Odd this day
It’s the 15th anniversary of Stephen Hawking’s party for time travellers, which was attended by the host (and a camera crew) and no time travellers.
This isn’t perhaps the most obscure silly anniversary this account has ever covered, being, as it was, widely publicised at the time. “It was”, Atlas Obscura points out
at least partly a stunt for a television show, the sort of combination of serious and silly that Hawking was known for.
The ‘party’ appeared in an episode of his 2010 Discovery Channel series, Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking.
There were, as you can see, plentiful glasses of champagne, canapés, and balloons. The invitation, though, left a little to be desired. It looks as though it was put together by the lowest paid employee on the show, and probably was.
In the programme, Hawking said:
I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will survive for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will one day be possible.
Given the state of the invitation, that seems unlikely — although perhaps that runner will one day pop up on Antiques Roadshow with that original bit of 80gsm paper churned out of a bog standard office printer and be told it’s worth countless thousands of pounds. Who knows?
The crucial thing here is the phrase “one form or another”, of course. Firstly, a designer called Peter Dean later produced a poshed-up version and sold limited edition posters.
Also, of course, the programme (and things like this, written about it) will continue to have a digital life, so maybe one day an Eloi will come across it in A.D. 802,701, wrest it from the hands of a Morlock, steal a machine built circa 1895 and get to the party.
Yes, I’m sure Russell T Davies could come up with a set of words to account for why no one showed up, and I have absolutely no doubt that Ncuti Gatwa could deliver them convincingly, but on the whole I think we can all see why Stephen Hawking concluded:
I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.
Rather wonderfully, though, the great professor’s love for combining intellectual pursuits and pissing about didn’t stop there. Hawking’s 2018 memorial service had a public ballot so that it wasn’t just Eminent Persons attending. As Ian Mansfield of Ian Visits spotted, the website set up to arrange this allowed entry to people born up to 20 years into the future.
Still, no one showed up from times yet to come. However, given that Hawking himself told 2012’s Seattle Science Festival:
Einstein’s general theory of relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that we could travel back in time. However, it is likely that warping would trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship and maybe the space-time itself.
…perhaps it’s for the best.
If you want an explanation of time and travel in and/or through it that doesn’t make you need a lie down, incidentally, you could do worse than this one, aimed at 12-year-olds:
…because I’ve read A Brief History of Time and it hurt my head and I can’t remember a bloody word of it.
