Overview
- An entertaining whirlwind tour of conceivable time travel scenarios?
- Delivers solid science about the prospects for time machines
- Explores familiar and more imaginative possibilities for travel in the 4th dimension
- Calls upon some 50 significant science fiction texts
Part of the book series: Science and Fiction (SCIFICT)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Spacetime Time
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Front Matter
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A Thought Experiment Is Not a Theory
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality—time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.
Reviews
“If you have a fascination for the subject, then the book is for you. … He believes it would be favourable to a time traveller to remain detached and observe from a distance.” (John Silvester, Odyssey The e-Magazine of the British Interplanetary Society, Issue 66, 2020)
“The Time Machine Hypothesis captures the wonder that so many readers of sf feel when they first learn that scientists in the real world actually do study the possibility of time travel and that there may be something to these fantastic stories after all.” (James Hamby, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 47, November, 2020)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Damien Broderick is an award-winning novelist, critic and theorist who holds a doctorate in the comparative discourse analysis of the sciences and humanities. He has published 75 books, some of them collaboratively or as editor. An Australian, he currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. His latest book is Consciousness and Science Fiction, also from Springer.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Time Machine Hypothesis
Book Subtitle: Extreme Science Meets Science Fiction
Authors: Damien Broderick
Series Title: Science and Fiction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16178-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Physics and Astronomy, Physics and Astronomy (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-16177-4Published: 17 July 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-16178-1Published: 12 July 2019
Series ISSN: 2197-1188
Series E-ISSN: 2197-1196
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 243
Topics: Popular Science in Physics, Theoretical, Mathematical and Computational Physics, Popular Science in Literature, Fiction, History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics