You can’t use a black hole to travel to an alternate universe, Stephen Hawking explained earlier today.

Too bad. I was hoping to vacation someday in that sexy alternate universe where Spock wears a goatee and Major Kira lies around eating grapes like some kind of Roman empress.

But at least there’s some consolation: by closing the door to alternate universes, Hawking produces baseball statistics, instead. According to CNN:

Hawking settled a 29-year-old bet made with Caltech astrophysicist John Preskill, who insisted in 1975 that matter consumed by black holes couldn’t be destroyed.

He presented Preskill a favored reference work “Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia” after having it specially flown over from the United States.

“I had great difficulty in finding one over here, so I offered him an encyclopedia of cricket as an alternative,” Hawking said, “but John wouldn’t be persuaded of the superiority of cricket.”

Smart guy, that Preskill. But while Hawking was explaining the relationship in our universe between black holes and baseball statistics, he failed to offer any sort of explanation for the Joe Morgan paradox.

The prevailing explanation for the Morgan paradox had been that Joe Morgan is caught in a multiversal quantum entanglement formed by some kind of tunnel between alternate universes.

With such a multiversal tunnel, the Joe Morgan from our universe, which has baseball statistics, could randomly flip-flop quantum states with a Joe Morgan from a universe without baseball statistics. Morgan’s statements would always make sense to him, but others will perceive his utterances as either lucid or nonsensical, depending on which universe Morgan occupies at any given moment.

But with black holes ruled out as a source of multiversal tunnels, the question becomes how a multiversal tunnel could be formed.

Some have suggested that an explosion resulting from a collision of brilliant minds such as Preskill and Ken Jennings could rip a hole in the fabric of the universe large enough for Joe Morgan to pass through.

Unfortunately, Hawking did not comment on this issue in today’s presentation. So for now, the Morgan paradox remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of science.