Read more
Informationen zum Autor Jenny Randles Klappentext IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME....Once widely considered an impossibility--the stuff of science fiction novels--time travel may finally be achieved in the twenty-first century. In Breaking the Time Barrier, bestselling author Jenny Randles reveals the nature of recent, breakthrough experiments that are turning this fantasy into reality.The race to build the first time machine is a fascinating saga that began about a century ago, when scientists such as Marconi and Edison and Einstein carried out research aimed at producing a working time machine. Today, physicists are conducting remarkable experiments that involve slowing the passage of information, freezing light, and breaking the speed of light--and thus the time barrier. In the 1960s we had the "space race." Today, there is a "time race" involving an underground community of working scientists who are increasingly convinced that a time machine of some sort is finally possible.Here, Randles explores the often riveting motives of the people involved in this quest (including a host of sincere, if sometimes misguided amateurs), the consequences for society should time travel become a part of everyday life, and what evidence might indicate that it has already become reality. For, if time travel is going to happen--and some Russian scientists already claim to have achieved it in a lab--then its effects may already be apparent. Chapter One: Pre-1895: The Dawn of Time To run any race you must know the course. To build a time machine you need to know what time is, just as you cannot fly without knowing the nature of air and aerodynamics. But understanding time is easier said than done. A celebrated Zen riddle asks, when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around, does it make a sound? This riddle can probably be applied to time. Would there be such a thing as minutes or years if no human beings could experience their passage? This seems to be a very odd suggestion, but the nature of time is very strange. Indeed, it is a real puzzle for science. It forms an inescapable part of our lives yet cannot easily be defined. It has fascinated mankind since we first learned to communicate, but there have been no clear answers about its nature. Indeed, some great minds have argued that its measurement is purely a human invention. Greek philosopher Zeno showed the problem when he tried to define a small unit of distance. To catch a tardy tortoise you can easily run twice as fast and halve the distance between you and the animal in a set period of time. But if you keep on halving the distance that gap will never equal zero, because half of something is always going to be a finite number, however small. But if there is always a gap between you and the tortoise it is impossible to ever catch up with it -- a conclusion that we know to be absurd by practical experience, even if we have never actually chased a tortoise. A faster runner will always catch a slower one, sooner or later. Time is intimately involved in this discussion -- since speed is a measure of distance traveled in a set time. So we can apply Zeno's thinking and divide a second into smaller and smaller pieces. If we keep breaking down this gap, making the units half as long as the previous one, then there will always be a finite length for any moment that we can measure. But if that moment has any size at all, then part of it must be in what we think of as the past and part of it in the future because it will take time to pass any mark or point. We call this tiniest measurable moment "now" and say that it separates past from future. Yet how can it separate anything if parts of it lie simultaneously in both past and future? Arguments still rage over the meaning of this curious riddle. Is it a fallacious argument -- like the one concerning the tortoise? After all, it may look impossible to catch up with the a...
