Time Travel: a writer’s guide

Time Travel: a writer’s guide – Paul J. Nahin ***

Time travel is an absolutely fascinating aspect of physics, if only because few people realize that it’s not fantasy – not only does time travel fail to break the laws of physics, we even have to deal with (very small scale) time travel on the part of GPS satellites to make them work properly. Paul Nahin doesn’t point this out, quite possibly because this is a surprisingly old book – although reissued in 2011 with a new preface, it dates back to 1997.

GPS might not have been part of everyday life back then, but most of the time travel science has survived pretty well unchanged. There are a few time-based omissions. No mention of superluminal tunnelling experiments or laser-based frame dragging, for instance. But the biggest omission in the science due to the age of the book has nothing much to do with time travel – it’s the casual dismissal of the cosmological constant, showing a predating of the discovery of dark energy. But luckily this is more a side-comment than of any great significance.

Apart from those small omissions, Nahin does a great job of getting through all the possibilities in a reasonably compact way. However, the way the book is tightly targeted means that it isn’t the ideal popular science book on time travel for the general reader. This is very much aimed at would-be writers of science fiction, and this comes through very strongly, both in Nahin’s remarks and in his approach which relies on many, many examples of science fiction stories featuring time travel. I’m quite a fan of science fiction, but I have to confess I found it heavy going with so many fictional references.

There are a couple of other tiny problems with the book. The science is mostly put across in a friendly fashion, but there are two times when Nahin goes into much too much detail, in a way that may well put off a lot of readers (particularly if they are looking at this as authors rather than would-be scientists). The other problem I had was a rather hectoring tone – at times he almost says that people with certain ideas (e.g. having problems with the killing-your-grandfather type paradox) are idiots because the paradox obviously won’t happen. I’m sorry, it isn’t obvious, and taking this approach is not particularly helpful.

Overall, then, a good if rather dated summary of the science of time travel, but because of the way it is put across only really of interest to serious SF fans or would-be writers (which, to be fair to the author, is exactly the audience that it is aimed at).

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Should we question science?

I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lot of respect for Sabine. She has written two excellent books and has been helpful to me with a number of physics queries - she also had a really interesting blog, and has now become particularly successful with her science videos. This is where I'm afraid she lost me as audience, as I find video a very unsatisfactory medium to take in information - but I know it has mass appeal. This meant I was concerned by Simon's tweet (or whatever we are supposed to call posts on X) saying 'The Problem With Sabine Hossenfelder: if you are a fan of SH... then this is worth watching.' He was referencing a video from 'Professor Dave Explains' - I'm not familiar with Professor Dave (aka Dave Farina, who apparently isn't a professor, which is perhaps a bit unfortunate for someone calling out fakes), but his videos are popular and he...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog