This book explores the idea of time travel from the first account in English literature to the latest theories of physicists such as Kip Thorne and Igor Novikov. This very readable work covers a variety of topics including: the history of time travel in fiction; the fundamental scientific concepts of time, spacetime, and the fourth dimension; the speculations of Einstein, Richard Feynman, Kurt Goedel, and others; time travel paradoxes, and much more.
Paul Nahin was born in California, and did all his schooling there (Brea-Olinda High 1958, Stanford BS 1962, Caltech MS 1963, and - as a Howard Hughes Staff Doctoral Fellow - UC/Irvine PhD 1972). (The lovely lady in the photo is his wife of 49 years, Patricia.) He worked as a digital logic designer and radar systems engineer in the Southern California aerospace industry until 1971, when he started his academic career. He has taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Universities of New Hampshire (where he is now emeritus professor of electrical engineering) and Virginia. In between and here-and-there he spent a post-doctoral year at the Naval Research Laboratory, and a summer and a year at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Defense Analyses as a weapon systems analyst, all in Washington, DC. He has published a couple dozen short science fiction stories in ANALOG, OMNI, and TWILIGHT ZONE magazines, and has written 11 books on mathematics and physics, published by IEEE Press, Springer, and the university presses of Johns Hopkins and Princeton. His new book NUMBER-CRUNCHING was published by Princeton in September 2011, and Johns Hopkins recently reprinted his 1997 book TIME TRAVEL FOR WRITERS. Princeton has just released the corrected paperback edition of his 2006 book DR. EULER'S FABULOUS FORMULA. He has just completed (for Princeton) his next book, ELECTRIC LOGIC, that treats the works of George Boole and Claude Shannon and how they created the information age (to be published 2012). Two of his other Princeton math books, CHASES & ESCAPES and DUELLING IDIOTS, are scheduled to be reprinted in 2012, each with a new Preface (the one in CHASES includes an analysis of the B-29 Enola Gay's escape maneuver from the blast wave of the atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima). He has given invited talks on mathematics at Bowdoin College, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tennessee, and Caltech, has appeared on National Public Radio's "Science Friday" show, and advised Boston's WGBH Public Television's "Nova" program on the script for their time travel episode. He recently gave the invited Sampson Lectures for 2011 in Mathematics at Bates College (Lewiston, Maine). When he isn't writing he is battling evil-doers on his Xbox360S and, now and then, he even wins. (And he gives a big thumb's up to Valve's terrific PORTAL 2, as well as to the oldie-but-still-goodie original Xbox greats RETURN TO CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN:TIDES OF WAR and THIEF:DEADLY SHADOWS!)
FINALLY - readers have written asking about the solutions manual to THE SCIENCE OF RADIO. I now have the pdf file (3 MB) for the solutions, and if you write to me I'll send you a copy. paul.nahin@unh.edu
