The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics

Etukansi
W. W. Norton & Company, 26.6.2007 - 391 sivua
The story of physicists' quest to answer a mind-boggling question: How can we travel through time?

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.

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Sisältö

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
9
PROLOGUE
13
INTIMATIONS OF SPAGETIME
23
EINSTEINS RADICAL IDEA
38
UNPHYSICAL TIME MACHINES
76
PASTWARD TIME TRAVELSERIOUSLY
94
PARADOX
134
COSMIC STRINGS AND CHRONOLOGY PROTECTION
169
A PARADE OF TIME MACHINES
230
TIME TRAVEL IN ANOTHER KIND OF SPACETIME
249
EXPLAINING THE APPARENT ABSENCE OF TIME TRAVELERS
263
TIME MACHINES AT THE ENDS OF TIME
278
EPILOGUE
303
NOTES
309
GLOSSARY
340
BIBLIOGRAPHY
351

NOVIKOVS WILD IDEAS
191
A TIME TRAVEL SUMMIT
214

Muita painoksia - Näytä kaikki

Yleiset termit ja lausekkeet

Suositut otteet

Sivu 5 - Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight.

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