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Renowned Scientist Stephen Hawking Dies At Age 76

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One of the greatest minds of our time, physicist and author Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76, according to news reports from the United Kingdom. "We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today," Hawking's family said in a statement released on Wednesday morning.

"He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.

"He once said: 'It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.' We will miss him for ever."

Hawking, whose brilliant career in theoretical physics and cosmology spanned six decades, remained an active science communicator until his last days. Just earlier this month he mused about existence before the Big Bang with Neil deGrasse Tyson on his popular Star Talk show.

In 1963, at the age of 21 he was diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset motor neurone disease or ALS, and doctors gave him the grim prognosis of just a few more years of life. Instead, Hawking lived another 55 years, making stellar contributions to science for more than half a century.

Image result for BREAKING: Stephen Hawking, One of Science's Greatest Minds, Has Died Aged 76

As a graduate student of cosmology at the University of Cambridge, Hawking wrote his PhD thesis on the "properties of an expanding Universe", mathematically demonstrating that the Big Bang theory was physically possible.

This was the very first step towards the singularity theorems he developed with mathematician Sir Roger Penrose starting in 1970, using the mathematics of black holes to prove that a universe which is ruled by the general theory of relativity must have begun as a singularity.

In the 1970s, Hawking turned his brilliant mind to bringing quantum mechanics into the mix, proposing that radiation can actually escape from a black hole thanks to laws from the quantum realm.

This suggestion stirred up a massive debate in cosmology, as it didn't gel with our understanding of how time moves in our Universe. And, true to form, Hawking never gave up on the problem himself, publishing a new paper on his black hole paradox just two years ago.

But his most famous work remains the popular cosmology book A Brief History of Time, first published in 1988 with an introduction by Carl Sagan.

Tributes to the professor have also been streaming in on social media:

Genius is so fine and rare. Goodbye Professor Hawking. You inspired and taught us all. pic.twitter.com/9Drdnv2eEe
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) March 14, 2018

“It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love” - Dr. Stephen Hawking 😢😢😢 pic.twitter.com/TK53EqP1Xp
— April (@April_54f) March 14, 2018

“It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.” RIP Stephen Hawking pic.twitter.com/5f49ucp2Of
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) March 14, 2018

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away”
-Stephen Hawking
— Julia Wilde (@Julia_SCI) March 14, 2018

Sad to hear about the passing of one of our greatest minds, #StephenHawking. He will be missed. pic.twitter.com/WDHKU0ulc8
— Nick Walden Poublon (@NWPinPDX) March 14, 2018

Goodbye, Professor Hawking. The world will miss you.

Stephen Hawking Believed Humankind Is in Danger of Self-Destruction Due to AI

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World-renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is a monumental figure in modern science. Lately, he's been focused on what he perceives to be major threats to the future of humanity.

THEORY OF THE END

Stephen Hawking is one of the most respected minds in science today. He often speaks on a wide range of topics both within and outside of his particular expertise in theoretical physics. Some of Hawking’s most discussed topics including the search for alien life, climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), and how all of these things, and more, are going to spell the end of humanity once and for all.

Speaking at an event at Cambridge University last year Hawking said, “Our earth is becoming too small for us, global population is increasing at an alarming rate and we are in danger of self-destructing.”

He recognizes the pessimism of his assertations. Hawking cites the passing of the controversial “Brexit” plan for the UK to leave the EU as a reason for this enduring pessimism, saying that if the measure passes, “…I would not be optimistic about the long-term outlook for our species.”

“SPOT ON”

Durwood Zaelke is the founder and President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD), an organization with a mission “to promote just and sustainable societies and to protect the environment by advancing the understanding, development, and implementation of effective, and accountable systems of governance for sustainable development.” Zaelke spoke to Futurism about Hawking’s comments.

“Mr. Hawking is spot on,” he began. “We’re chasing a fast-moving—indeed an accelerating problem of climate change, with slow-moving solutions, and we’re getting further behind every day.” As populations continue to boom, the detrimental environmental impact of humanity will only continue to worsen.

