"When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol."

So, I recently watched the recent Star trek re-make movie. I never watched Star Trek as a kid and I never watched the ton of spin-offs.

I enjoyed the re-make IMMENSELY. I can imagine trekkies everywhere rejoicing. At least, I was at the beginning, middle and end. The only thing that bothered me was their time travel system. From what I saw, they are saying that someone (in their case, a huge spaceship) can time travel through black holes. Watching this, I felt it was incorrect. It's not possible to time travel through black holes.

In college, I took a few classes and read a few books on quantum mechanics, theoretical cosmology and basic astronomy for fun. One of the books I read and loved was "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous legacy" by Kip Thorne. The images are awesome and it's a super fun book to read. In it, I remember him talking about the inability to travel through black holes because any black hole is continually being bombarded by tiny electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations and radiation that fall into the black hole. These become accelerated by the hole's gravity with a shit-ton of energy and would supposedly "rain down explosively" on your hyperspace vehicle. (In the movie, they technically travel through time because they were at the black hole's "event horizon" and not the actual black hole, but same diff. They'd inevitably fall in because at the point of view from the observer, the event horizon always looks hopelessly out of reach.)

Well, and so, one can't actually time travel through a black hole but it would be possible to time travel via wormholes, according to Kip Thorne. He did a little research for his friend Carl Sagan who was writing "Contact" where his story had to be corrected that it wasn't possible to travel through a black hole, but maybe through a worm hole.

So because of Star Trek, I picked up the book again and read through it. Kip Thorne's description of time traveling through wormholes is really interesting. Although in the book, Stephen Hawking, a friend and colleage of Mr Thorne, disagrees and says the laws of physics don't allow time machines.

Quoted in the book, Stephen Hawking is noted to have said, "Whenever one tries to make a time machine, and no matter what kind of device one uses in one's attempt (a wormhole, a spinning cylinder, a cosmic string or whatever), just before one's device becomes a time machine, a beam of vacuum fluctuations will circulate through the device and destroy it."

He jokes that his "chronology protection conjecture" will "keep the world safe for historians."

After reading, I went to youtube to look at Stephen Hawking videos to see if there's some speeches where he either jokes around or makes funny little sayings. Because in the book, Thorne describes him as having "off the wall humor." And I've read a couple books Hawking wrote, and I agree, he does.

I came across this video where he is on Star Trek playing cards.

Kinda funny: yes. Kinda nerdy: fuck yes.

Then after watching the Hawking Star Trek video, I watched this Star Trek video.

Oh how happy I am that youtube brings me back to full circle. Now I'm gonna go eat some chips.