Time by Clifford Pickover, Oxford University Press,
拢16.99/$25, ISBN 0195120426
鈥淣OTHING,鈥� said essayist Charles Lamb, 鈥減uzzles me more than time and space.鈥�
Then he spoilt it by adding: 鈥淎nd yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think
about them.鈥� The two cultures bifurcated long ago, I fear. For those whose
tastes incline less towards Lamb than towards Dolly the sheep, time is an
irresistible lure. Now the irrepressible and prolific Clifford Pickover gives us
Time: A Traveler鈥檚 Guide. He romps joyously through at least four
perfectly respectable scientific routes to time travel: relativity, particle
physics, quantum mechanics and psychology.
Relativity provides a counter-intuitive link between space and time, the
famous 鈥渢win paradox鈥�. Combine this innocent curiosity with a wormhole, and you
find yourself with a short-circuit in time. If the White Rabbit in
Alice in Wonderland had owned a wormhole instead of a rabbit hole,
he wouldn鈥檛 have worried about being late. He would have simply popped through
it into his own past.
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With quantum mechanics you can tunnel through time. You can also avoid the
paradoxes you thereby create (such as going back in time and shooting yourself
so that you weren鈥檛 alive to go back, so you were alive after all, so鈥�) by
switching to a parallel world.
Psychology shows that we live in our own past: everything that we experience
actually happened a split second ago. So there鈥檚 no need for fancy technology to
travel into the past: that鈥檚 where we are anyway. Time will be more
palatable to those of us who don鈥檛 mind our science dressed up in a bit of
fiction than to those who prefer it straight. The cameo appearances of Chopin鈥檚
music puzzled me because they seemed gratuitous. But I think I鈥檝e figured it
out: if you want to play good music, you have to beat time.