Like Hawking, Zealke believes that we are close to the tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible. Speaking in dire terms, Zealke said that “…we’ll soon face climate-driven chaos that will threaten our very civilization and our democratic form of government, while the fear of chaos feeds authoritarian regimes.”

In order to ensure the survival of our species, Hawking suggests humanity move beyond the confines of this planet. In June, Hawking told the BCC that “Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth.” Colonizing other areas of the Solar System will certainly help to relieve some of this population pressure and therefore mitigate carbon emissions. Despite whatever potential this idea has, Hawking cites another threat to human-kind that there just might be no running away from.

AI-NIHLATION

Hawking often speaks about the development of artificial intelligence (AI) as the true perpetrator of the eventual demise of human beings. In an interview with WIRED Hawking said, “The genie is out of the bottle. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether.”

Hawking fears that we will develop AI that is too competent, “A superintelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” Other big names within science and tech share these same trepedations as Hawking.

Founder of OpenAI and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, also has concerns about the destructive potential of AI. Musk has moderated his own rhetoric comparatively to Hawking (though he did say that AI is more of a risk than North Korea) which is focused on the need to regulate the development of AI systems. “AI just something that I think anything that represents a risk to the public deserves at least insight from the government because one of the mandates of the government is the public well-being,” Musk said.

Hawking believes that “some form of world government” should have control of the technology to make sure the machines don’t rise up and rebel like their terminating fictional counterparts.

However, these fears could be disproportionate to reality. Speaking to Futurism about all of this fear surrounding the development of AI, Pascal Kaufmann, the founder of Starmind and president of the synthetic intelligence development initiative the Mindfire Foundation, denies the likelihood of AI developing into a threat. “It is fascinating that when it comes to AI, our first thoughts often go towards being enslaved by our creations. That perspective makes for entertaining movies, but it does not mean that reality is doomed to walk the same path, or that it is the likely scenario,” he explained.

Kaufmann, however, does not deny the potential for destructive AI. “There are dangers which come with the creation of such powerful and omniscient technology, just as there are dangers with anything that is powerful. This does not mean we should assume the worst and make potentially detrimental decisions now based on that fear.”

Perhaps there is some way to trade the irrational fears for rational ones. Hawking certainly is right about the threat of climate change. Maybe if humans were more concerned with the scientific fact of climate change than the science fiction of killer robot overlords, we could start making real progress in getting our planet back on track.

References: The Guardian, Metro

Earth Will DIE By 2600, Warns Professor Stephen Hawking

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Professor Stephen Hawking has issued yet another chilling warning at a speech during the Tencent Web Summit, held in Beijing. Professor Hawking said that Earth ‘will become a flaming ball of fire by 2600,’ as Soaring populations and increased energy demands will cause the catastrophe. Some would say by now that Professor Hawking has become a little bit paranoid don’t you think?

In the last twelve months, professor hawking has made a series of comments related to AI and all of its danger, and how the rapid development could cause the human race to go extinct. Hawking has also warned that Earth could be destroyed by aliens, and that we ought to tread carefully when exploring space, searching for our cosmic neighbors.

And now, the world-renowned physicist has issued another warning saying that our planet may die by the years 2600. According to Professor Hawking, by the year 2600, planet Earth ‘will become a flaming ball of fire’. Now, this isn’t a prophecy, and something that he foresaw in his dreams, after all, he isn’t Nostradamus. Professor Hawking warned that it will be mankind who will destroy planet Earth, turning it into a giant blazing fireball, within the next 600 years.

According to Hawking, the soaring populating size and extreme demands for energy will eventually lead our planet to catastrophe. The stark warning was made via video link at the Tencent Web Summit, held in Beijing. This is why professor Hawking believes mankind must turn to the stars in order to avoid this fate, with our nearest cosmic neighbor Alpha Centauri being one of the best candidates for escape. Professor Hawking urged potential financial backers to join a global-scale project that could one day help take mankind to Alpha Centauri. And maybe Hawking is right. After all, what we are doing to our planet is inhumane, to say the least. We live life as if we had another 10 Earth’s lined up next door. Professor Hawking is one of the backers of the Breakthrough Starshot project, an initiative that would see a nanocraft probe sent to Alpha Centauri in the next 20 years or so.

