Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.
Time travel is metaphysically possible. Nikk Effingham contends that arguments for the impossibility of time travel are not sound. Focusing mainly on the Grandfather Paradox, Effingham explores the ramifications of taking this view, discusses issues in probability and decision theory, and considers the potential dangers of travelling in time.
The Hugo Award–winning author of Spin, praised as “a hell of a storyteller” by Stephen King, gives time travel his own mind-bending twist . . . Two events made September 1st a memorable day for Jesse Cullum. First, he lost a pair of Oakley sunglasses. Second, he saved the life of President Ulysses S. Grant. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson’s Last Year, the technology exists to open doorways into the past—but not our past, not exactly. Each “past” is effectively an alternate world, identical to ours but only up to the date on which we access it. And a given “past” can only be reached once. After a passageway is open, it’s the only road to that particular past; once closed, it can’t be reopened. A passageway has been opened to a version of late 19th-century Ohio. It’s been in operation for most of a decade, but it’s no secret, on either side of time. A small city has grown up around it to entertain visitors from our time, and many locals earn a good living catering to them. But like all such operations, it has a shelf life; as the “natives” become more sophisticated, their version of the “past” grows less attractive as a destination. Jesse Cullum is a native. And he knows the passageway will be closing soon. He’s fallen in love with a woman from our time, and he means to follow her back—no matter whose secrets he has to expose in order to do it. “Wilson’s prose is beautifully constructed in this intelligent and gripping novel.” —Chicago Review of Books
A timely volume that uses science fiction as a springboard to meaningful philosophical discussions, especially at points of contact between science fiction and new scientific developments. Raises questions and examines timely themes concerning the nature of the mind, time travel, artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, free will, the nature of persons, transhumanism, virtual reality, and neuroethics Draws on a broad range of books, films and television series, including The Matrix, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Frankenstein, Brave New World, The Time Machine, and Back to the Future Considers the classic philosophical puzzles that appeal to the general reader, while also exploring new topics of interest to the more seasoned academic
In 2554, the World is Coming to its End, unless an impossible mission through 600 years of time travel succeeds. Maternal instinct knows no boundaries, including the nano-neural-net intravenously installed in Dannia Weston’s mind to repress her identity, allowing her to perform a mission 300 years before her time. Transported to the year 1954, Dannia becomes a woman with a mid-twentieth century persona, college educated with an aptitude for mechanical invention. Due to her work during the war, she is employed by the U.S. government on a secret project. But what no one knows—including Dannia or those who sent her back to tinker with the mechanical past to reduce future pollution—is what might happen should she become emotionally involved in 1954. The 2254 science team programmed the nano-net to prevent the possibility of pregnancy, but each person reacts to strong emotional stimuli differently, and using birth control not available in 1954 is out of the question. When Dannia falls in love with Peter Hersh and becomes pregnant, her hormones erode a small section of the nano-chained network that stabilizes her new identity, triggering a mild memory rebirth...and threatening her mission and the fate of the world.
Best Books of 2016 BOSTON GLOBE * THE ATLANTIC From the acclaimed bestselling author of The Information and Chaos comes this enthralling history of time travel—a concept that has preoccupied physicists and storytellers over the course of the last century. James Gleick delivers a mind-bending exploration of time travel—from its origins in literature and science to its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick vividly explores physics, technology, philosophy, and art as each relates to time travel and tells the story of the concept's cultural evolutions—from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from Proust to Woody Allen. He takes a close look at the porous boundary between science fiction and modern physics, and, finally, delves into what it all means in our own moment in time—the world of the instantaneous, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.
"We trust in the linear, forever the same shape of the past, until eternity. But the diffrences between the past, presence and future are nothing but an illusion."
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.
Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American inspired and entertained several generations of mathematicians and scientists. Gardner in his crystal-clear prose illuminated corners of mathematics, especially recreational mathematics, that most people had no idea existed. His playful spirit and inquisitive nature invite the reader into an exploration of beautiful mathematical ideas along with him. These columns were both a revelation and a gift when he wrote them; no one--before Gardner--had written about mathematics like this. They continue to be a marvel. This is the original 1988 edition and contains columns published from 1974-1976.
Is it truly possible to secure passage to a time fixed in the past or future? Even before H. G. Wells ignited the world's imagination with his classic 1895 novel, "The Time Machine," time travel has long captivated humankind's curiosity, especially those seeking answers to the universe's most inscrutable laws. According to physicist Louis A. Del Monte, there is ample evidence that time travel has already occurred, as well as an arsenal of scientific data to back up this bold assertion. Now, he reveals his own theoretical research in support of this claim in a thought-provoking, mind-bending new work, "How to Time Travel." "How to Time Travel" provides insight into this perennially popular topic, covering the science of time travel, proposed time machines, time travel paradoxes, and time travel evidence. Organized into three major sections, the book demystifies the main tenets of this complex subject, including: Time Travel Evidence, The Science of Time Traveling, and Building a Time Machine. From explaining how Einstein's theories of relativity underpin time travel to detailing proposed methods of time travel, this comprehensive book will ensure that you never look at time in quite the same way again. The book also includes several new contributions to the field, including the Existence Equation Conjecture, the Grandchild Paradox, the Preserve the World Line Rule, and the Time Uncertainty Interval. A fascinating and radical foray into popular science, "How to Time Travel" will enthrall anyone who has a consuming interest in the subject or is newly compelled to mine the universe's most confounding mysteries.