Catharine Smith for Huffington Post:
Ever wondered if–and how–you could build a time machine?
Stephen Hawking, a self-described “physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer,” offers instructions on how to build a time machine in an article for the Daily Mail. “All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast,” the article promises.
Hawking roots his premise in Einstein’s theory of relativity, suggesting that since time moves faster in some places than others, it’s quite possible to move along this “river” into the future–but not back to the past.
“I used to avoid talking about it [time travel] for fear of being labelled a crank,” Hawking admits. “But these days I’m not so cautious.” Indeed, he recently wrote that humans should fear aliens and likened the inter-species exchange to what happened between Christopher Columbus and the Native Americans.
Hawking even suggests what he might like to do if he were able to travel through 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,” he writes. “Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.”…
[continues at Huffington Post]
