Stephen Hawking says travelling into the future may be possible

One of the biggest questions that keeps lurking the minds of all astronomers and physicists is the practicality of time travel. The idea not only seems amazing, but practical to a certain stage as well. And while we’re not here to make any changes in the laws that govern physics and nature as a whole, one of the world’s most prestigious physicists is out there with an answer. Stephen Hawking has thought of several possible ways of time travel and their limitations too.

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Hawking says that while wormholes and black holes do provide a way to travel into the future, the concept is largely limited by the paradoxes they create. The wormhole time travel concept is limited by the famous “Grandfather Paradox," the idea of black hole time travel seems limited as it is too dangerous and it cannot by any means take us very far into the future.

Hawking believes that the most practical way to travel through the fourth dimension, which is time, is traveling very, very fast. Much faster than the speed required to avoid being sucked into the black hole, but little less than the speed of light, as according to the laws, nothing can go faster than the speed of light which is about 186,000 miles per second. Traveling at a speed, which is just a point short of the speed limit, can take us to the future. Hawking further states that future travel will require a spacecraft that carries a vast source of energy, enough to propel the ship for six years at full power. Travel at that speed for a week and you’re 100 years into the future, relative to the time on Earth.

While such a ship might seem a distant dream today, a similar concept is already being experimented at the Large Hadron Collider, where tiny particles, known as pi-mesons are believed to travel into the future. Ordinarily, these particles disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.

Via: DailyMail/Dvice