Hawking service 'open to time travelers'

May 12, 2018 | Comment icon

8 comments

Will anyone from the future attend ? Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Ed g2s

Organizers of Stephen Hawking's memorial service have seemingly left the door open to visitors from the future.

Those wishing to attend the service, which will take place on June 15th at Westminster Abbey, have the opportunity to apply for one of 1,000 tickets that will be given out by means of a public ballot.

Intriguingly however, applications are open to anyone born before or up to the year 2038.

The peculiar choice of dates may be a nod to an experiment that Hawking conducted back in 2009 in which he announced that he was hosting a party and that time travelers were welcome to attend.

To further cement this idea, he didn't send out the invitations until after the party had taken place.

"I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible," he said at the time.

"I gave a party for time travelers. I sat there a long time, but no one came."

Whether anyone from the future will turn up at his memorial service however remains to be seen.

"We cannot exclude the possibility of time travel as it has not been disproven to our satisfaction," said a spokesman for the Stephen Hawking Foundation. "All things are possible until proven otherwise."

Source: Sky News | Comments (8)

Tags: Stephen Hawking

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Recent comments on this story

#1 Posted by Ozymandias 4 years ago

Time is not independent of space- we live in a space-time continuum. The arrow of time is uni-directional and the�universe is expanding�with it. In my view, time-travel is not possible. We only exist in the here and now. One cannot travel forward into the future to a place and�time that has never existed. Nor can one travel backwards to a time and place whose moment of existance was in the past, a particular point in the space-time continuum that no longer exists. Time travel in our space-time dimensions is analogous to�jumping out of one frame in a film reel and relocating yourself in another... [More]

#2 Posted by Black Monk 4 years ago

No invited time traveller turned up to his birthday party in 2009.

#3 Posted by Black Monk 4 years ago

How do you know time travelling to the past is impossible?

#4 Posted by pallidin 4 years ago

Well, what happens if there is no immutable�"forward arrow-in-time"? After all, we exist, not in the past or future, but the concrete NOW. Perhaps the past, present and future is rolled into one grand mystery. �

#5 Posted by IBelieveWhatIWant 4 years ago

It's been mathematically proven that you can in fact travel forward in time. It's actually pretty much accepted that it possible now. Backwards is another question entirely though.

#6 Posted by Ozymandias 4 years ago

Time dilation is not time travel. It is merely a differential in how time is recorded based on a relative difference in velocity between two observers.� The fastest any human has ever traveled - some of the Apollo mission astronauts -�has been about 11 kilometres (7 miles) a second. The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec�(186,000 miles/sec). We haven't even attained one ten thousandth of one percent of the speed of light. the formula for time dilation is; t' =� t/[sq.rt.(1- v2/c2)]� We have a long way to go before time dilation effects will ever effect us physically, and even then it will never ... [More]

#7 Posted by danydandan 4 years ago

� Actually Frank Tiplers calculations does show time travel is possible theoretically. Spacetine can be distorted by strong gravitational fields, and Tipler�s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100km long and 10km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. Basically you would need to use multisecond pulsar, we don't have then lying around in our back garden. So... [More]

#8 Posted by Black Monk 4 years ago

Does the present even exist? The past and future do, but what about the present?

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