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| A Sample of Things to Come | ||
| Foreword | ||
| What's New in the Second Edition | ||
| Prologue to the First Edition | ||
| Acknowledgments to the First Edition | ||
| Ch. 1 | An Overview of Time Travel | 1 |
| The Mystery of Time Travel | 1 | |
| Machineless Time Travel Without Dreams or Drugs | 13 | |
| Time Travel by Machine | 18 | |
| H. G. Wells - Why His Time Machine Won't Work | 22 | |
| Traveling to the Future | 25 | |
| Traveling to the Past | 30 | |
| Who Else Might Be Interested in Time Travel | 35 | |
| Some Problems | 40 | |
| Backward in Time - Can It Really Be Done? | 43 | |
| The Problem of Paradoxes | 47 | |
| The Fictional Origins of "Change the Past" | 54 | |
| Ways to Avoid Paradoxes | 57 | |
| Where Are All the Time Travelers? | 66 | |
| Skepticism and Time Travelers | 72 | |
| Einstein, Godel, and the Past | 79 | |
| Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes, Singularities, and Time Travel | 85 | |
| Tipler's Time Machine | 92 | |
| Ch. 2 | On the Nature of Time, Spacetime, and the Fourth Dimension | 97 |
| What Is Time? | 98 | |
| Speculations on the Reality of Time | 102 | |
| Has the Past Been for Ever? | 109 | |
| Time and Clocks | 115 | |
| Hyperspace and Wormholes | 117 | |
| Monsters in Hyperspace | 125 | |
| Space as the Fourth Dimension | 130 | |
| Time as the Fourth Dimension | 140 | |
| H. G. Wells on Space and Time | 143 | |
| Spacetime and the Fourth Dimension | 148 | |
| Spacetime, Omniscience, and Free Will | 161 | |
| Does the Future Already Exist? Is the Past Still Around? | 170 | |
| Ch. 3 | The Arrows of Time | 179 |
| The Language of Time Travel | 180 | |
| Does Time Have a Direction? | 181 | |
| Cause and Effect | 185 | |
| Backward Causation | 191 | |
| What Does "Now" Mean? | 198 | |
| Irreversibility | 205 | |
| Worlds in Reverse | 208 | |
| The Philosophy and Physics of Reversed Time | 220 | |
| Entropy as Time's Arrow | 227 | |
| Other Arrows of Time | 236 | |
| Multidimensional Time | 240 | |
| Ch. 4 | Time Travel Paradoxes and (Some of) Their Explanations | 245 |
| Paradoxes | 246 | |
| Early Science Fiction Speculations on Time Travel Paradoxes | 251 | |
| Two Basic Time Travel Paradoxes | 256 | |
| Can the Present Change the Past? Can the Past Be Un-Done? | 259 | |
| Changing the Past vs. Affecting It | 269 | |
| Why Can't a Time Traveler Kill His Grandfather? | 285 | |
| Quantum Mechanics and Time Travel | 294 | |
| Causal Loops | 304 | |
| Sexual Paradoxes | 319 | |
| Maxwell's Equations and Advanced Effects | 323 | |
| Communication with the Past | 327 | |
| Wheeler and Feynman and Their Bilking Paradox | 332 | |
| Absorber Theory and Signaling to the Past | 336 | |
| Tachyonic Signals, Spooky Actions, and the Bell Antitelephone | 342 | |
| Epilogue | 355 | |
| Notes and References | 367 | |
| Tech Notes | ||
| 1 | What Time Is Now? | 415 |
| 2 | Time Dilation via the Photon Clock | 423 |
| 3 | The Lorentz Transformation | 429 |
| 4 | Spacetime Diagrams, Light Cones, Metrics, and Invariant Intervals | 439 |
| 5 | Proper Time, Curved World Lines, and the Twin Paradox | 459 |
| 6 | A High-Speed Rocket Is a One-Way Time Machine to the Future | 467 |
| 7 | Superluminal Speeds, Backward Time Travel, and Warp Drives, or Faster-Than-Light Into the Past | 475 |
| 8 | Backward Time Travel According to Godel and Tipler | 489 |
| 9 | Wormhole Time Machines | 497 |
| 10 | "Solving" the Einstein Gravitational Field Equations, Unphysical Mass-Energy, and the Cosmic String Time Machine | 527 |
| 11 | Time and Gravity | 537 |
| Glossary of Important Terms and Concepts | 545 | |
| Bibliography | 557 | |
| Bibliographic Adieu | 618 | |
| Index | 621 |
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Kenji Akiyama
reviewed Time Machines on September 21, 2011
Time Machines
Reading this book is like spending hours upon hours with some kind of physics dissertation that tries to use science fiction to prove the possibility of time travel. The catch is that dissertations usually contain clear hypotheses and proofs, whereas this book goes almost nowhere for 300 pages.
Instead of spelling out concepts, author Paul Nahin instead references entire works inline without any context, as though the reader ought to have digested the entire body of science fiction works on his topics prior to picking up his book. There are ample notes to accompany his text, but these are more of a distraction than guidance when navigating his chaos.
Finally, after pages and pages of exposition and postulation that go apparently nowhere, the book wraps up with a series of "Tech Notes" (presumably intended to provide more concrete and organized information about the theories surrounding time travel and faster-than-light speeds) that replace poorly-utilized literary references with advanced (for the lay person the former portion of this book might attract) mathematics that leaves one feeling stupefied rather than at ease with any clear conclusion.
To be fair to Mr. Nahin, the topics he approaches are advanced exercises in physics and philosophy, and there are aspects of the book that effectively lead the reader into flights of fancy and awestruck speculation; unfortunately, these are as rare in his work as stable wormholes in the universe.
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Add Time Machines, This book explores the idea of time travel from the first account in English literature to the latest theories of physicists such as Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov. This very readable work covers a variety of topics including: the history of time travel in f, Time Machines to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Time Machines, This book explores the idea of time travel from the first account in English literature to the latest theories of physicists such as Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov. This very readable work covers a variety of topics including: the history of time travel in f, Time Machines to your collection on WonderClub |
