If could travel back in time, he would have never sat on Lou Gehrig's toilet seat.

I read an interview years ago about how Hawking likes to bet but will never take a bet about the existence of time travel. His reasoning was that if time travel existed, his opponent may have already been to the future and knew the answer.

TommyymmoT: If could travel back in time, he would have never sat on Lou Gehrig's toilet seat.

Wouldn't he go back and kill Lou Gehrig's mother? Lou obviously invented the thing. The only way to be sure.

Everyone knows the secret to time travel. You're all traveling through time right now. It just happens that the travel is along a fixed direction at roughly the same rate.

Pffft.

According to the most reliable, accepted models of quantum theory, you'd never have any guarantee that the timeline you returned to after looking at tomorrow's lottery numbers would produce the same eventual number draw. In fact, according to most projections, you'd actually REDUCE your chances. The odds would go up from from fixed odds of about one in 200,000,000, to one in a doubled measure of infinity. This, since you left one timeline and created another to go forward, and then subsequently left THAT one to create yet a third upon your "return" to the past/present. You'd then resume forward-linear time/space motion upon any of an infinity (X2) of split diversions from the initial departure singularity, which statistically speaking, has a for all intents and purposes zero practical chance of producing the desired outcome!

Ugh...I think I need to go lie down for a minute.

TommyymmoT , as the boobies you missed a hilarious opportunity to say boobies and have it time travel IN A FARK LIKE REPLY LOLOLOL you blew it

Wait a minute... That response was written in 1995, and here it is appearing on Fark in 2012! How did he do that?

Peki: Everyone knows the secret of time travel - it's slingshotting around the sun.

/kudos if you get the reference, it was the worst of the series, but oddly enough my favorite as a little girl

Peki: Everyone knows the secret of time travel - it's slingshotting around the sun.

Some friends of mine wrote what I think is a very good song about this theory.

Peki: RexTalionis: Peki: Everyone knows the secret of time travel - it's slingshotting around the sun.

/kudos if you get the reference, it was the worst of the series, but oddly enough my favorite as a little girl


[images.wikia.com image 640x393]

Yay. I'm not too old for that one yet.

Fun fact: The "Sun" used in the slingshot sequence was created by bouncing a laser beam off of a beer can.

RexTalionis: Peki: Everyone knows the secret of time travel - it's slingshotting around the sun.

/kudos if you get the reference, it was the worst of the series, but oddly enough my favorite as a little girl

[images.wikia.com image 640x393]

Or you can just give up and plough into it whilst listening to Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.

/kudos if you get THAT reference

MaxxLarge: The odds would go up from from fixed odds of about one in 200,000,000, to one in a doubled measure of infinity.

Logic fail.

The odds of anything are one once it happens. So all you do is steal the money, and go back in time to before you stole it with the bills and launder them double quick.

Larry Niven's Conjecture: The simplest change to resolve any time travel paradox is getting rid of the time machine.
"Niven's Law": If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
Rephrased more poetically: Nature abhors a vacuum, but actively despises a time machine.

abb3w: Larry Niven's Conjecture: The simplest change to resolve any time travel paradox is getting rid of the time machine.
"Niven's Law": If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
Rephrased more poetically: Nature abhors a vacuum, but actively despises a time machine.

so what you're saying is it shouldn't be a time machine, it should be a time stick or pair of pants or something. interesting...interesting.

*goes back to lab*

You can time travel if you throw yourself at the time-space continuum and miss.

DarnoKonrad: abb3w: Larry Niven's Conjecture: The simplest change to resolve any time travel paradox is getting rid of the time machine.
"Niven's Law": If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.
Rephrased more poetically: Nature abhors a vacuum, but actively despises a time machine.

I wonder if "time" is total fiction to begin with. Like "color." Which is not a fundamental property of the universe but a biological mechanism our brains use to detect different wave lengths of light.

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

tomWright: FunkOut: You can time travel if you throw yourself at the time-space continuum and miss.

Is that anything like flying by throwing yourself at the ground and missing?

Yes, but it requires one to be even drunker than normal.

ultraholland: I've always thought that if time travel were possible it would have already occurred at some point.

Poor reasoning. If time travel WASN'T possible, we wouldn't be doing it every hour of every day naturally.

The thing about reverse time travel is more along the lines of light cones. The present is set in stone. It simply is (for a very short time) absolutely static. The further from the present we get, the more options the future holds. The more options we've got, the bigger the cone gets. Assume the past is as mutable as the future. Now you've got unknown and fluidity in BOTH directions. Yesterday is tomorrow as well.

Even if someone were to Time Travel HG Wells style into the heart of London and announce with the leather goggles and Victorian mustache that they had done it, there would be no reliable way for them to get back to the Victorian age they had left because he was no longer in it then. It would be a different past with a whole slew of different choices when he went back, hence it would be as though he never left.

Also consider cost effectiveness. Perhaps time travel is dead easy but really expensive like rocketry. Any moron can go to the moon with enough money to pay the engineers. All the ground work is set and we've done it many times already and it's not like you'll need to look far to find volunteers to join your project.

The problem is it requires sums of money unheard of even among most of America's super elite aristocracy. If Fort Knox's entire gold reserve at the peak of it's size were somehow on the Moon and all you had to do was fly up there and get that gold in nice, easy to carry bars and take it back home, you'd lose money on every trip. Time travel might indeed be happening in very small, very controlled ways, but if it was prohibitively expensive to send back people it might go undetected.

Garbonzo42: Peki: Everyone knows the secret of time travel - it's slingshotting around the sun.

/kudos if you get the reference, it was the worst of the series, but oddly enough my favorite as a little girl

Worse than five?

Worse than Nemesis?

No and not worse than Generations.

CruiserTwelve: Wait a minute... That response was written in 1995, and here it is appearing on Fark in 2012! How did he do that?

/he clearly has this time travel figured out

I'd have been more impressed if Hawking had simply stated 'no', but dated his fax for the day after it was actually sent.

DarnoKonrad: I wonder if "time" is total fiction to begin with. Like "color." Which is not a fundamental property of the universe but a biological mechanism our brains use to detect different wave lengths of light.

Probably from some perspective, given the holographic nature of space-time. I don't think anyone's worked that into a GUToE yet.

devine: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

Very deep; you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you.

Boobies

"I told your mother last night....."

"Then again at breakfast."

abb3w: DarnoKonrad: I wonder if "time" is total fiction to begin with. Like "color." Which is not a fundamental property of the universe but a biological mechanism our brains use to detect different wave lengths of light.

Probably from some perspective, given the holographic nature of space-time. I don't think anyone's worked that into a GUToE yet.

devine: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

Very deep; you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you.

Not familiar with Douglas Adams?