The new time travelers : a journey to the frontiers of physics

Title:

Author:

Toomey, David M.

ISBN:

9780393060133

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication Information:

New York : W. W. Norton, c2007.

Physical Description:

391 p., [4] p. of plates : ill. ; 25 cm.

Contents:

Intimations of spacetime -- Einstein's radical idea -- "Unphysical" time machines -- Pastward time travel--seriously -- Paradox -- Cosmic strings and chronology protection -- Novikov's wild ideas -- A time travel summit -- A parade of time machines -- Time travel in another kind of spacetime -- Explaining the apparent absence of time travelers -- Time machines at the ends of time.

Subject Term:

Space and time.

Time travel.

Physics.

Summary:

The story of physicists' quest to answer a mind-boggling question: How can we travel through time? Since H.G. Wellsʼs 1895 classic The Time Machine, readers of science fiction have puzzled over the paradoxes of time travel. But in the 1990s, a group of theoretical physicists at Caltech undertook a serious investigation of the possibility of pastward time travel and concluded that it might be possible, inspiring a serious and sustained study that engaged more than thirty physicists around the world. Many of the figures involved in these theories 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.--From publisher description.

A fantastic journey to the frontiers of physics. Also includes information on black holes, cosmic strings, David Deutsch, Albert Einstein, energy, Pierre Gassendi, Kurt Godel, J. Richard Gott, gravity, Alan Guth, Stephen Hawking, Charles Howard Hinton, interstellar travel, jinn, Andrei Lossev, Mike Morris, multiverse, Igor Novikov, paradoxes, Roger Penrose, quantum mechanics, general relativity, special relativity, -- Carl Sagan, science fiction, spacecraft, stars, Sun, Kip Thorne, thought experiments, time, time travel, universe, Matt Visser, H.G. Wells, John Archibald Wheeler, wormholes, Ulve Yurtsever, etc.

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	530.11 TOO	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.

Author Notes

David Toomey is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, teaching technical writing and creative nonfiction.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

According to Toomey, professor of English who teaches technical and nonfiction writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the concept of time travel successfully made the transition from science fiction to the research literature of physics about 20 years ago. This is not to say that physicists uncritically accept the idea but simply that it is now a topic for rigorous scientific discussion. Because Toomey (Stormchasers) spends as much time describing the personalities of those investigating this odd field as he does the subject's technical aspects, he is able to bring the topic fully to life. The contributions made by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Kip Thorne, in addition to other lesser-known physicists, are described, but even the author's fine writing is not able to make all of the highly technical material easily understood. Given that time travel, if it can occur at all, is likely to involve wormholes and worldlines, multiverses and Minkowski diagrams, as well as negative energy and naked singularities, this is not surprising. Toomey is at his best treating the many paradoxes that time travel engenders and exploring the ways around them, from Hawking's "chronology protection conjecture" to David Deutsch's creation of multiple universes. While physicists have, to date, been unable to demonstrate that any laws of nature make time travel impossible, Toomey makes it clear that we shouldn't expect to make such a trip any time soon. 15 illus. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

"Kip Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps (1994) remains the best general-audience book about the outré physics of time travel, but for lay readers who may want a less-technical introduction, Toomey's title fills the bill. It illustrates dimension-bending concepts with space-time diagrams, M. C. Escher drawings, and the plot of H. G. Wells' Time Machine. Toomey gets a grip on bending the fourth dimension by historically chronicling physicists who have theorized about time travel, Thorne included. As is so often the case in physics, it all goes back to Einstein. After imparting the basic ideas of relativity, Toomey explains how they led physicists to imagine what would happen to light or matter when dragged through strong gravitational fields. He introduces black-hole gurus John Wheeler and Stephen Hawking and, relating the deficiency of black holes as time machines (they offer one-way trips), shifts to theoretically permissible specifications of time travel as conceptualized by pioneers Thorne, Frank Tipler, and Igor Novikov. If you dream of getting outside your personal light cone, Toomey shows how it might be imagined."--"Taylor, Gilbert" Copyright 2007 Booklist

Choice Review

Since the 1920s, when Einstein's general theory of relativity and gravity exploited time as a coordinate in his mathematical model of gravitational fields, the peculiar behavior of the time coordinate in various extreme gravitational circumstances (black holes, neutron stars, rotating masses, etc.) has attracted sporadic attention from theoretical physicists. With the rush of interest in the 1980s in this subject by such figures as Kip Thorne, Stephen Hawking, and Frank Tipler, the particular questions of time reversal gained both technical and popular attention, further magnified by cosmological issues raised by such new ideas as quantum gravity, superstring theory, and cosmological inflation. Toomey (Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst), a fluent science writer, here intelligibly reports these developments (and collateral ideas in fiction and the history of science). From interviews and documents, Toomey constructs a compelling narrative that fairly represents the proposals and their pitfalls in the still-problematic attempt to understand the scientific meanings of time and temporality. A formidable task, even for theorists popularizing extreme physics, and Toomey does it remarkably well. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; lower-division undergraduates through faculty; two-year technical program students. P. D. Skiff Bard College

Guardian Review

There's no such thing as a free lunch - unless it's a time-machine jinn, in which case you can have as many as you want, but you mustn't eat them. A time-machine jinn is a theoretical beast created out of nothing by a consistent time-travel loop. Do this: assemble certain materials at a factory, hook it up to a powerful computer and run away. Instantly an old and battered automatic spacecraft will land, having voyaged for millions of years to find suitable wormholes to use as a time machine, and then used them to hop back to the present, where it downloads its design into the computer to make sure it was built in the first place. Sounds like science fiction? Actually, it was worked out by physicists. As Toomey's superbly written popularisation shows, the idea of time travel, once not "serious", has attracted increasing scientific attention since it was shown that nothing in Einstein's equations prevents it. Here you will see weird behaviours of time-travelling billiard balls, etchings by Escher, and the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, which also implies a way to think about time: all possible futures exist, as a multitude of universes. So the question of free will is finessed: "Each universe within the multiverse is deterministic, but I exercise free will by moving among them." Which universe would you like to live in tomorrow? Caption: article-Etcetera15.1 Sounds like science fiction? Actually, it was worked out by physicists. As Toomey's superbly written popularisation shows, the idea of time travel, once not "serious", has attracted increasing scientific attention since it was shown that nothing in Einstein's equations prevents it. - Steven Poole.

Kirkus Review

A tour of advanced physical concepts demonstrates that time travel, once the domain of sci-fi, has moved into the purview of science. Toomey (Nonfiction Writing/UMass Amherst; Stormchasers, 2002, etc.) gives a nod to novelists for hatching the idea of time travel, then turns to scientists. Einstein's relativity theory states that rapid travel or strong gravitational fields slow the passage of time for those who experience them. This makes time travel to the distant future possible, if not quite satisfactory, since it's a one-way trip. Other corollaries of relativity hold out more intriguing possibilities. Dutch physicist Willem Jacob van Stockum describes a time-travel device involving a rotating cylinder of infinite length that would allow travel into the past. But while his math is unassailable, no infinite cylinder can exist in the universe we know; the device is "unphysical." Other physicists have tried to find more plausible engines to drive their time machines. For his novel Contact, Carl Sagan asked Caltech's Kip Thorne for a workable time-travel theory; Thorne suggested a wormhole, a shortcut through space implied in general relativity. Toomey goes on to examine time-travel explorations by other respected physicists, among them Stephen Hawking. The book touches on such esoteric ideas as the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, and the anthropic principle. One particularly strong chapter considers the apparent absence of time travelers in the present day; another examines a critical theoretical limitation: No theory exists by which a traveler can reach a point in time earlier than the activation of his machine. Toomey reasons that if a highly advanced alien race invented a time machine, say, half a million years ago, we only need to make contact with them and then use their machine to visit our own early history. Good overview of many challenging ideas. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review

Choice Review

Guardian Review

Kirkus Review

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