Reviews for Time Machines

The average rating for Time Machines based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-30 00:00:00 Freddy Taylor Philosophers and physicists have tackled the idea of time travel from one angle, trying to establish what's technically or logically possible, what's forbidden, and why, while science fiction writers have gone at it from another, exploring the dramatic and thematic possibilities. In this book, Paul Nahin has attempted the difficult task of surveying both viewpoints, the factual and the fictional. For me, the book is problematic in some respects. Nahin attempts to draw some conclusions about the science and the philosophy as he goes, but sometimes these feel poorly founded. And his discussion is sometimes a little cloudy. In reading it, I often wished I were in a classroom where I could ask questions. For instance: What exactly is the difference between changing the past, which Nahin says most thinkers have now ruled out, and merely affecting it, which they believe is allowed? The distinction eventually made sense to me, and after a second reading, Nahin's treatment of it seems quite clear within the limits of his text, though in commonsense terms it's still a little confounding. Basically, the idea is that, if I could travel to the past, anything I did there would have to be consistent with the state of the world today. To use a common example, I can't go back in time and kill my grandfather before my father was born, but I could go back and be the person who introduces my grandfather to my grandmother. Other points, mostly technical, still puzzle me, but that's in the nature of the material. Regardless, a vast amount of research has been summarized in this book, ranging from old pulp-magazine stories to scientific papers that were still recent at the time Nahin completed the text. In effect, the book is two surveys in one'combining an overview of the fictional literature with an account of the scientific and (less thoroughly) the philosophical literature'and that makes this a doubly valuable reference. Other writers have done a better job of explicating some of the concepts here, but as far as I can tell, there is no other book like this. Side notes: I read this as background for a play involving time travel. I'm curious what's in the revised and expanded second edition, but not so much that I want to buy it'apparently it's available only in hardcover form.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-21 00:00:00 Kenji Akiyama 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.