‘The idea behind this innovation is to have the nanocraft on the light beam. Such a system could reach Mars in less than an hour, or reach Pluto in days, pass Voyager in under a week and reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years,’ said professor Hawking during the conference. Going to Alpha Centauri will not be easy. In fact, since it is located 4.37 light years away, it would mean that our fastest spacecraft would take about 30,000 years to get there. The Starshot project aims to send miniature-sized spacecraft on a sail powered by a laser-beam to Alpha Centauri but traveling a thousand times faster. But why do we want to get to Alpha Centauri? Well, according to experts, there is a good chance that there are Earth-like planets existing in the ‘habitable zones’ of Alpha Centauri’s three-star system.

Stephen Hawking Was Wrong: "Spacetime Was Infinite At The Big Bang"

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According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the curvature of space-time was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their "no-boundary proposal", and by Alexander Vilenkin with his "tunneling proposal".

Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able to use better mathematical methods to show that these ideas cannot work. The big bang, in its complicated glory, retains all its mystery.

"Hence the "no-boundary proposal" does not imply a large universe like the one we live in, but rather tiny curved universes that would collapse immediately", says Jean-Luc Lehners, who leads the "theoretical cosmology" group at the AEI.

One of the principal goals of cosmology is to understand the beginning of our universe. Data from the Planck satellite mission shows that 13.8 billion years ago the universe consisted of a hot and dense soup of particles. Since then the universe has been expanding. This is the main tenet of the hot big bang theory, but the theory fails to describe the very first stages themselves, as the conditions were too extreme. Indeed, as we approach the big bang, the energy density and the curvature grow until we reach the point where they become infinite.

As an alternative, the "no-boundary" and "tunneling" proposals assume that the tiny early universe arose by quantum tunneling from nothing, and subsequently grew into the large universe that we see. The curvature of space-time would have been large, but finite in this beginning stage, and the geometry would have been smooth - without boundary (see Fig. 1, left panel). This initial configuration would replace the standard big bang. However, for a long time the true consequences of this hypothesis remained unclear.

Now, with the help of better mathematical methods, Jean-Luc Lehners, group leader at the AEI, and his colleagues Job Feldbrugge and Neil Turok at Perimeter Institute, managed to define the 35 year old theories in a precise manner for the first time, and to calculate their implications. The result of these investigations is that these alternatives to the big bang are no true alternatives.

As a result of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, these models do not only imply that smooth universes can tunnel out of nothing, but also irregular universes. In fact, the more irregular and crumpled they are, the more likely (see Fig. 1, right panel).

Hence one cannot circumvent the big bang so easily. Lehners and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what mechanism could have kept those large quantum fluctuations in check under the most extreme circumstances, allowing our large universe to unfold.

More information: Job Feldbrugge et al. Lorentzian quantum cosmology, Physical Review D (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.95.103508

An 11-Year-Old Boy Scored Higher in an IQ Test Than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking

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An 11-year-old boy has scored higher in an IQ test than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The so-called genius benchmark is set at 140 and Arnav Sharma gained a score of 162 – the maximum possible result you can achieve on the paper. It is a whole two points higher than German-born theoretical physicist Einstein and celebrated cosmologist Hawking.

Arnav, from Reading, passed the infamously difficult test a few weeks back with zero preparation and had never seen what a typical paper looked like before taking it. His mark in the exam, which primarily measures verbal reasoning ability, puts him in the top one per cent of the nation in terms of IQ level.

“The Mensa test is quite hard and not many people pass it so do not expect to pass,” Arnav confidently told The Independent from his home in Reading.

Genius Child

“I took the exam at the Salvation centre and it took about two and a half hours,” he recalled. “There were about seven or eight people there. A couple were children but the rest were adults. It was what I thought it would be.”

Arnav, who is of Indian origin, insisted he was not anxious before the sitting the test, saying: “I had no preparation at all for the exam but I was not nervous. My family were surprised but they were also very happy when I told them about the result.”

Meesha Dhamija Sharma, his mother, said she kept her “fingers crossed” for the whole exam.

