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Index
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The “laws” of time travel
Outline of the book
CHAPTER 1 Time Travel in the Pulps
The pulps and time travel
The special fascination of time-travel stories
Summary
CHAPTER 2 Special Relativity and Time Travel to the Future
Einstein’s discovery of the relativity of time
The paradox of the twins
Summary
CHAPTER 3 Time Travel to the Past
World-lines, light cones, and closed timelike curves
Causality
Antimatter and time travel
Why Wells’s time machine couldn’t work
Summary
CHAPTER 4 Hyperspace
Folded space-time and wormholes
Space as the fourth dimension
Summary
CHAPTER 5 Time as the Fourth Dimension
Circular, linear, and helical time
The direction of time
Entropy as an arrow of time
Summary
CHAPTER 6 The Block Universe
Conservation of mass-energy in time travel
Free will and fatalism
Summary
CHAPTER 7 When General Relativity Made Time Travel Honest
Meeting yourself in the past
Einstein’s response to Gödel
Summary
CHAPTER 8 Paradoxes: Changing the Past, Causal Loops, and Sex
The grandfather paradox
The Time Police
Principle of self-consistency
Sexual paradoxes
Summary
CHAPTER 9 Time Machines that Physicists Have Already ‘Invented’
Rotating cylinders
Wormholes
Exotic matter, energy conditions, and gravity time dilation
Cauchy and chronology horizons
Cosmic strings
Summary
CHAPTER 10 Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Into the Past
Tachyons and special relativity
The reinterpretation principle and antitelephones
The FTL signed message puzzle
The space-time geometry of FTL
Summary
CHAPTER 11 Quantum Gravity, Splitting Universes, and Time Machines
The uncertainty principle
Splitting realities
Chronology protection
The Back Reaction
Multiple time tracks and parallel worlds
Summary
CHAPTER 12 Reading the Physics Literature for Story Ideas
Glossary of Selected Terms and Concepts
Bibliography
Index
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