Time Travel and Warp Drives
Allen Everett and Thomas Roman
How to Build a Time Machine
Brian Clegg
As any fan of Doctor Who or Marty
McFly can attest, few areas of science
excite quite as much public interest as
time travel. Step into a police box or a
DeLorean, flip a switch, and you’re off
to change the world — or perhaps save it.
Would-be time travelers now have
two new relevant guides to the promise of time machines. Which you might
prefer depends on just how much you
want to understand the mathematics
underlying a machine like the TARDIS.
Surprisingly, time travel is not that
difficult in principle; nothing in the
known laws of physics prohibits it. The
problem is with today’s technology.
Take Ronald Mallett, the University
of Connecticut physicist who has been
trying to build a time machine to visit
Relics: Travels in Nature’s
Time Machine
Piotr Naskrecki
Some species are survival champs, able
to persist for millions of years virtually
unchanged. Known as “relicts,” their
long lineages give
biologists a glimpse
of what life was like
before humans could
observe it.
Naskrecki, an
entomologist and photographer, titled
the book Relics rather than Relicts as
a respectful nod to his subjects’ status
as objects of antiquity. Part travelog,
part natural history, the book chroni-
cles his journeys from rain forest to
his father, who died when Mallett was
10 years old. Using a ring laser, he hopes
to generate “closed timelike curves” in
which particles can return to the past.
Mallett has realized that his machine
could take him no further than the time
when it was switched on — making a
visit with his late father impossible.
Everett and Roman are physicists
who have probed the theoretical possibilities of time travel. Their expertise
shines as they talk the reader through
the underlying math of time travel,
much like an introductory college
course. These are writers who don’t
shy away from introducing Lorentz
transformations in the third chapter.
In contrast, Clegg’s book is more like
chatting with fellow students after a
professorial lecture. Its breezy summary
glosses over some of the finer points
of time travel, but allows an excellent
entry point for readers less willing to
slog through grim mathematical details.
Fascination with time travel is itself
timeless; witness the recent excitement
over neutrinos possibly moving faster
than light. If true, this would also permit
the particles to travel backward in time.
If that happens, you’ll need a handy reference guide. — Alexandra Witze
Everett and Roman: Univ. of Chicago,
268 p., 2011, $30; Clegg: St. Martin’s,
320 p., 2011, $25.99
Wyoming sagebrush plain in search
of these relics. Naskrecki’s writing is
sincere, enlightening and sometimes
genuinely funny, as when he describes
his harrowing adventure with bungee
jumping in New Zealand or how he
received a nasty chomp from a New
Guinean possum while a biologist
friend stood by and assured him, “these
possums never bite!”
But the photographs are the real draw
here. Naskrecki gets up close to plants
and animals to capture them in vivid,
colorful detail. Turning the pages is like
turning over rocks in the garden — what
crawls out can be startling, or bizarre,
but always fascinating. — Allison Bohac
Super Sneaky Uses
for Everyday Things
Cy Tymony
Put your engineering
skills to the test with
this guide to building
gadgets from common
household items. Andrews McMeel,
2011, 145 p., $12.99
The Fossil Chronicles
Dean Falk
A scientist who studies
brain evolution exam-
ines fossil finds — the
Taung child and hob-
bits — that are chang-
ing views of human evolution. Univ. of
California, 2011, 259 p., $34.95
Frozen Planet
Alastair Fothergill and
Vanessa Berlowitz
Journey with four polar
denizens — polar bear,
Arctic fox, Adélie penguin and wan-
dering albatross — through seasonal
changes in this companion to a BBC
television series. Firefly Books, 2011,
312 p., $39.95
Galileo’s Muse
Mark A. Peterson
A physicist and math-
ematician argues
that Renaissance art
spurred the scientific
revolution that laid the
foundations of modern science.
Harvard Univ., 2011, 336 p., $28.95
An Engineer’s Alphabet
Henry Petroski
A selection of quota-
tions, anecdotes and
other engineering
trivia is arranged into
a mini-encyclopedia
of the profession. Cambridge Univ.,
2011, 360 p., $21.99
How to Order To order these books or others,
visit www.sciencenews.org/bookshelf. A click on
a book’s title will transfer you to Amazon.com.
