During my pursuit of wormhole knowledge, I came across an article by Stephen Hawking discussing his research and opinions on wormholes and travel. I actually found the article quite interesting (and even humourous!), and felt that his findings should yield a separate blog post.

While Hawking definitely believes the data that wormholes exist as a connection between different parts of spacetime, he definitely does not believe in time travel using these wormholes... ever. He states that most wormholes are only billionths or trillionths of centimeters long, not nearly large enough to fit a human, let alone an entire space crew. Wormholes are far too unstable to enlarge by any means, he believes, and even if humans could create a wormhole, it would be far to unstable to leave open long enough to travel through.

Stephen Hawking is also a strong believer in paradoxes. He believes paradoxes caused by wormhole travel are one of the major reasons it could never work, even if the wormhole was large and stable enough to travel through. His example demonstrating paradoxes in wormhole travel involved a scientist looking back at himself minutes earlier through a wormhole; if he decided to shoot himself, who would be the one shooting? It would be a paradox. And this type of paradox is why time travel through a wormhole could not work. It would violate the very theory that cause comes before effect, the theory that governs the universe. In the end, the universe would descend into chaos if time travel through worm holes was possible. And according to Murphy's Law, if that could happen... it would.

Hawking also points out that feedback would prevent wormholes from long term existence. As a wormhole expands, it would suck in more natural radiation, which would create a loop of radiation absorption that would eventually cause the wormhole to collapse.

However, Hawking does see time travel using a black hole as a more possible alternative (although not entirely possible). At the center of the galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, and the gravitational pull around it is so strong that it slows time around it. Flying a space ship around the black hole would cause time to move substantially slower for passengers, which would make the crew travel into the future as they return to Earth. However, it is difficult to do so because the ship would have to travel the speed of light to avoid being sucked into the black hole, which is 2,000x faster than the fastest human space travel. If this were possible, however, there would be no paradox.

Space travel is quite the debated topic in the science community! I will leave the link at the bottom, since it is an excellent article with some fascinating information! Until next time, Fizzix communtiy, until next time.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html