhole-like events as these bridges. That would mean that one can only travel back to the date when these devices are first created. At best, Hawking's experiment would only prove that such devices have not been invented yet.

[Glaucon]

Haven't you guys seen the langoliers? The past do not exist anymore.

[Slim Shady]

The theory is that even though Time Travel seems quite impossible now [even though we have some solid theories for how it could be achieved it seems heavily impractical to put into practice] given enough time and human development it will one day happen.

My fear is we never get that far because the human race dies out due to some sort of disaster or cosmic effect.

If we avoid an earthly disaster I am afraid that the human race is not able to achieve the technology required to get off the Earth before the solar system collapses and move to another habitable planet, a la Asimov's novels.

Maybe this is proof of the eventual human end. Scary thought.

[Mage]

(06-28-2015 07:14 AM)CJ_W Wrote:  

(06-28-2015 01:51 AM)Mage Wrote:  

The truth is I suspect that Hawking is not as big of a genous

Ok.

By your logic you must be a feminist, if femists have better spelling.

[Cr33pin]

Is he going to say that Sana Claus will never exist next?

[Slim Shady]

This is not a new experiment by Hawking. He has talked about this a long time ago.

This is supposed to be a fun, playful experiment not some sort of scientific proof.

I don't get why people are getting mad at Hawking...

[Truth Teller]

(06-28-2015 01:51 AM)Mage Wrote:  

The truth is I suspect that Hawking is not as big of a genous as we think, he still is a very smart and respectable man for sure, but I suspect he is more about advertising himself in a certain way, explaining ideas and complex concepts in a popular way that makes the completely uninitiated in physics to think he is very smart.

Also the image of a man who is all mind and no body somewhat plays on popular conviction that he must be very smart.

I don't want to say bad things about Hawking he is still very smart in both physics and apparently marketing himself, he also has great willpower to continue living despite his sickness, but sometimes I think his fans go a little overboard and glorify simple things he says as something supergenius when it's just common sense.

Also - maybe time travelers do exist but they keep it secret. Maybe they are what we consider UFO's, aliens, saints, apparitions of Virgin Mary or God/gods. If you can control time and history then you have almost godlike control over the world anyway so it could be the same thing.

First, a few things about Hawking. Hawking has made some important mathematical discoveries in physics and cosmology. His work with Roger Penrose on the Big Bang singularity is highly-regarded. The same is true about his work with George Ellis on black holes. That being said, if Hawking were not in a wheelchair, nobody would know about him. How many people here (excluding Slim Shady) have heard of Alexander Vilenkin, Andrei Linde, Dennis Sciama, George Ellis, etc.? Not too many, although all four of them are eminent cosmologists. Dennis Sciama's doctoral students have been outstanding. Anybody hear of Martin Rees? Of course not, but he's arguably done more than Hawking in his career.

About the idea of time travelers (or aliens) being seen as gods: that's actually been proposed by authors. See Chariots of the Gods for an explanation of that. It doesn't make any sense, though.

[BDawg]

Saw him in person years ago where he made a joke about time travel. There was, at one point, a space alien with a camera around his neck on the projection behind him. As Captainstabbin remarked, he said we can't time travel since we cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

My father's girlfriend at the time disliked him since he was skeptical about alien travelers. She was convinced crop circles proved Hawking otherwise.

[CH-Toronto]

I think it's possible time travel will exist with the caveat that you will only be able to go so far back in time as to the invention of time travel. (See: Primer)

[TheBlackNarwhal]

The real reason the Titanic sank was from the combined weight of all the time travelers coming to see its' demise.

[Aurini]

One thing that always irked me about certain time travel stories was the "Don't Change the Past!" silliness; the mere fact that you're displacing air that otherwise wouldn't have been displaced changes the past.

As an example: there was an episode of Ray Bradbury Theatre where hunters go back in time to shoot T-Rexes who were about to die anyway, the logic being that killing a T-Rex who would have lived could change the future. After one such jaunting they come back, to find out that everybody's now a Nazi in the present. The tour guide goes to inspect one of the boots of his party - and discovers an ancient moth that was crushed, changing the timeline.