“I was thinking what is going to happen because you never know and he had never seen what a paper looks like,” she explained.

When pressed about the point she became aware of his abilities, Ms Sharma cast her mind back to Arnav being in India as a toddler. Despite being told he was exceptional, she refused to believe it at the time.

“At one-and-a-half years old I took him to India for a holiday to see his grandparents, his grandmother told me about him and said Arnav is going to do very well with his studies,” she said. “I did not trust her, I just thought she was saying it to make me happy, but she was right.”

It was not until he was two-and-a-half years old that she became aware of his mathematical prowess.

“He was counting up to more than 100. That was when I stopped teaching him because I came to know that there is no end to his numbers.”

When asked about whether there was anyone else in the family with an unusually high IQ, she could not recall anyone, adding: “His dad is quite clever as well but not as clever.”

Arnav, who attends Crossfields School on the outskirts of Reading, has been selected for Eton College and Westminster, both highly competitive and sought-after schools, with no preparation.

But it’s worth noting his talents are not restricted to numbers. Arnav used to have a passion for singing and dancing and reached the semi-finals for Reading’s Got Talent for Dancing with a Bollywood act when he was eight.

Arnav, who also cites his hobbies as coding, badminton, piano, swimming and reading, also has an unusually good geographical knowledge, and can name all the capitals of the world.

A spokesperson for Mensa heaped praised on Arnav for the achievement, saying: “It is a high mark which only a small percentage of people in the country will achieve”.

Mensa is one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, as the only way to join is to prove your IQ is in the top two per cent of the nation.

It was founded in 1946 in Oxford by Lancelot Lionel Ware, a scientist and lawyer, and Roland Berrill, an Australian barrister, but the organisation later spread around the world.

Its mission is to “identify and foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity”.

Stephen Hawking Has Figured Out How to Escape a Black Hole

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Matter that falls into a black hole is gone forever, right? Well not quite, says Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking told this at a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, just yesterday. He also said “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” You possibly know that black holes are stars that have shrunken under their own strong gravity, generating gravitational forces so powerful that even light can’t escape. Anything that falls inside is believed to be torn apart by the immense gravity, never to been seen or heard from again ever. What you may not know is that physicists have been arguing for 40 years about what happens to the information about the physical state of those objects once they fall in.

According to quantum mechanics this information cannot be destroyed, but Einstein’s theory general relativity says it has to be – that’s why this disagreement is recognized as the information paradox. Now according to Hawking this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. Hawking, just yesterday, said “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” Hawking is proposing that the information about particles fleeting through is interpreted into a type of hologram – a 2D depiction of a 3D object – that sits on the surface of the event horizon.

Hawking also said:

“The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles. Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.”

So the main question is how does that help something escape from the immense gravity of black hole? In the 1970s Hawking presented the idea of Hawking radiation – photons produced by black holes due to quantum fluctuations. In the beginning he said that this radiation carried no information from inside the black hole, but in 2004 he changed his mind and proposed that it could be probable for information to get out. One thing to be mentioned here is that how this escape of information works is still a mystery, but Hawking now thinks he’s solved it. His new theory is that Hawking radiation can carry some of the information stowed on the event horizon as it is produced, providing a way for it to escape. But don’t think getting a message from inside, he said.

Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stockholm, who was present in Hawking’s lecture, said, “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost. He is saying that the information is there twice already from the very beginning, so it’s never destroyed in the black hole to begin with. At least that’s what I understood.”

More explanation is expected later today when one of Hawking’s coworkers Malcom Perry expands on the notion, and Hawking and his associates say they will also issue a paper on the work in upcoming month, but it’s obvious he is aiming for the idea that black holes are inescapable. It’s even probable information could escape into parallel universes, hawking told the audience yesterday.

Hawking said:
"The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe."

Don’t Fear Falling Into A Black Hole – You May Live On As A Hologram

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nterstellar, the main character Cooper escapes from a black hole to see his daughter Murph in her final days. Some have argued that the movie is so scientific that it should be taught in schools. In reality, many scientists believe that anything sent into a black hole would be destroyed. But a new study suggests that this might not be the case after all.

