time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
It’s an established fact that time travelers are kind of rude. They’re always leaving their stuff lying around, or teasing everyone with vague information about the future. In 2009, they didn’t even bother to visit Stephen Hawking, after he went and invited them all to his birthday party. Terrible.
Are there an infinite number of parallel universes? Or do we exist within one of a finite number, where things are quite similar to our own?
Stephen Hawking’s second Reith Lecture, given this week on BBC Radio 4, contained quite a few interesting comments, not the least of which was the possibility that we could harness a black hole to power the entire planet.
If time travel is possible…
In Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) gets exactly what they’ve been, well, searching for: a communication from an alien civilization. In fact, they receive a series of communications. One is a repeating signal in the “universal language” of mathematics, the first 261 prime numbers. Another is a retransmitted broadcast of Adolf …
On June 28th 2009, Stephen Hawking threw a party, but no one came. He’d set the table, threw up some balloons, popped open a bottle of champagne. And then he waited. And waited. And, well, waited. Perhaps no one arrived because Hawking didn’t send the invitations until the party was over. Yeah, you’d think that’s …