All well and good for a short story, but the issue is that the introduction of bullets into the dinosaur's corpse would have been more than sufficient for the past to change. Say a carrion eater ingests one of the bullets, suffers constipation, and winds up defecating two-metres to the right of where it previously would have; a different ant colony develops, a different evolution of ants occurs, et cetera. This isn't even mentioning the butterfly effect of air-displacement altering weather patterns.

I can enjoy a time travel story that's told well, but when they try and be too realistic it becomes a case of gratuitous technobabble.

In my opinion a time travel story should be about:
A) A fun an exciting visit to the past or future (Back to the Future, Doctor Who).
B) A compelling "What if history had been different?" story (Yesterday's Enterprise).
C) A puzzling recursive paradox, fun in its own right (Primer).

Back to the Future's a great example, because of the utter silliness of the rules - "If you meet your former self, the whole universe might collapse!" This provides the rules needed for a narrative to progress, without having the audacity to pretend that it's remotely scientific.

Primer has well developed rules, and is an utter mind-screw; it's much like the classic scifi where it's more about the science than the characters.

It requires the author to be genre savvy; what are you writing? What is your audience going to get out of it? There's no such thing as a fully-consistent time travel story, so don't even bother.

[TheBlackNarwhal]

(06-28-2015 02:58 PM)Aurini Wrote:  

As an example: there was an episode of Ray Bradbury Theatre where hunters go back in time to shoot T-Rexes who were about to die anyway, the logic being that killing a T-Rex who would have lived could change the future. After one such jaunting they come back, to find out that everybody's now a Nazi in the present. The tour guide goes to inspect one of the boots of his party - and discovers an ancient moth that was crushed, changing the timeline.

That was based off his short story "A Sound of Thunder," if anyone cares to look it up.

[LeBeau]

(06-28-2015 01:13 PM)Slim Shady Wrote:  

This is not a new experiment by Hawking. He has talked about this a long time ago.

This is supposed to be a fun, playful experiment not some sort of scientific proof.

I don't get why people are getting mad at Hawking...

Agreed, and there wasn't any need for the clickbait headline, unless people actually think this experiment counts as rigorous scientific method?

[Simeon_Strangelight]

(06-28-2015 01:32 PM)BDawg Wrote:  

Saw him in person years ago where he made a joke about time travel. There was, at one point, a space alien with a camera around his neck on the projection behind him. As Captainstabbin remarked, he said we can't time travel since we cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

And here he will be proven wrong if he isn't proven wrong already.

Stephen Hawking is not some kind of God - just a train that runs along certain tracks a lot faster than others. He knows what he knows.

His statement about women being complete mysteries show that he will only be aware of things that he lets himself be aware of or accept his mind to dwell on.

Quote:

In a recent interview with the New Scientist, British physicist Stephen Hawking, known for his illustrious work on black hole theory, declared that women are “a complete mystery”.

Also infinite alternative dimensions of variations of yourself are bullshit too for a different reason as well. That's even more absurd than a species that time travels to the beginning of time and destroys the universe on accident - actually that would happen for sure.

Even Einstein worked on faster communication than light later in his life, so we know it exists, it's just not part of our scientific public knowledge yet.

[Slim Shady]

(06-30-2015 01:55 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:  

so we know it exists, it's just not part of our scientific public knowledge yet.

How/where do we know this?

You have proof of faster than light travel?

I hope you're not talking about tachyons.

---------------

Stephen Hawking is a comedian. His statement about women was a joke, just like this time traveler experiment.

One of Hawking's buddies is comedian Jimmy Carr who makes dark jokes about rape, killing whales, and shagging pandas.

Hawking makes bets on important cosmic realities with lad mags like Penthouse and Playboy.

You've got to have a sense of humor if you're going to live the kind of life that he has.

[Saweeep]

Hawking is a funny guy.

This was just a silly joke guys.