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Professor Hawking was a theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose work changed the face of science forever. It 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 on 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 on a new way, visualizing problems to find a solution rather than writing them down. .
Some of his colleagues have suggested that this way of thinking led to his greatest discoveries and to working with black holes.
He explored the idea of how humans could harness the time-warping properties of black holes in order to time travel on Discovery Channel’s “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking”.
At the center of the Milky Way, about 6,000 light-years from us, is the heaviest object in the entire galaxy, hidden by a vast cloud of gas and stars: a supermassive black hole.
It contains the mass of four million suns, crushed at a single point by its own gravity; the closer you get, the stronger the gravity, the closer you get and even light can’t escape.
This means that the hole is enveloped in a sphere of darkness 15 million kilometers in diameter.
A black hole of this size, explained Professor Hawking, has a profound effect on time, slowing it down more than “anything else in the galaxy” – making it “a winding machine. natural time ”.
The scientist proposes an experiment: a spaceship flying so close to the black hole that it manages to experience time more slowly than outside its event horizon – the boundary around a black hole beyond which no light cannot escape.
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He continued, “If a space agency controlled it from Earth, or anywhere else far from the black hole, they would observe that each full orbit took sixteen minutes.
“But for the good people on board, near this massive object, time would be slowed down.
“Here, the effect would be much more extreme than near the pyramid or the planet Earth.
“The crew’s time would be cut in half.
“For every sixteen minute orbit, they would only live eight minutes of time.
“The ship and her crew would travel through time.”
If the crew circled the black hole for five of their years, ten years would go elsewhere.
When they returned home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years older than them.
Professor Hawking said: “The crew of the spacecraft would return to a future Earth – they would have made a journey not only in space but in time.”
And while a supermassive black hole is technically a time machine, Professor Hawking notes, “It’s not really practical.”
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