Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time
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Wednesday, Apr 15
Description
In this fascinating book, the renowned astrophysicist J. Richard Gott leads time travel out of the world of H. G. Wells and into the realm of scientific possibility. Building on theories posited by Einstein and advanced by scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Gott explains how time travel can actually occur. He describes, with boundless enthusiasm and humor, how travel to the future is not only possible but has already happened, and he contemplates whether travel to the past is also conceivable. Notable not only for its extraordinary subject matter and scientific brilliance, Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe is a delightful and captivating exploration of the surprising facts behind the science fiction of time travel. Read more
Publisher : Mariner Books
Publication date : September 19, 2002
Edition : Reprint
Language : English
Print length : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 0618257357
ISBN-13 : 55
Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.69 x 8.25 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #184,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #23 in Physics of Time (Books) #45 in Relativity Physics (Books) #217 in Cosmology (Books)
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Top Amazon Reviews
I enjoyed this very much as it is descriptive of the science investigation of travel thru time.
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2024 by Brad Lightner
This was a good read. I am not a physicist, but I was able to understand Gott's arguments well, so in that respect it was a good book, but, there were a number of formatting and spelling errors that made the reading a bit tedious in parts. If you're interested in the physics of time, then it's worth the money.
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Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2018 by DanE
Even though I am well into my senior years, I have had an interest in astronomy, space travel, cosmology, physics and time travel since my youth. When I saw this 291 page soft cover book on Amazon for a bargain price (Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe: The physical possibilities of travel through time by J. Richard Gott lll) I purchased it. I just finished reading this very interesting and informative volume and found it to be fascinating. Even though this book is filled with scientific complex formulas based upon physics; nevertheless, the author does an excellent job of making the various hypothesis easy to understand when it comes to the possibility of time travel. This book is organized into five detailed sections covering the following areas: Dreaming of time travel, time travel to the future, time travel to the past, time travel and the beginning of the universe, and report from the future. The end of the book is filled with notes and annotated references. There are also several illustrations showing how the various hypotheses may in time become actual working scientific theories. If you are interested in the scientific study of the possibility of traveling through time you may want to check out this intriguing book. Rating: 5 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: Tactical Principles of the most effective Combative Systems).
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Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2020 by Joseph J. Truncale
A fascinating read. Though it lost me several times in its twisted logic and mind numbing science the last chapter in particular made it worth the ride. If you must skip a couple pages, by all means do. But do come return for the finale.
Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2024 by TomL
If you're thinking about reading this book, you've already read it before, or one just like it, that is to say. There's a strong overview of the general issues involving time travel and how it could work in the real universe. Toward the end, Gott gets a bit heavy-handed in trying to convince us of his pet Copernican Principle, in my opinion overstating its predictive power.
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Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2017 by Xiggy
I searched extensively for a book that would explain current theories of time and the implications thereof that could be understood by a non-mathematical mind and one not trained in physics, and it was extraordinarily difficult. I ended up choosing this book, which is probably as close as one will get to what I was hoping for. The first and last chapters are actually the most accessible and interesting, the first being an overview of many fictional accounts of time travel (both movies and books) and the last a treatise on future prediction and probability, which I found most interesting and consoling. The chapters inbetween were the denser material in which the author discusses whether or not time travel to the past or the future could work and, inevitably, it deals with the theory of relativity, wormholes, black holes, etc. and how all that would function, all of which is confusing for a layperson like me. Nevertheless, this is, as I mentioned, the closest thing to a non-scientific explanation of what are at base purely mathematical constructs. It does get one thinking philosophically about what "time" is and about time travel in general. For example, if one can travel to the future, doesn't that imply that the future already "exists" as a "place" which one can visit? Mindbending reading and worth it for that reason alone.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2006 by T.R.
Gott's book is a typical physicist's commentary, with a few unique twists. One of the first things Gott does is explain the logic of time travel. This is important, and helps to dispel some possibly incorrect ideas that might be popularly held. Clearly, time travel is possible. We all do it as part of our normal existence. What's implied by the phrase "time travel" is the ability to control the pace; to move through time as freely as we move through space. Gott shows that we can move forward in time at different rates. The trick here, of course, is to use velocity and/or gravitational fields. This is a well-established experimental fact of relativity. Okay. So we can adjust our forward speed through time. But can we go in reverse? This seems to have a few more problems with it, like apparent paradoxes. For example, suppose I go back in time and kill myself as a little child. Then what? Gott would argue that that would be impossible. It looks like a paradox only because I assume sufficient free agency. Or, Gott might argue that the world in which I kill myself as a little child is a parallel universe. One in which there are parallel "me's" and "you's" and that I can only travel backward in time to those parallel universes, and not the one in which I actually live. At any rate, the point of the first part of Gott's book is to convince us that unorthodox time travel really is possible - both at different forward rates, and in reverse. Things get weirder. Next, Gott introduces us to wormholes and cosmic strings. This part is very interesting, but in reading it all, I had to be careful not to forget exactly what Gott is talking about. Want to travel backward in time? No problem. Just get two cosmic strings that are really, *really* long (and massive) and move them toward each other at nearly the speed of light. Then get in your space ship and zing around the moving cosmic strings: and there you have it - you move backward in time. To be fair, Gott reminds us frequently that this is something that only a very advanced civilization could do. One that could command the energy of an entire galaxy. Personally, I think Gott is optimistic. One of the things that I wish Gott had discussed relates to questions about conservation of mass/energy in time travel to the past. If I'm sitting at my desk, and suddenly my future self appears, then it looks like about 70 kg of mass has suddenly been created. That's roughly equal to 1.7*10^18 Joules. A ton of TNT is equivalent to about 4.1*10^9 Joules, so we are talking about the energy of roughly 1,500 1-megaton bombs. That's a lot of energy. Since all this time travel takes place in space, a space craft of some sort is required. The mass energy now looks like hundreds of thousands of 1-megaton bombs. Since no machine is ever 100% efficient, if this time-travel to the past was even 99.9999% efficient, the resulting time traveler would arrive in the past as an explosive event that would blow himself (and a lot of other folks) to smithereens. It occurred to me that this might make the foundation for a good science fiction story. Perhaps the 1921 explosion over northern Russia was actually a time traveler whose machine turned out to be only 99.9999% efficient. In my opinion, the best part of this book is near the end, where Gott explains the beginning of time: there isn't any. The universe, instead, exists as space-time that closes back on itself (that's the picture on the front cover). This, to me, seems like a very appealing view. We've long since come to accept a finite space with no beginning or end. A space that curves back on itself. The surface of our planet does this, and the universe probably does, too. What could be more natural, then, than a four-dimensional space-time universe that does the same thing? Gott has written a very good book. The only bad chapter is, unfortunately, the last. This one digresses and gets mired down in the Copernican principle, which states that we are not "special," and that we are most likely to understand the universe by assuming that the view we see is not privileged. This is a sound scientific principle that has guided much of the most successful science of the last several hundred years. Unfortunately, Gott violates it while trying to use it to support human colonies on Mars. Gott's idea is to use the Copernican principle to show that our species has, at most, a few million years to survive, and then to argue that we must disperse throughout the cosmos, with a first stop as settlers on Mars to reduce our chances of going extinct. In doing this, however, Gott tacitly assumes that we *are* "special," and that our "special" ability to build rocket ships and colonize other planets somehow gives us a survival advantage. Gott seems to have the mistaken idea that intelligence offers enhanced survival abilities beyond the normal 11-million-or-so years. But is this true? We make nuclear weapons, biological agents, and global weather changes capable of destroying our species. Sharks, on the other hand, have limited intelligence, and bacteria have virtually no intelligence. Both have been doing just fine for hundreds of millions of years, while most "intelligent" apes (of which our species is just one example) totter near extinction. In spite of the weak ending, I really liked this book. It made me sit up and think, and I always appreciate that. Hats off to Gott for writing what is both entertaining and educational.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 28, 2002 by Duwayne Anderson