Technically, we are travelling through time every moment we live.
Fox must be doing a little bit of time travel themselves - the series debuted last week and is actually called Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking (Stephen Hawking's Universe was a 1997 special). In fact, funny thing - the episode dealing with time travel has already aired. Shoddy reporting.
Basically, he threw in a few theories - and admitted some are most quite difficult if not impossible.
First, he proposed enlarging a strand of
Quantum foam into a larger wormhole - but admitted that controlling such a wormhole for a large period of time would be difficult.
The next two dealt with the fact that the larger a celestial body, the greater is effect on time. Atomic clocks do in fact run slower on Earth than they do in orbit because of Earth's gravity, an effect known as
Gravitational Time Dilation. As he pointed out, were satellites not programmed to adjust to this, the GPS system would be thrown out of whack.
Of course, by orbiting Earth, we are not going to see that much of a time difference. So, he suggested two other forms of time travel.
One would be going near a star. Thing Star Trek IV. While the Enterprise used this to go back in time (impossible), the theory in itself is rather sound. Of course, nearing a star is dangerous (a little hot), and we would not get very far into the future. So, we need something larger.
That is where we find a black hole. Here, we have an object with a much greater gravitational pull, therefor something which will hurl us into time quicker. If we find the black holes "suck zone" rim and orbit it in four years in our sturdy little ship, something like eight years will pass here on Earth (I think the time passage is much greater, I am just using a random figure there). Again, this is difficult in finding a ship which could travel that far and survive being that close to a black hole.
And, yes, he did discuss travelling at or near the speed of light, but dismissed that for the same reasons I've seen given here - the energy required would be too great.
Stephen Hawking is far from a nutjob. This is a man on an intellectual plain greater than most of us can even comprehend. Mind you, a lot of what I stated above was done in a simplistic way - and that his explanations during the program were also kept quite simple. So, you are witnessing the simplistic explanation given by a simpleton as he attempts to quote the simplistic guides of a genius.
