Far Away Times

Photo credit: topnews.net.nz

Watching Into The Universe With Steven Hawking this afternoon and they are talking about the possibility of time travel.  He uses the example of everything in the dimensions we are familiar with being made up of fibers with gaps and crevices in them.  Look at a piece of fabric and notice the spaces between the threads that make it up...  Magnify the smoothest surface you can find, a pool ball for example, and you'll see that even its surface has tiny cracks and crevices.  Mr. Hawking asks if time has the same characteristic.  And if it does, can those open spaces be pathways to other times and places?

In those simplistic terms I can grasp the idea.  But, of course, there's so much more to it... and he rules out the chance of going back into history because of the paradoxes that would create.  He does, however, say that travel into the future is possible.  And it has to do with being able to move at a velocity very near the speed of light because the laws of nature will not allow that to be exceeded so time slows down.  For example, if you were on a train circling the earth 11 times per second (I think that was the example, anyway) you would be on it for a week but when it stopped and you got off the rest of earth would  have aged 100 years.  It's an interesting theory and if you look up the show he explains it much better, and in a lot more detail, than I did.

If you had the chance would you get on that train and head into the future?  To what time would you most like to go?