The Future of Spacetime [Hardcover]

Stephen William Hawking (Author), Kip S. Thorne (Author), Igor Novikov (Author), Timothy Ferris (Author), Alan Lightman (Author), Richard Price (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

Our Minds Tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patterns of nature, aimed at readers who share their fascination with the deepest mysteries of the universe.
-- Richard Price: An Introduction to Spacetime Physics
-- Stephen Hawking: Chronology Protection
-- Igor Novikov: Can We Change the Past?
-- Kip S. Thorne: Speculations about the Future
-- Timothy Ferris: On the Popularization of Science
-- Alan Lightman: The Physicist as Novelist

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American

Put Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and Alan Lightman in a room together, and I would imagine that the intellectual sparks would fly lively and thick. The five essays collected in this book are adapted from those sparks, talks given at the California Institute of Technology in June 2000 to honor the 60th birthday of physicist Kip Thorne. If there is a unifying theme to the essays, it is the possibility of time travel, one of Thorne's obsessions as a theoretician of general relativity and, of course, a topic of perennial popular interest. None of the authors was paid for his contribution, and royalties will go to a Caltech scholarship fund in Thorne's name. Theoretical physicist Igor Novikov starts by asking, "Can we change the past?" He shows how curious foldings and warpings of spacetime apparently allow the possibility of traveling back in time and considers the so-called grandfather paradox: What if I travel back in time and kill my grandfather? Then, logically, I would never have been born to make my journey into the past. Novikov argues that the laws of nature would prevent such logical paradoxes from happening. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the world's most famous theorist of spacetime. He is less sanguine than Novikov that time travel is possible, except on the scale of individual atomic particles, which is not of much use for science-fiction fantasies. If Hawking's take on the physics is correct, grandfather is doubly safe. Thorne uses his commanding presence at the heart of the book to address the question implicit in the title: How will our understanding of spacetime evolve in the near future, theoretically and experimentally? The final two essays, by writers Timothy Ferris and Alan Lightman, though excellent in themselves, have nothing directly to do with the topic at hand. Ferris considers how science is communicated to the general public, and Lightman muses on relations between science and art. It all adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The word "hodgepodge" comes to mind, and the fact that the editors decided the book needed a long preparatory introduction (longer than all but one of the five contributions) and a puffed-up glossary suggests that the problems were apparent from the beginning. Anyone who wants the skinny on time travel and the future of spacetime would do well to go directly to Thorne's excellent popular book Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (W. W. Norton, 1994). Still, there is a terrific story lurking among the disparate parts of the present volume, but readers will have to dig it out for themselves. I would suggest skipping the introduction and going straight to Lightman's piece on science and art. He was trained as a physicist and has transformed himself into a successful novelist, so he knows both sides of which he speaks. He takes us to the heart of the creative process and shows us what physicists and novelists have in common. For one thing, they both make up stories, and they both want their stories to be true. Ferris tells us why scientific story making is essential to a healthy and free body politic. "Technologically, intellectually, and even politically, science resides somewhere near the center of our culture, by which I mean the society of all those persons who value their freedom, honor their responsibilities, appreciate their ignorance, and are willing to keep learning," he writes. Now go to the essays by Novikov and Hawking and watch two outrageously clever minds at play in the fields of knowledge and ignorance. They take Einstein's supreme story--his theory of gravity and spacetime, called general relativity--and make delightful riffs on the theme. What if? they ask. They agree on this: even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible. Finally, turn to Thorne's central essay, where it all comes together. We have in Einstein's legacy a fabulously inventive story: black holes, time travel, ripples in spacetime, the big bang--stuff any novelist would have been proud to invent. But the story must be put to the experimental test, and so far general relativity has passed muster. Soon new tests of a most exquisite sensitivity will come on line, and these are the focus of Thorne's crystal-ball gazing. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO)--three huge instruments at Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La.--and similar devices in Italy, Germany and Japan promise the possibility of detecting gravitational waves rippling through spacetime from colossal events (imploding stars, colliding black holes, even the big bang itself) unfolding across the universe. Then, sometime around 2010 if physicists get their way, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be launched into space. Three intercommunicating spacecraft arrayed across millions of kilometers of the solar system, bobbing like corks in water as gravitational waves roll by, will map in fine detail the bending of space, the warping of time, and the whirl of spacetime around distant black holes. LISA will detect ripples in spacetime as small as one hundredth the diameter of an atom. What a story! What a test! This is story making that lifts the human spirit out of our sometimes petty terrestrial concerns and places us among the stars.

Chet Raymo is emeritus professor at Stonehill College in Massachusetts and a science columnist for the Boston Globe.

From Booklist

Caltech physicist Kip Thorne's sixtieth birthday was celebrated in essay form by fellow relativists interested not only in space-time but also in explaining it to nonscientists. Collected in this volume, these pieces feature Thorne's predictions about imminent discoveries of space-time gravity waves; Stephen Hawking's sporting arguments against certain of Thorne's ideas about black holes and wormholes; and two views by popular writers (Timothy Ferris and Alan Lightman) on making such subjects accessible. If accessibility is the book's underlying task, its first two essays may well be the most effective. In one, a physicist equips the reader with the elements of space-time concepts and terminology, such as world lines, rotational transformation, and frames of reference. The other examines whether Einstein's equations allow for the existence of time machines by examining the paradoxes about causality that arise if they do. Exuding a lighthearted tone, these pieces will appeal especially to those who enjoyed Thorne's Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (1994). Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393020223
• ISBN-13: 978-0393020229
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #765,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five fascinating pieces, November 18, 2002

By 

Robert Adler "science writer & author" (Santa Rosa, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Future of Spacetime (Hardcover)

I'm usually wary of books that are collections of essays, especially essays by several different people. Like many such books, The Future of Spacetime is something of a hodgepodge. Still, when I saw that the authors included Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Timothy Ferris, Alan Lightman and Igor Novikov, it seemed to be worth taking a look. That decision was very well rewarded.

The five essays in The Future of Spacetime were first presented as talks for a celebration of the 60th birthday of Kip Thorne, a leading theoretical physicist. Three of them, plus a brief introduction by physicist Richard Price, deal with relativity, and especially with the possibility and implications of "closed timelike curves" in spacetime--time travel for short. In addition, Tim Ferris writes insightfully about why it is so important for scientists and science writers to do a better job of informing people about scientific theories and discoveries, but even more importantly clueing them in about how science works. He points out that it may take 1,000 years for a concept to penetrate to the core of society. Since modern science is at best 500 years old, there's lots left to be accomplished. Alan Lightman, who is both a physicist and a novelist, beautifully describes the creative process that lies at the heart of both science and creative writing. Scientists and novelists, he argues, are simply seeking different kinds of truths.

The three physics essays are gems. Each sheds at least some light on the nature of spacetime, on the possibility (or impossibility, or improbability) of time machines and time travel, and on intimately related issues such as causality and free will. Novikov, for example, concludes that the future can influence the past, but not in such a way as to erase or change an event that has already happened. Hawking argues that time travel is happening all the time at the quantum level, but that nature would protect against an attempt to use a time machine to send a macroscopic object, such as a human being, back in time. I was particularly impressed by Kip Thorne's essay, in which he makes a series of predictions concerning what physicists and cosmologists will discover in the next thirty years. He explains the importance of the gravity-wave detectors that are now starting to come on line. They promise to let us read the gravitational signals of such primordal events as the collision of black holes and even the big bang itself. It is as fascinating to get to piggyback on how these great minds think as it is to read their conclusions.

In short, The Future of Spacetime is a bit of a salad, but an extremely delicious and satisfying one.

Robert E. Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, 2002).

59 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Future of Spacetime, May 25, 2002

By 

T. C. Brayshaw (Kerrville, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Future of Spacetime (Hardcover)

It is easy to recommend this book. The five authors of the articles in the book are all prominent in the field os cosmology and its interpretation. The editor, Richard Price, presents a good introduction of the subject of spacetime. It is not for the novice, but it is good. The sections by Hawking and Novikov are part of symposium in honor Kip Thorn's sixtieth burthday. Ferris and Lightman are excellent popularizers of difficult physics. The best part of this book is it shows that physics is fun. All of the authors obviously know each other and enjoy each other's company. This book is almost like sitting around a dinner table and overhearing the authors needle each other but still explain the basis of the universe as we understand it.

This is the best book I have read on this subject in years.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Spacetime = Matter + Energy, August 7, 2002

By 

Wojciech Langer (Toronto, Ontario) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Future of Spacetime (Hardcover)

We have 4 scientific essays here, about space, gravity and possibilities of traveling in time, many drawings, figures and pictures and only two math equations.
However, this writings are, in my opinion, for "advanced" laymen, who collect, cherish and have fully digested at least a "Brief History of Time" or other popular science books dealing with cosmology, quantum and relativity.

Introduction (essay number one) by Richard Price presents known facts about relativity, but author uses innovative way to teach us about different types of transformation between reference frames. With elegance he introduces concept of spacetime diagrams and worldliness. Good beginning.

Then comes Igor Novikov: his essay straightforward and easy to read. Supported by well designed drawings it explains how the wormhole can work and why it is rather impossible to kill your grandfather by traveling to the past.
If you have his book "River of Time", you will know what I am talking about.

Third essay by Stephen Hawking is rather hardly digestible highbrow dissertation, with plenty of inward shortcuts. Drawings and figures are not clear and without indications to which part of the text they belong. This part of the book is least meritorious, but... help can be found later.

The most impressive essay by Kip Thorne creates the hub of the book. Kip Thorne has proposed Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in 1984 and is a cofounder of this project. He also believes in potential of a String Theory.
Thorne's current writing is an excellent addition to his famous book "Black Holes and Time Warps" published 8 years ago. He predicts now many interesting discoveries related to LIGO/LISA gravity waves project. If successful, this project will greatly contribute to new theory connecting general relativity with quantum fields and will help to solve mysteries of neutron stars and singularities. History of Thorne's bets with Hawking is funny and adds flavor to this chapter.

End of the book contains Glossary (whole 17 pages of it) and I read it with a big pleasure since this helped me to understand Hawking's text.

Last two essays about skills of popular writing in science were also interesting but of a less importance to me...