The New Time Travelers – A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics - Hardcover

Toomey, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060136 ISBN 13: 9780393060133

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

Since H. G. Wells' 1895 classic The Time Machine, 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.

About this title

Synopsis:

In reading H.G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine", we keep its subject and all other whirring, light-flashing, time-travel devices safely in the realm of fiction. But for decades theoretical physicists, astrophysicists and philosophers have delved into the reality of time travel, the "how" of travelling through time. Kip Thorne, Carl Sagan and Steven Hawking are among the new time travellers 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 civilisation 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.

About the Author:

David Toomey is a professor of English and director of the Professional Writing and Technical Communication Program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He lives in Amherst.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393060136
• ISBN 13: 9780393060133
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400