Toomey brings the brilliant minds of Kip Thorne, Carl Sagan, and Steven Hawking to life as they confront temporal paradoxes and questions of free will, probe black holes and time warps, conceive of parallel universes, and imagine a civilization with the power to send signals into the past.

The story of physicists' quest to answer a mind-boggling question: How can we travel through time? Since H. G. Wells' 1895 classic The Time Machine, readers of science fiction have puzzled over the paradoxes of time travel. What would happen if a time traveler tried to change history? Would some force or law of nature prevent him? Or would his action produce a "new" history, branching away from the original?In the last decade of the twentieth century a group of theoretical physicists at the California Institute of Technology undertook a serious investigation of the possibility of pastward time travel, inspiring a serious and sustained study that engaged more than thirty physicists working at universities and institutes around the world.Many of the figures involved are familiar: Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne; others are names known mostly to physicists. These are the new time travelers, and this is the story of their work--a profoundly human endeavor marked by advances, retreats, and no small share of surprises. It is a fantastic journey to the frontiers of physics. Some images in the ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

About the possibility of time traveling based on several specialized works, including those of Nicholas J. J. Smith ("Time Travel"), William Grey (”Troubles with Time Travel”), Ulrich Meyer (”Explaining causal loops”), Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (”Presentists should believe in time-travel”), Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin ("Time Travel and Modern Physics"), and David Lewis (“The Paradoxes of Time Travel”). The article begins with an Introduction in which I make a short presentation of the time travel, and continues with a History of the concept of time travel, main physical aspects of time travel, including backward time travel in the past in general relativity and quantum physics, and time travel in the future, then a presentation of the Grandfather paradox that is approached in almost all specialized works, followed by a section dedicated to the Philosophy of time travel, and a section in which I analyze Causal loops for time travel. I finish my work with Conclusions, in which I sustain my personal opinions on the time travel, and the Bibliography on which the work is based. Keywords: time travel, grandfather paradox, causal loops, temporal paradoxes, causality CONTENTS Abstract Introduction History of the concept of time travel Grandfather paradox The philosophy of time travel Causal loops Conclusions Bibliography Notes DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17802.31680

Time travel is metaphysically possible. Nikk Effingham contends that arguments for the impossibility of time travel are not sound. Focusing mainly on the Grandfather Paradox, Effingham explores the ramifications of taking this view, discusses issues in probability and decision theory, and considers the potential dangers of travelling in time.

The topic of time travel provides tantalizing conundrums to consider for STEM experts and sci-fi creators alike. Most scientists and mathematicians agree that time travel by humans is probably impossible, yet they have not been able to offer conclusive proof. This book describes how the very nature of time remains a fascinating and complex subject, whether viewed from the perspective of Einstein's relativity or the nanoscale realm of quantum physics. Readers will recognize notable fictional works in literature, film, and television in which time travel serves as a useful plot device as well as a means of examining human history and contemporary social issues.

This book argues that time travel fiction is a narrative “laboratory,” a setting for thought experiments in which essential theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are represented in the form of literal devices and plots. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, the book links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from evolutionary biology in the late 1800s, through relativity and quantum physics in the mid–20th century, to more recent “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg shows how increasing awareness of new scientific models leads to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which evolves from a “vehicle” used chiefly for sociopolitical commentary into a psychological and narratological device capable of exploring with great sophistication the temporal structure and significance of subjects, viewpoints, and historical events. The book covers work by well-known time travel writers such as H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, as well as pulp fiction writers of the 1920s through the 1940s, popular and avant-garde postwar science fiction, television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and current cinema. Literature, film, and TV are read alongside theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, and Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.