THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 7, 1995 TAG: 9510070003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
No less a cosmic oracle than Stephen Hawking, whose brilliance shines through his grievous physical impairment, is writing about travel backward as well as forward through time.
Fresh quotes from the author of A Brief History of Time indicate he is overcoming his doubts about the idea. It's all couched in the skull-bursting abstractions of quantum mechanics and relativity, but I'm excited to find that an old fantasy/hope of mine may have even more going for it than I once imagined.
The notion of plunging far back into history, or leaping ahead, via an ingenious machine or a space-time warp - or something - has been around quite a while.
Cranking up selective reruns of historic events, seeing them just as they happened, for my private enlightenment has been a pet reverie, a proposition I like to weave into conversations and which I wrote a piece about several years ago. That was when some physicists had hypothesized about the use of ``wormholes'' through space to escape the limits of our conventional dimensions.
I still like to think of real occurrences of the past as available somewhere for close re-examination.
I even spelled out in that earlier article my conviction that exploring the past in some fashion would be a splendid way to spend eternity.
I don't know that this kind of historic review, even without moving into the hereafter, is what Hawking has in mind, but it seems to me that the current direction of his thought on time/space dramatically reinforces the possibility.
So I'm itching anew to shift time into reverse and find out the facts about a whole bunch of things. Since I last canvassed the possibilities and wrote about my yens (such as finding out exactly what killed off the dinosaurs), I've thought of a few more riddles from the past that need solving. The new Hawking speculation encourages me to mention them.
Of course, there's the obvious one posed the other day by the O.J. acquittal. (What really happened out there in Los Angeles 16 months ago?)
But also:
Did Shakespeare write the plays?
What did the common ancestor of humans and apes look like?
Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?
Did everything start with a Big Bang, or are we, maybe, in the middle of a long whimper?
What was it - if anything - between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?
Did Peary really reach the North Pole?
Who - if anybody - was Deep Throat? MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.
by CNB