Why are people born in 2038 invited to a tribute to Stephen Hawking?

The organizers of a posthumous tribute to the physicist Stephen Hawking left the door open for the arrival of some guest of the most special: travelers of the time.

And is that being born between 1918 and 2038 is one of the requirements to participate in the draw with which the Stephen Hawking Foundation that will give a thousand quotas for the ceremony in which the scientist's ashes will be deposited along with those of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin .

This posthumous tribute will take place at Westminster Abbey, London, on June 15.

"We can not exclude the possibility of time travel, since it has not been refuted satisfactorily," said a spokesperson for the foundation.

"Everything is possible until proven otherwise."

The party failed

The particular invitation is a nod to Professor Hawking, who in 2009 organized a party for "Travelers of the future", which, obviously, nobody attended.

The party, which included balloons and champagne, was a way to "check if travel in time from the future to the past are possible," explained Hawking himself.

Once the failed party was over, Hawking handed out the invitations.

"Maybe, someday, someone living in the future will find the information and will use a time machine to come to my party, proving that, one day, time travel will be possible," he said then.

For Hawking, the fact that nobody went to his party was an "experimental evidence that traveling in time is not possible".

However, he also argued that Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity opened the possibility that spacetime could be deformed to the point of allowing travel to the past.

The draw

The organizers of the ceremony will raffle the tickets for the ceremony, although they clarify that the invitation only includes access to the abbey, and does not cover transportation costs, accommodation or visa procedures.

During the first 24 hours of the opening of the draw, some 12,000 people from more than 50 countries had already registered at www.stephenhawkingfoundation.org.

The selected ones will be announced on May 16 and will receive their ticket starting on June 1st.

People, present and future, who want to participate for a quota to the Hawking tribute, must have registered in the draw until midnight on May 15.

Although for a traveler in time that should not be a very difficult requirement to fulfill.