The research says that, rather than being devoured, a person falling into a black hole would actually be absorbed into a hologram – without even noticing. The paper challenges a rival theory stating that anybody falling into a black hole hits a “firewall”and is immediately destroyed.

Hawking’s black holes

Forty years ago Stephen Hawking shocked the scientific establishment with his discovery that black holes aren’t really black. Classical physics implies that anything falling through the horizon of a black hole can never escape. But Hawking showed that black holes continually emit radiation once quantum effects are taken into account. Unfortunately, for typical astrophysical black holes, the temperature of this radiation is far lower than that of the cosmic microwave background, meaning detecting them is beyond current technology.

Hawking’s calculations are perplexing. If a black hole continually emits radiation, it will continually lose mass – eventually evaporating. Hawking realized that this implied a paradox: if a black hole can evaporate, the information about it will be lost forever. This means that even if we could measure the radiation from a black hole we could never figure out it was originally formed. This violates an important rule of quantum mechanics that states information cannot be lost or created.

Another way to look at this is that Hawking radiation poses a problem with determinism for black holes. Determinism implies that the state of the universe at any given time is uniquely determined from its state at any other time. This is how we can trace its evolution both astronomically and mathematically though quantum mechanics.

Lots of theories but only one way to find out for sure. NASA/Flickr, CC BY-SA

This means that the loss of determinism would have to arise from reconciling quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of gravity – a notoriously hard problem and ultimate goal for many physicists. Black hole physics provides a test for any potential quantum gravity theory. Whatever your theory is, it must explain what happens to the information recording a black hole’s history.

It took two decades for scientists to come up with a solution. They suggested that the information stored in a black hole is proportional to its surface area (in two dimensions) rather than its volume (in three dimensions). This could be explained by quantum gravity, where the three dimensions of space could be reconstructed from a two-dimensional world without gravity – much like a hologram. Shortly afterwards, string theory, the most studied theory of quantum gravity, was shown to be holographic in this way.

Using holography we can describe the evaporation of the black hole in the two-dimensional world without gravity, for which the usual rules of quantum mechanics apply. This process is deterministic, with small imperfections in the radiation encoding the history of the black hole. So holography tells us that information is not lost in black holes, but tracking down the flaw in Hawking’s original arguments has been surprisingly hard.

Fuzzballs versus firewalls

But exactly what the black holes described by quantum theory look like is harder to work out. In 2003, Samir Mathur proposed that black holes are in fact fuzzballs, in which there is no sharp horizon. Quantum fluctuations around the horizon region records the information about the hole’s history and thus Mathur’s proposal resolves the information loss paradox. However the idea has been criticised since it implies that somebody falling into a fuzzball has a very different experience to somebody falling into a black hole descried by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

The general relativity description of black holes suggests that once you go past the event horizon, the surface of a black hole, you can go deeper and deeper. As you do, space and time become warped until they reach a point called the “singularity” at which point the laws of physics cease to exist. (Although in reality, you would be die pretty early on on this journey as you are pulled apart by intense tidal forces).

In Mathur’s universe, however, there is nothing beyond the fuzzy event horizon. Currently, a rival theory in quantum gravity is that anybody falling into a black hole hits a “firewall” and is immediately destroyed. The firewall proposal has been criticized since (like fuzzballs) firewalls have drastically different behavior at the horizon than general relativity black holes.

But Mathur argues that to an outside observer, somebody falling into a fuzzball looks almost the same as somebody falling into an Einstein black hole, even though those falling in have very different experiences. Others working on firewalls and fuzzballs may well feel that these arguments rely on properties of the example he used. Mathur used an explicit description of a very special kind of fuzzball to make his arguments. Such special fuzzballs are probably very different to the fuzzballs needed to describe realistic astrophysical black holes.

The debate about what actually happens when one falls into a black hole will probably continue for some time to come. The key question is to understand is not that the horizon region is reconstructed as a hologram – but exactly how this happens.

