Preface
The neighborhood children think I have a time machine in my garage. Even mycolleagues sometimes behave as if I have one. Astrophysicist Tod Lauer once sentme a formal letter inviting me to Kitt Peak National Observatory to give a talkon time travel. He sent this invitation six months after I had already given thetalk. The invitation explained that since I was an expert in time travel, Ishould presumably have no trouble in returning to the past to make theappearance. On another occasion, at a cosmology conference in California, Ihappened to wear a turquoise sports jacket — which I imagined might fit innicely with the California ambiance. Bob Kirshner, then chair of Harvard’sastronomy department, came up to me and said, "Richard, this is the ‘Coat of theFuture’; you must have gotten this in the future and brought it back, becausethis color hasn’t been invented yet!" Since then, I’ve always worn this coatwhen giving talks on time travel.
Time travel is certainly one of the most fun topics in physics, but it has aserious side as well. I have received calls from people who want to know aboutrecent developments in time travel because they wish to return to the past torescue a loved one who died under tragic circumstances. I treat such calls withgreat seriousness. I have written this book partly to answer such questions. Onereason that time travel is so fascinating is that we have such a great desire todo it.
Physicists like me who are investigating time travel are not currently at thepoint of taking out patents on a time machine. But we are investigating whetherbuilding one is possible in principle, under the laws of physics. It’s ahigh-stakes game played by some of the brightest people in the world: Einsteinshowed that time travel to the future is possible and started the discussion.Kurt Gödel, Kip Thorne, and Stephen Hawking have each been interested in thequestion of whether time travel to the past is possible. The answer to thatquestion would both give new insights into how the universe works and possiblysome clues as to how it began.
This book is a personal story, not a history of science. Imagine me as yourguide, taking you to the summit of Mount Everest. The climb is sometimeschallenging, sometimes easy, but I promise that we will ascend by the easiestpossible route. It’s a path of ideas I know well, having marked some of thetrail myself. Along the way, we will intersect the work of many of mycolleagues. I have mentioned many of them to give you a fair idea of the othertrailblazers of this terrain. Some contributions are emphasized and othersbriefly noted, in or out of historical sequence, as they play into telling mystory. To those whose work I’ve not mentioned — though it may be equallyimportant but following a different route up the mountain — I apologize inadvance.
We start our journey at base camp: the dream of time travel itself and thepathbreaking science fiction of H. G. Wells.
Continues...
Excerpted from Time Travel in Einstein's Universeby Gott, J. Richard, III Copyright © 2002 by Gott, J. Richard, III. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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