Breaking the Time Barrier: The Race to Build the First Time Machine

Front Cover
Simon and Schuster, 2005 M04 5 - 280 pages
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME....
Once widely considered an impossibility--the stuff of science fiction novels--time travel may finally be achieved in the twenty-first century. In Breaking the Time Barrier, bestselling author Jenny Randles reveals the nature of recent, breakthrough experiments that are turning this fantasy into reality.
The race to build the first time machine is a fascinating saga that began about a century ago, when scientists such as Marconi and Edison and Einstein carried out research aimed at producing a working time machine. Today, physicists are conducting remarkable experiments that involve slowing the passage of information, freezing light, and breaking the speed of light--and thus the time barrier. In the 1960s we had the "space race." Today, there is a "time race" involving an underground community of working scientists who are increasingly convinced that a time machine of some sort is finally possible.
Here, Randles explores the often riveting motives of the people involved in this quest (including a host of sincere, if sometimes misguided amateurs), the consequences for society should time travel become a part of everyday life, and what evidence might indicate that it has already become reality. For, if time travel is going to happen--and some Russian scientists already claim to have achieved it in a lab--then its effects may already be apparent.
 

Contents

The Day that Time Stood Still
1
The Race
7
The Dawn ofTime
21
The First Time Traveler
39
Relatively Speaking
48
Bending Space and Time
58
Other Dimensions
65
Bridges Across Time
75
Strings Attached
154
Cheating Gravity
169
Many Worlds Many Timelines
178
Quantum Foam
184
Kakus Time Machine
191
Faster than Light
201
Handshakes from the Future
213
Twisting Time
224

Travel into the Future
80
Time Travel into the Past
87
Black Holes
93
Back from the Future
105
The Time Mirror
118
Entangled Time
126
Wormholes
136
Chronology Protection
145
Beam Me Up
231
Chrononauts
240
Beyond Times Last Frontier
249
Does Evidence ofTime Travel Already Exist?
259
References
265
Index
271
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2005)

Jenny Randles, who specialized in physics and geology at university, has sold more than one and a half million copies of her fifty published books. She has written articles for such journals as New Scientist, and lives in North Wales.

Bibliographic information