Sci-fi makes it look so easy. Receive a distress call from Alpha Centauri? No problem: punch the warp drive and you're there in minutes. Facing a catastrophe that can't be averted? Just pop back in the timestream and stop it before it starts. But for those of us not lucky enough to live in a science-fictional universe, are these ideas merely flights of fancy—or could it really be possible to travel through time or take shortcuts between stars?
Cutting-edge physics may not be able to answer those questions yet, but it does offer up some tantalizing possibilities. In Time Travel and Warp Drives, Allen Everett and Thomas A. Roman take readers on a clear, concise tour of our current understanding of the nature of time and space—and whether or not we might be able to bend them to our will. Using no math beyond high school algebra, the authors lay out an approachable explanation of Einstein's special relativity, then move through the fundamental differences between traveling forward and backward in time and the surprising theoretical connection between going back in time and traveling faster than the speed of light. They survey a variety of possible time machines and warp drives, including wormholes and warp bubbles, and, in a dizzyingly creative chapter, imagine the paradoxes that could plague a world where time travel was possible—killing your own grandfather is only one of them!
Written with a light touch and an irrepressible love of the fun of sci-fi scenarios—but firmly rooted in the most up-to-date science, Time Travel and Warp Drives will be a delightful discovery for any science buff or armchair chrononaut.
To see video demonstrations of key concepts from the book, please visit this website: http://press.uchicago.edu/sites/timewarp/index.html
Author(s): Allen Everett, Thomas Roman
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 280
Tags: Физика;Популярная физика;
Contents......Page 8
Preface......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
1. Introduction
......Page 14
2. Time, Clocks, and Reference Frames
......Page 23
3. Lorentz Transformations and Special Relativity
......Page 35
4. The Light Cone
......Page 55
5. Forward Time Travel and the Twin “Paradox”
......Page 62
6. “Forward, into the Past”
......Page 75
7. The Arrow of Time
......Page 89
8. General Relativity: Curved Space and Warped Time
......Page 102
9. Wormholes and Warp Bubbles: Beating the Light Barrier and Possible Time Machines
......Page 125
10. Banana Peels and Parallel Worlds
......Page 149
11. “Don’t Be So Negative”: Exotic Matter
......Page 171
12. “To Boldly Go . . .”?
......Page 194
13. Cylinders and Strings
......Page 209
14. Epilogue
......Page 231
Appendix 1: Derivation of the Galilean Velocity Transformations......Page 238
Appendix 2: Derivation of the Lorentz Transformations......Page 240
Appendix 3: Proof of the Invariance of the Spacetime Interval......Page 245
Appendix 4: Argument to Show the Orientation of the x',t' Axes Relative to the x,t Axes......Page 247
Appendix 5: Time Dilation via Light Clocks......Page 249
Appendix 6: Hawking’s Theorem......Page 254
Appendix 7: Light Pipe in the Mallett Time Machine......Page 263
Bibliography......Page 266
Index......Page 272
