Overview
- Blends adventure, love, suspense, magic, pathos, and mystery in a rich scientific novel full of unexpected twists and turns
- Offers new scientific ideas on interplanetary voyages and time travel
- Suggests an alternative theory on antimatter which holds that traveling in time is possible
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Science and Fiction (SCIFICT)
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Table of contents (18 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This riveting scientific novel combines adventure, love, suspense, magic, pathos, and mystery in a carefully woven plot that is full of unexpected twists and turns. The author is an astrophysicist who has developed an alternative theory, which holds that traveling in time is possible. Time is, in fact, the real protagonist of the novel and of the intrigue surrounding the attempt to seize the secret of Time’s other arrow, the dark arrow normally hidden from us, which points back at our past. The underlying premise is that antimatter is nothing more than common matter moving backwards in time. The justification for this interpretation has been with us for some time, “hiding in plain sight” within Maxwell’s equations, the Lorentz transformations, the CPT theorem of relativistic quantum mechanics, and Feynman diagrams. While the science underlying the narrative is explained whenever necessary, sometimes with the aid of simple mathematical formulas, these scientific asides account for only a small part of the book, which will appeal to a wide audience, including readers who are far from being science buffs.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Massimo Villata is an Italian astrophysicist and science fiction writer. He graduated from the University of Turin with honors in physics and at the end of his PhD won a competition at the Observatory of Turin, where he still works today. His main field of research is extragalactic astronomy. He specializes in the study of blazars (extremely energetic and variable active galactic nuclei), and since 2000 he has been President of the International Consortium of Optical and Radio Telescopes (WEBT – Whole Earth Blazar Telescope). He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and also employs his knoweldge in the writing of science fiction novels under the pseudonym Max Wells, inspired by the famous Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. He terms this genre “the scientific novel”.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Dark Arrow of Time
Book Subtitle: A Scientific Novel
Authors: Massimo Villata
Series Title: Science and Fiction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-67485-8Published: 27 November 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-67486-5Published: 17 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2197-1188
Series E-ISSN: 2197-1196
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: V, 163
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Popular Science in Physics, Elementary Particles, Quantum Field Theory, Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics, Space Exploration and Astronautics), Fiction