Breaking the Time Barrier: The Race to Build the First Time Machine - Softcover

Randles, Jenny

 
9780743492591: Breaking the Time Barrier: The Race to Build the First Time Machine
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743492595 ISBN 13: 9780743492591
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME....
Once widely considered an impossibility--the stuff of science fiction novels--time travel may finally be achieved in the twenty-first century. In Breaking the Time Barrier, bestselling author Jenny Randles reveals the nature of recent, breakthrough experiments that are turning this fantasy into reality.
The race to build the first time machine is a fascinating saga that began about a century ago, when scientists such as Marconi and Edison and Einstein carried out research aimed at producing a working time machine. Today, physicists are conducting remarkable experiments that involve slowing the passage of information, freezing light, and breaking the speed of light--and thus the time barrier. In the 1960s we had the "space race." Today, there is a "time race" involving an underground community of working scientists who are increasingly convinced that a time machine of some sort is finally possible.
Here, Randles explores the often riveting motives of the people involved in this quest (including a host of sincere, if sometimes misguided amateurs), the consequences for society should time travel become a part of everyday life, and what evidence might indicate that it has already become reality. For, if time travel is going to happen--and some Russian scientists already claim to have achieved it in a lab--then its effects may already be apparent.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jenny Randles, who specialized in physics and geology at university, has sold more than one and a half million copies of her fifty published books. She has written articles for such journals as New Scientist, and lives in North Wales.

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Chapter One: Pre-1895: The Dawn of Time

To run any race you must know the course. To build a time machine you need to know what time is, just as you cannot fly without knowing the nature of air and aerodynamics. But understanding time is easier said than done.

A celebrated Zen riddle asks, when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound? This riddle can probably be applied to time. Would there be such a thing as minutes or years if no human beings could experience their passage?

This seems to be a very odd suggestion, but the nature of time is very strange. Indeed, it is a real puzzle for science. It forms an inescapable part of our lives yet cannot easily be defined. It has fascinated mankind since we first learned to communicate, but there have been no clear answers about its nature. Indeed, some great minds have argued that its measurement is purely a human invention.

Greek philosopher Zeno showed the problem when he tried to define a small unit of distance. To catch a tardy tortoise you can easily run twice as fast and halve the distance between you and the animal in a set period of time. But if you keep on halving the distance that gap will never equal zero, because half of something is always going to be a finite number, however small. But if there is always a gap between you and the tortoise it is impossible to ever catch up with it -- a conclusion that we know to be absurd by practical experience, even if we have never actually chased a tortoise. A faster runner will always catch a slower one, sooner or later.

Time is intimately involved in this discussion -- since speed is a measure of distance traveled in a set time. So we can apply Zeno's thinking and divide a second into smaller and smaller pieces. If we keep breaking down this gap, making the units half as long as the previous one, then there will always be a finite length for any moment that we can measure. But if that moment has any size at all, then part of it must be in what we think of as the past and part of it in the future because it will take time to pass any mark or point. We call this tiniest measurable moment "now" and say that it separates past from future. Yet how can it separate anything if parts of it lie simultaneously in both past and future?

Arguments still rage over the meaning of this curious riddle. Is it a fallacious argument -- like the one concerning the tortoise? After all, it may look impossible to catch up with the animal but clearly we know that it is not, so the riddle is flawed in its execution. Others suggest that there may be something even more profound in this realization about time first made 2,500 years ago. Is the reason that we cannot clearly identify a moment that is neither past nor future a hint that past and future are a product of human imagination? Is the universe fundamentally timeless and is the distinction between past and future just an illusion brought about by our limited capacity to visualize the cosmos?

Virtually every human society that developed a culture has speculated in similarly bemused ways about the nature of time. The Greeks defined it as a measurement of intervals, which could be of long or short duration. As far back as 350 BC Aristotle had realized the implications of the Zeno paradox. But he had no better answer, and this choice to divide time into basic units, mirroring many mundane things that form a sequence, such as the human heartbeat, allowed for the creation of sundials, water clocks, and eventually mechanical clocks. We gained a feeling of mastery over time by recording it with increasing skill and so it came to be a powerful element in our lives.

St. Augustine, many centuries later, was a little bolder and dared to ask the question -- what was God doing before He created the universe? If time was born along with the matter in the universe, as the Bible suggests, then was there any time before that instant, or is God somehow also to be considered timeless? Intriguingly, this question largely foresees modern scientific concerns about how the cosmos was first created -- the subject of intense debate between physicists and astronomers.

There are two basic theories. One is the so-called Steady State idea that the universe has always existed in its present form, perhaps even made by God. British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle championed this theory though he also invented the name given to the rival theory -- the Big Bang. He hoped that such a daft name would ridicule this alternative concept that says that everything in the universe emerged long ago from one single, tiny point that exploded outward and has gone on expanding across billions of years. But the Big Bang theory has gathered strong evidential support from modern science and is the widely accepted view today. Hoyle was proved wrong, but ironically, his name is attached to the theory that he so detested -- the ultimate insult. Physics has had to conclude that time somehow began when the universe started to expand and before that instant there was neither matter nor time.

However, it was by no means clear to Renaissance thinkers that time emerged from the birth of the universe. Nor did they even accept that it was an essential requirement to make the laws of nature work. Indeed, the more that science began to comprehend these rules, the more it became aware that time, in our experience moving from the past into the future on a perpetual one-way journey, is not a prerequisite. In fact, virtually every law of physics seemed to work just as well if time flows backwards, moving from the future into the past. This realization enhanced suspicions that time might be a convenience of mind that made us see things as we do rather than a necessity of nature.

Different societies have other concepts of time and it is a mistake to imagine that our modern Western perspective, dominated by timetables and cell phones, is the only way to see things. We have grown up with this one version of reality but there are other, equally valid interpretations. The dreamtime, for instance, is an aboriginal concept still widespread in native Australian culture. It could not be further removed from twenty-first-century thinking and is extremely difficult to even translate. But, in essence, it regards past, present, and future as coexisting in a timeless void or hidden dimension beyond the range of our normal perception. For that reason, in dreams and other states of consciousness where we lose touch with the normal sense of awareness, we enter what is in effect another reality where things that once were, still are, and where things that will someday be, have already become.

Time spans the infinity of the cosmos and the tiniest moment that we can record. But it may not even exist. No wonder it is such a riddle. But it is important to follow the manner with which science has attempted to come to terms with time, piecing together its nature through a series of grand theories and experiments. For these are the stepping-stones upon which today's plans to build a time machine are all based.

Throughout the Renaissance, as scientists began to understand the nature of the physical world, there was an uneasy truce between what mattered to most human beings and the things that interested physicists. Galileo and Newton showed that all the planets of the solar system, including the Earth, rotate around the sun in a wonderful cosmic ballet. Their paths could be mathematically defined, to the point that Newton even argued that God created the universe as a vast clockwork machine that allowed everything that would ever happen to be mapped out into perpetuity. God had wound up the machinations of the cosmos and let it loose for mankind to discover its properties. By doing so we could make stunning calculations far into the future, because the speeds and times of the orbits of these...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743492595
ISBN 13 
9780743492591
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande