Sean Carroll has a marvellous talent for explaining complex issues in a comprehensible way. The current book is Volume 1 of his series The Biggest Ideas in the Universe, devoted to Space, Time and Motion. This book (and the two volumes to follow) is written for people who are interested in the conceptual ideas, supported by some mathematics. He does not shy away from equations because he believes that even non-professionals can learn serious science rather than being satisfied with facile analogies. It is at times a slow read because it is a book about modern physics. But for everyone who wishes to learn more about space, time and motion, according to the theory of relativity, this book offers a bridge between popular science and the mathematical models of working physicists.
'Sean Carroll has achieved something I thought impossible: a bridge between popular science and the mathematical universe of working physicists. Magnificent!'
Brian Clegg, author of Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World
Immense, strange and infinite, the world of modern physics often feels impenetrable to the undiscerning eye - a jumble of muons, gluons and quarks, impossible to explain without several degrees and a research position at CERN.
But it doesn't have to be this way!
Allow world-renowned theoretical physicist and bestselling author Sean Carroll to guide you through the biggest ideas in the…
Nahin tells the story of time travelling machines, both from the fictional, philosophical and the scientific point of view. He explains such issues as time travel into the future and the past and the paradoxes involved. The narrative is accompanied by numerous entertaining illustrations. Mathematical details are confined to Tech Notes at the end. Readers can pick and choose the chapters in which they are most interested. It is in my opinion still one of the most comprehensive books about time travel; an excellent spring board for further exploration of this fascinating topic.
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.
This is an entertaining book about the psychology rather than the physics of time, written by an informed BBC journalist. There is a clear difference between clock time and mental time. Hammond recounts numerous experiments, which psychologists have undertaken to help understand what they call 'mind time'. It is an easy read, full of fascinating stories about how time is perceived in various circumstances and under different conditions. The whole book concentrates on how 'the mind creates sensations of time'; how age, fear and illness can all influence our psychological conception of time. The reader learns why time seems to run slowly when we are young and why it seems to speed up as we get older.
Winner of the 2013 British Psychological Society's Book Awards Popular Science category.
Time rules our lives, but how much do we really understand it?
In Time Warped, we meet the people willing to go to extreme lengths to find out. They travel to Costa Rica to find out if hummingbirds can sense the passage of time, they walk towards the edge of a stairwell blindfolded and one man spends two months in an ice cave in total darkness - all in an attempt to fathom the tricks time can play on our minds.
The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to reconstruct the evolution of our changing conceptions of time in the light of scientific discoveries. It adopts a new perspective; the material is organised around three central themes, which run through our history of time reckoning: cosmology and regularity; stasis and flux; symmetry and asymmetry. It is the physical criteria that humans choose – relativistic effects and time-symmetric equations or dynamic-kinematic effects and asymmetric conditions – that establish our views on the nature of time. This book defends a dynamic rather than the more popular static view of time. It defends the 'reality' of time against the prevailing view of the 'unreality' of time. It combines philosophical views about time (idealism, realism, relationism) with physical theories about time (classical physics, the theory of relativity and thermodynamics).
