What if guests, from another time, overstay their welcome?
When Stephen Hawking was laid to rest in London’s Westminster Abbey in June, one would have expected his voice on Earth had been silenced.
But Hawking left a “parting gift”, as multiple news sources call it, a posthumous book.
Brief Answers to the Big Questions was published on Oct 16.
According to a review in The Guardian newspaper, it’s unlike his earlier book for laymen, A Brief History of Time, whose complexities led one comic in the United States to call it the most popular book nobody has ever finished reading.
“Almost everything in Brief Answers is effortlessly instructive, absorbing, up to the minute and — where it matters — witty,” Tim Radford wrote in The Guardian in October.
I haven’t got a copy of Brief Answers. But I’ve heard much about it and have looked forward to reading it, particularly because of one of the questions it discusses: time travel.
Hawking, I learned from one review, thought it possible, but maybe only into the past.
He once put the notion brilliantly to the test.
On June 28, 2009, he sat in his living room surrounded by trays full of delectable delicacies, chilled champagne and other choice wines at the ready, waiting for noon, the time that his party for time travelers would begin.
To ensure that only real time travelers would attend, he issued his written and video invitations after the get-together. That way, he could be certain that his guests came from the future.
The video can still be found online and shows Hawking waiting for the guests amid the sumptuous spread and a “Welcome time travelers” sign hanging above it.
To ensure that nobody got lost on their way, the video (and written invitations) gave “the exact coordinates in time and space”.
But nobody came.