There’s an innumerable number of reasons no one showed up, only one of which is that backwards time travel isn’t possible.
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.
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.
Tbf the important question is: assuming that backwards time travel is possible, will people attempt to the party. And there I would say, unlikely. And while I think backwards time travel is very implausible, the experiment itself proves nothing
Maybe future people knew about his supposed ties to Epstein and didn’t want to show up…
Exactly, they’d know a lot more accurately what happened too, which raises another point as to why no one comes back here - imagine gong somewhere that you know horrible things are happening to children but you can’t say anything or save them because of the timeline…
Even if in the unlikely event Hawking didn’t know about it talking to him and not saying ‘that friend of yours epstine is a bad dude’ would be unbearable.
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.
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.
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.
There is also the harry potter version, any time travel is woven into the only timeline. The past is “edited” to always have included the events time travel.
This can be considered similar to the branching method; where the original branch without the events of the time travel simply ends; only the “new” branch continues.
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. 🤷🏻♂️
Depends on how you see it. It could also be that for some reason or another even with backwards time travel no one shows up. And thus you avoid having a paradox
Or it could be like a time portal so once you build one you an travel back to any point it existed in but one to a point where it doesn’t exist since you need time travel infrastructure
Or the technology for invisibility arrives before time travel so they were there, just undetected. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
rips bong
I mean, that for the most part makes sense. Although in that case, wouldn’t it have been reported that “no one attended the party but the food and the snacks were somehow missing”?
That said. Unsure how exactly it went but I read somewhere that if you had the power of True Invisibility, that is being undetectable at any wavelength of light, then you’d basically be able to simulate negative mass, and from there to “time travel” it’s kind of a straight line.
