Sorry, grandma, I won't be seeing you again anytime soon.

books:


	• The Future of Spacetime Stephen William Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, ... W. W. Norton & Company, 2003 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Interesting thinking on the edge of knowledge

This a book derived from 5 physicists who gave a discourse to honor Kip Thorne on his 60th birthday. If you're interested in the musings of some of the greatest minds in science, this is an excellent book. Absent is the mathematics that gives substance to the thoughts, which makes this subject very approachable to the lay audience.

The topics are far ranging in the field of physics and the discussions are beyond the edge of what is currently provable. This is the area of where knowledge meets intuition, where great theories and insight are born.

If time travel, the universe as four dimensions, and related subjects are not for you, then this isn't the book for you. If your interested in the thoughts that will propel further investigation in the quest for knowledge and understanding, this is an excellent book.

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Sorry, grandma, I won't be seeing you again anytime soon.

Time travel appears pretty impractical based on this book. Maybe it's mathematically possible to fold time and punch wormholes in it in theory, but I don't think NASA or Greyhound is going to be offering trips back and forth through our lives. However, it's always intriguing to read what really smart people come up with, because they make a lot of it seem so obvious, even though I could never come up with it on my own.

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The State of Real Time Travel

A series of essays on the concept of Time in current Theoretical Physics. The papers were presented in 2000 following a tradition within the community of Physics. These topics honor Kip Thorne on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Thorne has investigated the possibility of actual time travel in current concept of Spacetime.

Igor Novikov provides arguments for the possibility of travel to the past, but concludes that it is impossible to change the past, which has already happened, including any effects of a future person traveling back into time. Stephen Hawking argues that travel in time, in the science fiction concept, is impossible, likely violating the laws of physics as we understand them now.

Contributors discuss the latest knowledge on black holes and singularities. This volume was enjoyable as a view of Physics enjoying itself, taking its possibilities seriously, while enjoying the adventure along the way. Insights from Quantum Physics contribute to our possibilities in the macro world.

Timothy Ferris explores the factors involved in the popularization of science. He provides some shocking statistics about the general ignorance of the American public about science and our knowledge of the universe. Alan Lightman takes us into the world of writing to compare the insights and themes of science fiction and physics.

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Is time-travel possible?

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This slim volume consists of six essays, based on talks presented at the Kipfest [note 1] on the occasion of Kip Thorne's sixtieth birthday. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Physics at Caltech is best known to the general public for his 1988 wormhole "time machine" proposal, and indeed much of the book is taken up exploring the question, "is time travel possible?"

Physicist Richard Price leads off with a concise refresher-essay, "Welcome to Spacetime." Danish physicist Igor Novikov explores classic time-travel paradoxes, with some cool diagrams and novel results: in essence, "closed timelike curves" [note 2] are theoretically possible, but paradoxes aren't allowed -- with a time-machine, you could visit your grandfather, but you couldn't kill him. The universe wouldn't permit it -- which in essence is Hawking's Chronology Protection conjecture. Hawking speculates that the unfortunate time-traveler would be incinerated by (literally) a bolt from the blue. Well, what he actually says is, "one would expect the energy-momentum tensor to be infinite on the Cauchy horizon" [note 3], which (sigh) is a pretty typical Hawking attempt at "popular" science.

Fortunately, Thorne himself is a master popularizer, and he ends up explaining Hawking's ideas as well as his own. His essay amounts to an update chapter for his wonderful 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, which I enthusiastically recommend: . Thorne reluctantly concludes that things really don't look very good for wormholes, especially for time travel -- though he does leave a tiny ray of hope for some super-advanced future civilization to make wormholes for space travel [note 4]. Thorne notes that our grasp of basic physics is so crude that we can really only understand maybe 5% of the stuff that fills our universe -- the "normal" baryonic matter that makes up people, planets and stars. Thorne guesses that 35% of the universes's mass is in some unknown form of "cold dark matter", and the remaining 60% is some even more mysterious form of "dark energy" -- so there's certainly plenty of room left for discovery!

The book concludes with a nice explanation of why good popular-science books are needed, by noted pop-science writer Timothy Ferris, and with Alan Lightman's essay on "The Physicist as Novelist". Lightman, a former student of Thorne's, went on to write Einstein's Dreams and other well-regarded novels.

The Future of Spacetime is written for a general audience -- aside from Hawking's essay, everything should be understandable to any science-literate reader. I particularly recommend it to readers who've liked Thorne's earlier pop-science works.
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Note 1). a clever play on festschrift, the traditional name for such a tribute volume.

Note 2). As Hawking cheerfully points out, "closed timelike curve" is just physics-speak for time travel, because you can't admit you're studying that sci-fi stuff in a grant proposal...

Note 3). Arthur C. Clarke notes that "the most convincing argument against time travel is the remarkable scarcity of time travellers..."

Note 4). As you may know, a faster-than-light spaceship could also be used as a time-machine, another reason why most physicists think FTL travel is very unlikely. I'd love to see a theoretical treatment of FTL travel that wouldn't violate Hawking's "Chronology Protection Clause"... Note also that there's no theoretical barrier to wormhole spaceships travelling a bit *slower* than light.

Peter D. Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Tucson & Santa Fe (USA)
Review first published at SF Site:
http://www.sfsite.com/11a/fs139.htm

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reviews: page 1, 2

Where the science of black holes, gravitational waves, and time travel will likely lead us, as reported by spacetime's most important theoreticians and observers.

Our minds tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patterns of nature, aimed at readers who share their fascination with the deepest mysteries of the universe.
? Richard Price: "An Introduction to Spacetime Physics"
? Stephen Hawking: "Chronology Protection"
? Igor Novikov: "Can We Change the Past?"
? Kip S. Thorne: "Speculations about the Future"
? Timothy Ferris: "On the Popularization of Science"
? Alan Lightman: "The Physicist as Novelist"

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