Professor Hawking was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work changed the face of science forever. He became most popular after the publication of his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, which went on to become one of the best-selling titles of all time. Professor Hawking is perhaps best known for his work with black holes, first predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS in 1963 at the age of 21, and when he lost the use of his limbs, the scientist was forced to train his mind to work in a new way, by visualizing problems to create a Find a solution instead of writing it down. .
Some of his colleagues have suggested that this way of thinking led to his greatest discoveries and work with black holes.
He explored the idea of how humans could use the time-warping properties of black holes to make time travel on Discovery Channel’s ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking’.
At the center of the Milky Way, about 6,000 light-years away, lies the heaviest object in the entire galaxy, hidden by a massive cloud of gas and stars – a supermassive black hole.
It contains the mass of four million suns, crushed to a single point by its own gravity; the closer you get, the stronger the gravity, get very close, and even the light cannot escape.
This means the hole is wrapped in a sphere of darkness 25 million miles in diameter.
A black hole of such size, Prof. Hawking explained, has a profound effect on time, slowing it down more than “anything else in the galaxy” – making it “a natural time machine.”
The scientist proposes an experiment: a spaceship that flies so close to the black hole that it experiences time slower than outside its event horizon – the boundary around a black hole beyond which no light can escape.
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He continued: “If a space agency were to pilot it from Earth or somewhere else away from the black hole, they would see each full orbit lasted sixteen minutes.
But for the brave people on board, close to this huge object, time would be delayed.
“Here the effect would be much more extreme than with the pyramid or planet Earth.
“The crew’s time would be delayed by half.
‘For every 16-minute job they would only experience eight minutes.
“The ship and its crew would travel through time.”
If the crew were to circle the black hole for five years, ten years would pass elsewhere.
When they got home, everyone on Earth would have been five years older than them.
Prof Hawking said, “The crew of the spacecraft would return to a future Earth – they would have traveled not only in space but also in time.”
And while a supermassive black hole is technically a time machine, Professor Hawking notes, “It’s not exactly practical.”