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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How Not to Build a Time Machine?: In Search of the Nearest Yesterday

How Not to Build a Time Machine?: In Search of the Nearest Yesterday

Adler, Kal

Paperback

PhilosophyAstronomy & Space

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798192803189
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.54
Height: 0.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
There is a respectable way to begin a book about time travel. It involves Einstein. There is also a less respectable way. It involves a screwdriver.

Treat time travel as an engineering problem and something awkward happens immediately. Before you can ask how to get to 17 June 1985, you have to ask where it is - and yesterday, it turns out, has no address. It isn't far away. It may be nowhere at all.

This is a book about what that question does to everything downstream of it.

It goes through the real physics: the experiments that prove we already travel into the future, the solutions to Einstein's equations that genuinely permit travel into the past, and the reasons almost every physicist believes nature forbids them anyway. It takes the grandfather paradox seriously enough to credit the man who solved it in 1991, and honest enough to admit what his solution costs.

Then it follows the argument sideways. If a date is really a description of a *state*, the destination need not lie behind us. Something sufficiently like it might exist somewhere else - which turns a problem about time into a problem about possibility, search, and, unexpectedly, about what we would owe the people living at the other end.

You will not get a time machine. You will get a parts list, an honest account of which parts are missing, and one idea the author is fairly sure nobody has had before.

Written by someone with no standing to tell you what nature permits, and no professional obligation to stop asking.

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