Time Travel

Time Travel explains science to help you make your fiction plausible. You'll leave for the future from a solid theoretical launching pad - and you'll see why the idea of traveling to the past violates no known laws of physics. Time Travel explores the theories of relativity, shows you the equations, probes the marvelous possibilities. It's filled with facts you can use in your fiction to cross the filmy borders and take readers along the corridors of time.

Introduction The science of time travel. The "laws" of time travel. The difference between science fiction and fantasy. Outline of the book.

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CHAPTER 1 Time Travel in the Pulps

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A brief history of time travel as it was written in the "Golden Age" of science fiction.

The pulps and time travel

The special fascination of time-travel stories

Summary

CHAPTER 2 Special Relativity and Time Travel to the Future

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An explanation of Einstein's special theory of relativity and why it indicates that time travel may be possible.

Einstein's discovery of the relativity of time

The paradox of the twins

Summary

CHAPTER 3 Time Travel to the Past

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A look at the scientific groundwork upon which time travel theory is constructed.

World-lines, light cones, and closed timelike curves

Causality

Antimatter and time travel

Why Well's time machine couldn't work

Summary

CHAPTER 4 Hyperspace

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The concept of dimension and why we live in a world of at least three spatial dimensions.

Folded space-time and wormholes

Space as the fourth dimension

Summary

CHAPTER 5 Time as the Fourth Dimension

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A look at how time "moves" and how it can be considered as a spatial dimensions.

Circular, linear, and helical time

The direction of time

Entropy as an arrow of time

Summary

CHAPTER 6 The Block Universe

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Philosophy and science are uneasy neighbors in the block universe.

Conservation of mass-energy in time travel

Free will and fatalism

Summary

CHAPTER 7 When General Relativity Made Time Travel Honest

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How Godel found what Einstein had overlooked and put forth his own view of time travel.

Meeting yourself in the past

Einstein's response to Godel

Summary

CHAPTER 8 Paradoxes: Changing the Past, Causal Loops, and Sex

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A overview of time travel paradoxes and why most of them are invalid.

The grandfather paradox

The Time Police

Principle of self-consistency

Sexual paradoxes

Summary

CHAPTER 9 Time Machines that Physicists Have Already "Invented"

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Theoretical "paper" time machines and how they might work.

Rotating cylinders

Wormholes

Exotic matter, energy conditions, and gravity time dilation

Cauchy and chronology horizons

Cosmic strings

Summary

CHAPTER 10 Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Into the Past

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The theory of sending information forward or backward in time.

Tachyons and special relativity

The reinterpretation principle and antitelephones

The FTL signed message puzzle

The space-time geometry of FTL

Summary

CHAPTER 11 Quantum Gravity, Splitting Universes, and Time Machines

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Contemporary physicists have a few new ways of looking at time travel.

The uncertainty principle

Splitting realities

Chronology protection

The Back Reaction

Multiple time tracks and parallel worlds

Summary

CHAPTER 12 Reading the Physics Literature for Story Ideas These technical journals are available in academic libraries, or at any college or university with a physics department, and can be scanned for the latest results in time machine physics, and fresh story ideas.

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Glossary of Selected Terms and Concepts

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Bibliography

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Index

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