Professor Hawking was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work changed the face of science forever. He became the most popular after the publication of his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ from 1988, which became 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 had to train his mind to work in a new way and visualize problems to find a solution. achieved as opposed to writing it. .
Some of his colleagues suggested that this way of thinking led to his greatest discoveries and work with black holes.
He explored the idea of how people can take advantage of the time-distorting properties of black holes to travel time during the Discovery Channel’s ‘Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking’.
In the middle of the Milky Way, about 6000 light-years from us, lies the heaviest object in the entire galaxy, hidden by a large cloud of gas and stars: a supermassive black hole.
It contains the mass of four million suns, crushed by its own gravity to a single point; the closer you get, the stronger the gravity, get very close, and not even light can escape.
This means that the hole is closed in a sphere of darkness 15 million miles in diameter.
A black hole of such a large size, Prof Hawking explained, has a huge impact on time and slows 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 can experience time more slowly than outside its horizon – the boundary around a black hole from which no light can escape.
NET IN: Black hole disappears in the middle of the distant galaxy Abell
He continued: ‘If a space agency were to control it from Earth or anywhere else away from the black hole, they would observe that each full orbit took sixteen minutes.
“But for the brave people on board, near this massive object, time would be delayed.
‘Here the effect would be much more extreme than near the pyramid, or planet Earth.
‘The crew time would be halved.
‘For every sixteen-minute course, they would have had just eight minutes.
“The ship and its crew would travel through time.”
If the crew were to turn around five years from the black hole, ten years would pass elsewhere.
Upon their return home, everyone on earth would have been five years older than they had been.
Prof Hawking said: “The crew on the spacecraft would return to a future earth – they would not only have traveled in space but also in time.”
And while a supermassive black hole is technically a time machine, Prof Hawking says, “It’s not exactly practical.”