Synopses & Reviews
The story of physicists' quest to answer a mind-boggling question: How can we travel through time?
Most of us have read H. G. Wells's classic The Time Machine, keeping its subject and all other whirring, light-flashing, time-travel devices safely relegated to the realm of fiction. But for decades theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, and philosophers have delved into the reality of time travel, the "how" of traveling through time. Kip Thorne, Carl Sagan, and Steven Hawking (leaders in their fields) are among the new time travelers who, calling on special and general relativity and quantum mechanics, have designed theoretical bases for a variety of time machines.
David Toomey brings these brilliant minds to life as they confront temporal paradoxes and questions of free will, probe black holes and time warps, conceive of parallel universes, and imagine a civilization with the power to send signals into the past. In so doing, Toomey takes the reader on a mind-bending adventure to the very edge of physics.
Synopsis
Since H. G. Wells' 1895 classic , readers of science fiction have puzzled over the paradoxes of time travel. What would happen if a time traveler tried to change history? Would some force or law of nature prevent him? Or would his action produce a "new" history, branching away from the original?In the last decade of the twentieth century a group of theoretical physicists at the California Institute of Technology undertook a serious investigation of the possibility of pastward time travel, inspiring a serious and sustained study that engaged more than thirty physicists working at universities and institutes around the world.Many of the figures involved are familiar: Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne; others are names known mostly to physicists. These are the new time travelers, and this is the story of their work--a profoundly human endeavor marked by advances, retreats, and no small share of surprises. It is a fantastic journey to the frontiers of physics.
Synopsis
The story of physicists' quest to answer a mind-boggling question: How can we travel through time?
About the Author
David Toomey is an associate professor of English and director of the Professional Writing and Technical Communication Program at the University of Massachusetts−Amherst. He lives in Amherst.
Exclusive Essay
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