Black holes Could be a Portal to Another Universe and Are Not An 'eternal prison' Says Stephen Hawking

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For a long time, researcher have viewed black holes as ‘eternal prisons’ for all that is drawn into their endless depths. But from past whole year Stephen Hawking has been saying that there may be a way out. The famous theoretical physicist clarified these notions at the inauguration of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, initiating the program that will primarily concentrate on black hole research.

The lecture was held at Harvard’s Sanders Theater, where Stephen Hawking spoke for an audience of over 1,000 people.

Hawking is currently the director of research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in UK, and from the past few years hawking has made some development on his theories on the ‘lost’ information that gets drawn into black holes. He proposes that this information may be kept in a different universe, and may not be vanished forever as is usually believed.

With the help of Black Hole Initiative, Harvard scientists will join forces to ‘cultivate a sort of culture of people fascinated by black holes,’ said Chair of the Harvard Department of Astronomy Avi Loeb, The Harvard Crimson reports.

This will allow professors along with undergraduate and graduate students to contribute in research and new study on black holes.

The most "Scientifically Accurate" illustration of black hole (Interstellar Movie)

Publicized in February, the theoretical cosmologist says the breakthrough delivered some of the first solid indication of the presence of black holes, according to The Boston Globe. During the lecture hawking said:

“Black holes aren’t the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole, both from the outside and possible through another universe. So if you feel you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out”

In his lecture, Hawking also talked about the recent discovery of gravitational waves. The theoretical physicist related the return of information to a burned encyclopedia, where information wouldn't theoretically be lost, but would be extremely tough to decode.

Black holes could be gigantic objects – as massive as the distance from the sun to Jupiter – Hawking explained, but that also leaves the possibility of black holes being as small as a mountain.

This lecture tracks the current launch of Hawking’s $100m project, an alliance with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder: Mark Zuckerberg, called Breakthrough Starshot.

They have planned a project that on small so-called 'nanocraft' flying on sails propelled by beams of light through the space.

This 'nanocraft' will complete its journey to the Alpha Centauri star system 25 trillion miles (4.37 light years) in twenty year to look for alien life.

How To Build A Time Machine by Stephen Hawking

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All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a relatively big rocket that goes really, really fast.

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?

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Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by 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. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do – at the fourth dimension. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length. But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years and the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.

To see what that means, let’s imagine we’re doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you’re travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that’s travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?

Let’s indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy.

Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What’s more, we’ve even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they’re too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me.

Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it’s easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it’s also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time.

Hawking in a scene from Star Trek with dinner guests from the past, and future:

(from left) Albert Einstein, Data and Isaac Newton

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Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times. Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through – but here’s where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.

Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I’m not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet. Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past.

Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. Now, I realize that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there. I’ve thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne.

So I’ve combined two of my favorite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible. Let’s imagine I’m throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travelers. But there’s a twist. I’m not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I’ve drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.

In the meantime, my time traveler guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn’t the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes. Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox.

I don’t like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it’s true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he’s built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past.

Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He’s now dead. So who fired the shot? It’s a paradox. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.

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This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe – that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can’t make themselves impossible. If they could then there’d be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I’m sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.

In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can’t exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you’ve ever been to a rock gig, you’ll probably recognise this screeching noise. It’s feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It’s transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.

The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won’t last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That’s the real reason no one could come back in time to my party. Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.

But the story’s not over yet. This doesn’t make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time’s current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at different speeds in different places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realized that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right. And the proof is right above our heads. Up in space.

This is the Global Positioning System, or GPS. A network of satellites is in orbit around Earth. The satellites make satellite navigation possible. But they also reveal that time runs faster in space than it does down on Earth. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny difference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. You can just imagine the mayhem that that would cause.

The problem doesn’t lie with the clocks. They run fast because time itself runs faster in space than it does down below and the reason for this extraordinary effect is the mass of the Earth. Einstein realized that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time. And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future. Right in the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from us, lies the heaviest object in the galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole containing the mass of four million suns crushed down into a single point by its own gravity. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the gravity. Get really close and not even light can escape. A black hole like this one has a dramatic effect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine.

