Time Travel: A Writer's Guide to the Real Science of Plausible Time Travel (Science Fiction Writing Series)

Time Travel explains science to help you make your fiction plausible. You'll leave for the future from a solid theoretical launching pad - and you'll see why the idea of traveling to the past violates no known laws of physics. Time Travel explores the theories of relativity, shows you the equations, probes the marvelous possibilities. It's filled with facts you can use in your fiction to cross the filmy borders and take readers along the corridors of time. Cover Time Travel Copyright About the author Contents Introduction The science of time travel The "laws" of time travel The difference between science fiction and fantasy Outline of the book CHAPTER 1. Time Travel in the Pulps A brief history of time travel as it was written in the "Golden Age" of science fiction The pulps and time travel The special fascination of time-travel stories Summary CHAPTER 2. Special Relativity and Time Travel to the Future An explanation of Einstein's special theory of relativity and why it indicates that time travel may be possible Einstein's discovery of the relativity of time The paradox of the twins Summary CHAPTER 3. Time Travel to the Past A look at the scientific groundwork upon which time travel theory is constructed World-lines, light cones, and closed timelike curves Causality Antimatter and time travel Why Wells's time machine couldn't work Summary CHAPTER 4. Hyperspace The concept of dimension and why we live in a world of at least three spatial dimensions Folded space-time and wormholes Space as the fourth dimension Summary CHAPTER 5. Time as the Fourth Dimension A look at how time "moves" and how it can be considered as a spatial dimension Circular, linear, and helical time The direction of time Entropy as an arrow of time Summary CHAPTER 6. The Block Universe Philosophy and science are uneasy neighbors in the block universe Conservation of mass-energy in time travel Free will and fatalism Summary CHAPTER 7. When General Relativity Made Time Travel Honest How Godel found what Einstein had overlooked and put forth his own view of time travel Meeting yourself in the past Einstein's response to Godel Summary CHAPTER 8. Paradoxes: Changing the Past, Causal Loops, and Sex A overview of time travel paradoxes and why most of them are invalid The grandfather paradox The Time Police Principle of self-consistency Sexual paradoxes Summary CHAPTER 9. Time Machines that Physicists Have Already "Invented" Theoretical "paper" time machines and how they might work Rotating cylinders Wormholes Exotic matter, energy conditions, and gravity time dilation Cauchy and chronology horizons Cosmic strings Summary CHAPTER 10. Faster- Than-Light (FTL) Into the Past The theory of sending information forward or backward in time Tachyons and special relativity The reinterpretation principle and antitelephones The FTL signed message puzzle The space-time geometry of FTL Summary CHAPTER 11. Quantum Gravity, Splitting Universes, and Time Machines Contemporary physicists have a few new ways of looking at time travel The uncertainty principle Splitting realities Multiple time tracks and parallel worlds Chronology protection The Back Reaction Summary CHAPTER 12. Reading the Physics Literature for Story Ideas These technical journals are available in academic libraries, or at any college or university with a physics department, and can be scanned for the latest results in time machine physics, and fresh story ideas Glossary of Selected Terms and Concepts Bibliography Index