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Title: The Future of Spacetime by S. W. Hawking, Kip S. Thorne, Stephen W. Hawking, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman, Richard Price, Igor Novikov, Ferris, Igor D. Novikov, Timothy ISBN: 0-393-32446-X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (6 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Is time-travel possible?
Comment: -----------------------------------------------------------
This slim volume consists of six essays, based on talks presented at the Kipfest [note 1] on the occasion of Kip Thorne's sixtieth birthday. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Physics at Caltech is best known to the general public for his 1988 wormhole "time machine" proposal, and indeed much of the book is taken up exploring the question, "is time travel possible?"

Physicist Richard Price leads off with a concise refresher-essay, "Welcome to Spacetime." Danish physicist Igor Novikov explores classic time-travel paradoxes, with some cool diagrams and novel results: in essence, "closed timelike curves" [note 2] are theoretically possible, but paradoxes aren't allowed -- with a time-machine, you could visit your grandfather, but you couldn't kill him. The universe wouldn't permit it -- which in essence is Hawking's Chronology Protection conjecture. Hawking speculates that the unfortunate time-traveler would be incinerated by (literally) a bolt from the blue. Well, what he actually says is, "one would expect the energy-momentum tensor to be infinite on the Cauchy horizon" [note 3], which (sigh) is a pretty typical Hawking attempt at "popular" science.

Fortunately, Thorne himself is a master popularizer, and he ends up explaining Hawking's ideas as well as his own. His essay amounts to an update chapter for his wonderful 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, which I enthusiastically recommend: . Thorne reluctantly concludes that things really don't look very good for wormholes, especially for time travel -- though he does leave a tiny ray of hope for some super-advanced future civilization to make wormholes for space travel [note 4]. Thorne notes that our grasp of basic physics is so crude that we can really only understand maybe 5% of the stuff that fills our universe -- the "normal" baryonic matter that makes up people, planets and stars. Thorne guesses that 35% of the universes's mass is in some unknown form of "cold dark matter", and the remaining 60% is some even more mysterious form of "dark energy" -- so there's certainly plenty of room left for discovery!

The book concludes with a nice explanation of why good popular-science books are needed, by noted pop-science writer Timothy Ferris, and with Alan Lightman's essay on "The Physicist as Novelist". Lightman, a former student of Thorne's, went on to write Einstein's Dreams and other well-regarded novels.

The Future of Spacetime is written for a general audience -- aside from Hawking's essay, everything should be understandable to any science-literate reader. I particularly recommend it to readers who've liked Thorne's earlier pop-science works.
______________________

Note 1). a clever play on festschrift, the traditional name for such a tribute volume.

Note 2). As Hawking cheerfully points out, "closed timelike curve" is just physics-speak for time travel, because you can't admit you're studying that sci-fi stuff in a grant proposal...

Note 3). Arthur C. Clarke notes that "the most convincing argument against time travel is the remarkable scarcity of time travellers..."

Note 4). As you may know, a faster-than-light spaceship could also be used as a time-machine, another reason why most physicists think FTL travel is very unlikely. I'd love to see a theoretical treatment of FTL travel that wouldn't violate Hawking's "Chronology Protection Clause"... Note also that there's no theoretical barrier to wormhole spaceships travelling a bit *slower* than light.

Review first published at SF Site:
http://www.sfsite.com/11a/fs139.htm

Rating: 4
Summary: Sorry, grandma, I won't be seeing you again anytime soon.
Comment: Time travel appears pretty impractical based on this book. Maybe it's mathematically possible to fold time and punch wormholes in it in theory, but I don't think NASA or Greyhound is going to be offering trips back and forth through our lives. However, it's always intriguing to read what really smart people come up with, because they make a lot of it seem so obvious, even though I could never come up with it on my own.

Rating: 1
Summary: Garbage
Comment: It is incredible how they trust blindly in EVERY aspect of General Relativity. Space-time warpages and singularities happens ONLY in mathematics! There is no way out. It is funny how Scientific American gives credibility to such a kind of science-fiction. It is time to stop lying to the public!

Hawking and Thorne, grasp it: Time-travel is physically IMPOSSIBLE.

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