This book provides a general overview of time travel in science fiction, as well as a systematic study of time travel’s metaphysical implications. Rather than physics, as in the author’s previous books on the topic, the focus of this book is now on philosophy and science fiction. There are no Tech Notes loaded with algebra or integrals in this spirit.After all, time travel seems to break a basic natural law: every effect has a cause, and the cause occurs before the effect.Backwards causation appears to be enabled, if not needed, through time travel to the past, with an impact (the time traveller emerging into the past as he exits his time machine) occurring before its trigger (the time traveller pressing the start button on his machine’s control panel to begin his trip backward through time).The chapters on time travel paradoxes, for example, are examples of new discussions of advances by physicists and philosophers that have arisen since the publication of TIME MACHINES in 1999. Those chapters have been updated to reflect the most recent philosophical thought on paradoxes.

Abouth The Time Machine Tales Writer 

 

Paul Nahin was born in California and completed his education there (Brea-Olinda High School 1958, Stanford BS 1962, Caltech MS 1963, and UC/Irvine PhD 1972, all in electrical engineering, as a Howard Hughes Staff Doctoral Fellow).He has taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Universities of New Hampshire and Virginia (where he is currently an emeritus professor of electrical engineering).

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