I like to imagine how a spaceship might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon, by orbiting it. If a space agency were controlling the mission from Earth they’d observe that each full orbit took 16 minutes. But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down. And here the effect would be far more extreme than the gravitational pull of Earth. The crew’s time would be slowed down by half. For every 16-minute orbit, they’d only experience eight minutes of time.

Around and around they’d go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had. So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it’s not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn’t provoke paradoxes. Plus it won’t destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it’s pretty dangerous. It’s a long way away and it doesn’t even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine.

You just have to travel very, very fast. Much faster even than the speed required to avoid being sucked into a black hole. This is due to another strange fact about the universe. There’s a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It’s one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future. To explain why, let’s dream up a science-fiction transportation system. Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a superfast train. We’re going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it’s circling the Earth over and over again.

To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let’s say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.

This happens to protect the speed limit, and it’s not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn’t she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard. Now she can’t run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future.

Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year’s Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they’d find a very different world from the one they’d left. In one week they’d have travelled 100 years into the future.

Of course, building a train that could reach such a speed is quite impossible. But we have built something very like the train at the world’s largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they’re whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.

It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we’d need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.

The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.

After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future. The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime.

A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It’s a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.

Stephen Hawking's Mission to Find Alien Life Detects Mystery Signals

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Stephen Hawking Has a Chilling Warning about Aliens

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Stephen Hawking: It’s Time to Get the Hell off Planet Earth

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Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has set a deadline for humanity to save itself. Within in the next 100 years, he warns, we need to colonize Mars and other planets. If we don’t, we may not survive climate change, disease, and other versions of doom we’re bound to inflict on ourselves this century.

Hawking’s pessimistic take on humanity isn’t new. But the super-famous scientist and author has been making the case more urgently in advance of the release of his new BBC documentary, Expedition New Earth, this summer.

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And President Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement on June 1 has only upped the stakes, Hawking said in a talk delivered by Skype at the Starmus science and art festival on Tuesday.

“Unlike Donald Trump, who may just have taken the most serious and wrong decision on climate this world has seen, I am arguing for the future of humanity and a long-term strategy to achieve this,” Hawking, now 75 and still a professor at the University of Cambridge, said.

“There is no new world, no utopia around the corner,” on Earth, he added. “We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”

If you share Hawking’s faith in the human imagination and fierce drive to explore, then these are hopeful words. It’s conceivable that we could rekindle the excitement of the early days of space travel in the 1960s, and get more serious about it and Hawking has some concrete goals to guide us going forward. If we’re going to make his timeline for building new civilizations before we perish, here’s what we need to do:

1. Bring the cost of spaceflight down dramatically.

2. Develop new technologies to launch us farther and faster into space.

3. Discover new planets more habitable than the ones we already know about.

4. Figure out how to survive on inhospitable planets we already know about, like Mars, and planets that might support life, like Proxima b.

If these ideas sound familiar, it’s because billionaires like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, who are deeply invested in spaceflight, have been pushing them too. Some of Hawking’s fellow physicists and astronomers also agree we could use an exit strategy. And there’s now a small but growing community of aspiring space colonists prepping for life on Mars. (To be clear, Mars, for now, looks like a pretty deadly place.)

Last year, as Vox’s Brian Resnick reported, Hawking, along with a Russian billionaire and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, concocted a scheme to build and send spacecraft the size of postage stamps to Alpha Centauri, the second-closest star to Earth, some 4.37 light-years away.

The plan, called Breakthrough Starshot, is ambitious, to say the least. A huge number of engineering hurdles would need to be cleared over the next couple of decades to make a launch possible. And it’s just a tiny example of what we’d need to actually decamp to other planets and the moon.

Timetables like Hawking’s are troubling to climate scientists and a whole lot of other people who’d like to focus on fixing planet Earth, however. If we start looking for our salvation outside our solar system, they fear we may be dissuaded or distracted from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avert catastrophic climate change right now.

As Katherine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist at Texas Tech University and another Starmus speaker, tweeted during Hawking’s talk on Tuesday:

Hawking admits there are risks to the kind of audacious space exploration he’s calling for. We don’t know what or whom we’ll find when we venture further afield. But, he said Tuesday, with just a twinge of envy, "If there are beings on Alpha Centauri, they remain blissfully unaware of the rise of Donald Trump.”

