Breaking the Time Barrier

The Race to Build the First Time Machine

Jenny Randles

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Year: 2005
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781416516552
• Subtopic: Physics
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Preface: The Day that Time Stood Still
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PrefaceThe Day that Time Stood Still
• IntroductionThe Race
• Pre-1895: The Dawn of Time
• 1895: The First Time Traveler
• 1905: Relatively Speaking
• 1919: Bending Space and Time
• 1926: Other Dimensions
• 1935: Bridges Across Time
• 1937: Travel into the Future
• 1949: Time Travel into the Past
• 1963: Black Holes
• 1973: Back from the Future
• 1983: The Time Mirror
• 1984: Entangled Time
• 1988: Wormholes
• 1992: Chronology Protection
• 1994: Strings Attached
• 1996: Cheating Gravity
• 1997: Many Worlds, Many Timelines
• 1998: Quantum Foam
• 1999: Kaku’s Time Machine
• 2000: Faster than Light
• 2001: Handshakes from the Future
• 2002: Twisting Time
• 2003: Beam Me Up
• 2004: Chrononauts
• Epilogue: Beyond Time’s Last Frontier
• Appendix: Does Evidence of Time Travel Already Exist?
• References
• Index