Skip to main content

10 Short Lessons in Time Travel - Brian Clegg ***

Time travel, as Brian Clegg reminds us in his first chapter (sorry, first lesson), was a popular fictional subject long before it found its way into mainstream science. That it did is largely thanks to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which is a notoriously abstruse area of modern physics. So it’s no easy thing to produce a popular-level book that really gets to grips with the serious science of time travel, and it’s to Clegg’s credit that he achieved just that in his brilliant How to Build a Time Machine (aka Build Your Own Time Machine) ten years ago. This new book is rather different, approaching the same subject in an altogether more lightweight way.

Appropriately enough, it’s part of a series called ‘Pocket Einstein’. But the fact that Einstein keeps cropping up in it  – with topics like quantum entanglement and Einstein-Rosen bridges as well as relativity – is largely coincidence. Other titles in the same series include Artificial Intelligence and Renewable Energy, which aren’t subjects Einstein had much to say about. Of course, ‘Einstein’ is just publisher’s shorthand for ‘advanced science’ – and the inclusion of his name on a book’s cover is a pretty good indicator that it isn’t going to be very advanced at all. If Clegg really had devoted all ten lessons to the physics of time travel it would have entailed far more technical detail than the casual reader is going to want, so some chapters take quite meandering – though always interesting and entertaining – detours into very loosely related subjects like space drives and suspended animation.

I realise that a book like this is built around a title the publisher thinks will sell, but I still feel it would have been better as ‘10 Short Lessons on Time’, with only two or three chapters at the end on actual time travel topics like closed timelike curves, wormholes and all the associated paradoxes. This would allow earlier chapters to focus squarely on other aspects of time without pretending to be about time travel. Not just other areas of physics, such as entropy and time dilation, but topics like psychology (our highly subjective experience of time) and philosophical musings from Zeno and St Augustine to the present day, are fascinating enough to warrant chapters in their own right. Clegg does cover these areas, but in a slightly apologetic way as if he’s saying ‘Don’t worry class, we’ll get back to our time travel lesson just as soon as I’ve finished this brief digression ...’.

If you happen to see this book when you’re looking for a relaxed but thought-provoking read, then don’t hesitate to buy it as it’s guaranteed to keep you entertained. But if you want a really thorough insight into the science of time travel, with copious endnotes that you can to dig deeper into, then Clegg’s first book is still the place to go.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May
Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more