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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more