Building a Time Machine

Stephen Hawking, the famed physicist, says that it is, in fact, quite possible to build a time machine, and he tells us how == except that it's not exactly something that we can easily cobble together from spare parts in our workshops.   Instead we need a wormhole through the fourth dimension, which is time, or we could use one of those massive machines called hadron colliders, or we could somehow stumble across what he calls a really, really fast spaceship.

Hawking is interesting in and of himself, not least because of the way that bodily -- because of a grievous illness that struck just as he was starting to go good in his early life -- he is now little more than an almost completely dried-out vegetable.   He has to stay under constant medical care, and he can only talk to us by means of a computer.

   So the odd but somehow appropriate thing -- if this is not too cruel to say -- is that whereas the use of his physical being is so constricted that it is capable of only a very tiny fraction of the actions of any ordinary human, inside his head he has at his disposal all the tools that it would seem the human mind can possibly have, and he is able to use them free of all the hangups that make only a tiny proportion of the capabilities of the human brain available to the rest of us, and that's why he can come up with concepts about things like wormholes, black holes, and time machines that are way beyond almost everyone else.

  In keeping with the use of mathematics in the work of physics, a gigantic employment of inverse proportion must be at work there, so that it's possible to see that early and almost totally crippling illness as having been some sort of blessing in disguise, because it has seemed to allow him to get on with his life's work almost absolutely unhindered, compared to what might have happened had he been able to hold on to the health of a normal human being.

  Would Hawking want, then, to trade his physical state today with the one he used to have?

In his instructions about building the time machine, he sounds as if, if he could get one delivered to his front door, one of the first things he would do would be to have a full and frank discussion with Marilyn Monroe. 
  
What does that say about sex being, like so many things, all in the mind?

I know exactly where I would go first, if time machines became something you could wheel, freshly manufactured, out of a store, or, preferably, order online.  I've been thinking for many years that the greatest thing would be to go back into one of the ages of the dinosaurs and spy on those rascals from behind a rock.

Meanwhile I would not be at all surprised if time machines don't become commonly available, though they would make a gigantic mess of everything, with people fooling around everywhere all the time.   It wasn't so long ago, after all, when it was universally thought that such commonplace articles today as telephones, computers, and cars were complete impossibilities.

Therefore I have not yet finished reading Hawking's article.  Something about the way he was talking made me think that he was mainly interested in convincing the non-believers that he's not a complete crackpot, and I started fearing that disappointment might be waiting just ahead.  

He should just let the jive non-believers mill about in their own, dead-end wormholes, and get on with it, in ten short, easy lessons, or whatever building the machine takes.