There's an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn't possible.
One of which is that Stephen Hawking threw a lousy party.
The other one is that most people haven't herd of it, so I doubt the knowledge of this party will travel that far into the future.
Someone who put work and effort into developing time travel will have heard of it. Unless it happened after a complete destruction and rebuild of civilization or two.
Maybe Stephen Hawking sent hate mail to future humans so now they don't attend his party out of spite.
Or it was developed by aliens who don’t care about human history.
This makes me think of the red dwarf episode where they find a Time Machine 3 million years into deep space, and use it to go back to the 15th century. They get disappointed and think it failed because they are still in deep space, and Kryten says no, it worked, we are now in 15th century deep space.
They then work out that you need both a Time Machine and an instant space travel machine like the holly hop drive. Especially since everything in the universe is moving.
And so, like, aliens might very well care but can’t find the right intersection of time and space to actually get there. :)
Take that back!!
We're in one of the unlucky few possible resulting timelines in which no one showed. My friend from timeline 3f-1933847.12b told me that their party is still going. Every few hours more travelers turn up with a fresh keg, and whatever their generation's party drug is.
It's by far the most plausible but sure, if you ignore Ockham's razor, sure, it's only one of many explanations
More plausible than there being rules around time travel that involve not attending parties? I think not.
Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn't want to show up...
Can you imagine if someone showed up and his party became ground zero for a worldwide pandemic of future diseases for which we don't have cures yet?
Hawking gets a Covid sample from a time traveler in 2009 and immediately travels to the Wuhan lab to study it and look for a cure, he successfully delays the pandemic and he almost gets to a cure but a bad guy time traveler comes to kill him in 2018 and without the watchful eye of Stephen Hawking, the world falls to chaos.
I'd watch that movie.
The bad guy would have to be the Mr Glass guy from Unbreakable, or otherwise the chase scenes would be really really short.
They want you to believe that nobody showed up.
They did not, bc the real party was somewhen else entirely...
And by They, you of course mean The Globetrotters, formerly of Harlem
Hawking concluded it is impossible because nobody showed up to his party. Zero thought was spent wondering if it was a party worth showing up to.
Yeah, now that I think of it more, I can't see a single good reason for a time traveler to show up at this party. Going back in time to prove the existence of time travel to the past has a very good chance of handing control of time travel away to people who can undo your existence without you ever being aware of it.
Even if you just wanted a conversation with one of the brilliant minds in physics, it would be smarter to pick a random lecture or non-time-travel-themed party.
Yes, or someone did show up despite knowing the risks because they trusted Hawking to understand the dangers of revealing the secret of time travel and not sharing it with any living soul. If time travel were to ever become possible and somewhat commonplace then the chances are probably close to zero that everybody chooses not to attend this party (assuming the invitation remains famous for long enough). Perhaps the party was crowded with people thinking the same way.
It's much more likely that it all just played out exactly the way Hawking said it did, of course. But it's a fun thought experiment to play around with.
That assumes time-travelers are smart. Never a safe assumption to make.
Correct me if I'm wrong:
I live in a timeline where time travel has not yet been invented. Even if someone invents it in the future and travels to the past to the party, that'd create an alternate timeline where the party is attended and civilization leaps bounds ahead in glorious post-scarcity, magical socialism fashion.
But nooooo since the timeline was forked at that point, no matter how many people do, in fact, attend the party, I'm stuck in the "strand" of the timeline when no one ever did because time travel has not been invented.
There's different ideas on how time travel "could" work and one of them is the timeline-split notion upon which you base your idea. In that vain it's solid.
Other ideas are that time travel always results in a loop or that its perhaps only possible under very specific circumstances (ie you can't pick an arbitrary location or time to travel to nor to travel from).
My hunch is that even if time travel were possible there's simply no practical experiment to tell whether you are in a split timeline (and if so how it differs from others), aka it's outside of the realm of scientific // logical inquiry.
If y'all like exploration of time travel go watch the show Travelers some time. It has some interesting premises in that regard.
There is also the Paycheck method. There is no travel you can only observe by looking through a special "time telescope." Maybe plenty of people observed the party, they just weren't able to physically attend.
However, IF, your theory is accurate, then you are the prime instance of you. All time travel alternatives are just YOU in another scenario, not different versions of each other, they are all YOU.
That's got to be worth something. 🤷🏻♂️
Eh, that's more science fiction than actual theory.
My theory is, time travel is possible but humanity went extinct before we got to that point.
Agreed. We are wiping ourselves out.
It would have been really awkward for everyone involved if someone stumbled into his party by mistake and freaked him out.
Imagine having time travel and wasting it on going to some nerd party.
I mean, it wouldn’t be like they waste any time, lol
Just because you can time travel, doesn't still mean you don't still age, get hungry, have limited energy to do stuff, ...
me with the ability to time travel: but I'm tired
The problem is he only told us when it was, but not where.
He did divulge the location afterwards.
Perhaps the time travellers came back as catering staff so they could polish it all off without having to engage in human interaction.
I'm planning on going!
But you did not, in the future.
I mean when time travel is invented the story will change and we'll be reading about those visitors. Nobody has shown up at Hawking's party yet.
That's the point though. It doesn't matter when time travel is invented, only if it can be invented.
If time travel is possible even 10 000 years in the future someone would almost certainly show up at Hawking's party since they have a time machine.
The fact that no one showed up it's a reasonable argument that time travel is impossible
Well, it was a party, not an orgy.
[off topic]
"The Big Time" by Fritz Leiber is one of my all time favorite novels. His time travel works on the principle of 'The Law Of Conservation Of Reality." There's only one timeline, and it's possible to change it, but it requires a lot of work.
If you go back and kill baby Hitler, he'll come back to life and no one will remember anything. It takes vast armies fighting thousands of secret battles to change one thing. But when a Big Change hits, look out!
So by the thought of infinite parallel universes though, shouldn't there then be at least some in which someone did attend?
Pi is an infinite series of non-repeating digits, and yet you will never find the letter A in pi because there is a 0% chance of the letter A being a digit in a decimal system. By the same logic, infinite possibilities do not guarantee that every conceivable state occurs, if that conceivable state has a 0% probability. As finite beings, it is very difficult for us to accurately distinguish between a 0% probability and a infinitesimal probability, so we end up circling back to "we don't know"
One the one hand you are correct.
On the other hand... Behold! An A in pi! https://www.spoj.com/problems/PIHEX2/
Haha, I figured it was 50/50 on whether I would get this comment or something about the ASCII representation of the letter A
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