About Time: Einstein's Unfinished RevolutionAn elegant, witty, and engaging exploration of the riddle of time, which examines the consequences of Einstein's theory of relativity and offers startling suggestions about what recent research may reveal. The eternal questions of science and religion were profoundly recast by Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications that time can be warped by motion and gravitation, and that it cannot be meaningfully divided into past, present, and future. In About Time, Paul Davies discusses the big bang theory, chaos theory, and the recent discovery that the universe appears to be younger than some of the objects in it, concluding that Einstein's theory provides only an incomplete understanding of the nature of time. Davies explores unanswered questions such as: * Does the universe have a beginning and an end? * Is the passage of time merely an illusion? * Is it possible to travel backward -- or forward -- in time? About Time weaves physics and metaphysics in a provocative contemplation of time and the universe. |
Contents
Prologue | 13 |
A Very Brief History of Time | 21 |
Time for a Change | 44 |
Interlude | 65 |
Timewarps | 78 |
Black Holes Gateways to the End of Time | 104 |
The Beginning of Time When Exactly Was | 126 |
Einsteins Greatest Triumph? | 146 |
The Arrow of Time | 196 |
Backwards in Time | 219 |
Time Travel Fact or Fantasy? | 233 |
But What Time Is It Now? | 252 |
Experimenting with Time | 265 |
The Unfinished Revolution | 279 |
Notes | 287 |
Bibliography | 293 |
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Common terms and phrases
Ann's antimatter arrow astronomers atom backwards Betty Betty's big bang big crunch billion black hole brain Chapter clock COBE collapse consciousness cosmic cosmologists dark matter decay detector dipole distance duration Earth Eddington effect Einstein electric electron energy epoch equations existence expansion experiment experimenter fact faster than light flow force future fuzziness galaxies gravitational field happen Hawking Hubble human idea imaginary infinite kaon kilometers per second laws light cones light-years loop mathematical measure motion nature neutron objects observer origin particle past path philosophers photon physical processes physicists possible problem QSOs quantum mechanics quantum physics quark radiation radio reality red shift reversed rocket scale Schwarzschild radius scientists sense signal photons singularity solution sort space spacetime speed of light star Stephen Hawking symmetry tachyons temporal theory of relativity time-reversed timewarp tion trillion universe Wheeler world line wormhole