Stephen Hawking Was Wrong: "Spacetime Was Infinite At the Big Bang"

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According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down.

However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their "no-boundary proposal", and by Alexander Vilenkin with his "tunnelling proposal".

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"Hence the "no-boundary proposal" does not imply a large universe like the one we live in, but rather tiny curved universes that would collapse immediately", says Jean-Luc Lehners, who leads the "theoretical cosmology" group at the AEI.

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As an alternative, the "no-boundary" and "tunneling" proposals assume that the tiny early universe arose by quantum tunnelling from nothing, and subsequently grew into the large universe that we see. The curvature of spacetime would have been large, but finite in this beginning stage, and the geometry would have been smooth - without boundary (see Fig. 1, left panel). This initial configuration would replace the standard big bang. However, for a long time the true consequences of this hypothesis remained unclear.

Stephen Hawking Could Win the Nobel Prize as the 'Black Holes' Created In a Lab Confirm Stephen Hawking's Radiation Theory

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About 42 years ago, Stephen Hawking proposed that not everything that comes near the black hole succumbs to its deep nothingness. Small particles of light (photons) are occasionally emitted back out, depriving the black hole of a tiny amount of energy, and this steady loss of mass over time means every black hole ultimately evaporates out of existence.

Labelled as Hawking radiation, these evading particles help us make sense of one of the utmost paradoxes in the known Universe, but nobody got to prove this practically, and Hawking’s suggestion stayed firmly in hypothesis territory.

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But now all that is possibly be about to change, with two independent teams of scientists claiming that they’ve found proof to back up Hawking's claims, and it could finally see one of the greatest living physicists win a Nobel Prize. Back in 1974, Hawking suggested that the Universe is jam-packed with 'virtual particles' that, according to what we know about how quantum mechanics works, blink in and out of existence and destroy each other when they come in contact - with the one exception, if they come to appear on either side of a black hole's event horizon.

Fundamentally, one particle gets eaten by the black hole, and the other radiates away into the cosmos. The presence of Hawking radiation has explained a lot of questions about how black holes really work, but during that, it also raised a bunch of question that physicists are still trying to resolve.

Hawking’s theory wasn’t proved earlier because this radiation emitted by the black hole is so subtle, it’s almost impossible to spot it from thousands of light-years away. But now physicist Jeff Steinhauer from Technion University in Haifa, Israel, thinks that if we can’t reach black holes then why not drag out the black hole to us?

As Oliver Moody reports for The Times, Steinhauer has achieved to create a lab-sized ‘black hole’ assembled from sound, and when he kicked it into gear, he observed particles take energy from its outer edge. Reporting his experiment in a research paper forwarded to the physics pre-press website, arXiv.org, Steinhauer says he chilled helium to just above absolute zero, then churned it up so fast, it made a 'barrier' over which sound should not be able to pass.

Moody reports:

“Steinhauer said he had found signs that phonons, the very small packets of energy that make up sound waves, were leaking out of his sonic black hole just as Hawking’s equations predict they should”

These results of the experiment are still under peer-review and the research paper has uploaded on arXiv.org for public to see. According to a another paper published in Physical Review Letters just last month, Physicists Chris Adami and Kamil Bradler from the University of Ottawa propose a new method that lets physicists to follow a black hole’s life over time.

That’s thrilling stuff, because it means that whatsoever information or matter that travels over the event horizon doesn’t ‘vanish’ but is gradually leaking back out during the later phases of the black hole’s disappearance.

Adami said in a press release:

"To perform this calculation, we had to guess how a black hole interacts with the Hawking radiation field that surrounds it. This is because there currently is no theory of quantum gravity that could suggest such an interaction. However, it appears we made a well-educated guess because our model is equivalent to Hawking’s theory in the limit of fixed, unchanging black holes."

Both the researches will soon come with an answer whether hawking is right or wrong. As Moody points out, Peter Higgs, who claimed the presence of the Higgs boson, had to wait some 49 years for his Nobel Prize, we’ll have to patient if Hawking ends up with his own.