Talk:Hawking's time traveller party

Latest comment: 2 months ago by Belbury in topic Contradictory conclusions?

Contradictory conclusions? edit

We've got quotes from Hawking that he regards the party as experimental evidence that time travel is not possible while also hoping that one day someone living in the future will find the information and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will one day be possible. On the surface these seem contradictory. Is the second quote missing some context? Belbury (talk) 13:19, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Oh, I think I get it: the hopeful speech is (per the video clip) possibly from a TV show where he's staging or reenacting the event, and he's imagining what its outcome might be before it has happened.
But the cited euronews.com source has put the two quotes alongside each other and in the wrong order, years later, as if he was disappointed about time travel being disproven in 2009 yet remained hopeful that it might be proven using his 2009 invites "one day". Which has a nice narrative news story shape to it but makes no sense.
I've restructured the article to make it clearer that he was saying one thing before the event and the other afterwards. Belbury (talk) 15:44, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply