Historical research guide · 0933 · 2011

Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space

Allen Everett · Thomas Roman

In one minute

Allen Everett and Thomas Roman are two of the physicists who actually did the calculations on warp drives, wormholes and negative energy, and this is the book where they explain the whole subject to everyone else. It uses no mathematics beyond high school algebra. They start where relativity starts — clocks, reference frames, the light cone — then separate two things people usually run together. Travelling forward in time is ordinary physics: move fast, and you arrive in the future, which is what the twin paradox describes. Travelling backward is a different animal, and its deep surprise is that in relativity it is the same problem as travelling faster than light. From there the book surveys the real proposals: wormholes, warp bubbles, rotating cylinders, cosmic strings — each a way to beat the light barrier and each, for the same reason, a candidate time machine. Then it faces the two hard parts squarely: the exotic matter these designs demand, and the paradoxes they would create.

Connection

This is chapter 4’s reader-friendly companion, written by researchers who published in the field: the same wormholes, warp bubbles and negative-energy constraints the site treats through primary papers, laid out in order and in plain language. For chapter 13 it is a model of the honest ledger — it names what the mathematics allows, what the energy conditions cost, and where the argument is still open.

From the source

Forward and backward time travel are fundamentally different problems. Moving forward is ordinary relativity — the effect the twin paradox describes — while moving backward is bound up with something else entirely: there is a theoretical connection between travelling backward in time and travelling faster than the speed of light, and the book treats them as one subject for that reason.Chapters 5 and 6, and the publisher’s description
Wormholes and warp bubbles are the two principal routes general relativity offers for beating the light barrier, and the book presents them together with the observation that each is also a possible time machine.Chapter 9, Wormholes and Warp Bubbles: Beating the Light Barrier and Possible Time Machines
Every one of these designs runs on exotic matter — material with negative energy density — and the book gives it a chapter of its own rather than a footnote. This is the authors’ own research territory: Roman’s published work with Ford derives the quantum inequalities that bound how much negative energy a quantum field may carry and for how long.Chapter 11, on exotic matter
The paradoxes are worked through rather than waved away — the grandfather paradox and its relatives, self-consistency, and the parallel-worlds response are given a full chapter, and Hawking’s chronology-protection result is set out in an appendix.Chapter 10 and Appendix 6
The survey is wider than wormholes and warp bubbles: rotating cylinders and cosmic strings are treated as their own class of proposal, and the light pipe of the Mallett time machine is analysed in an appendix.Chapter 13, Cylinders and Strings; Appendix 7
The whole case is made without mathematics beyond high school algebra, and with derivations of the Galilean and Lorentz transformations, the invariance of the spacetime interval and time dilation kept in appendices for readers who want them — the authors’ working answer to whether this physics can be taught to a general audience without diluting it.Publisher’s description; Appendices 1 through 5

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https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226225005.001.0001

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

PUBLICATION. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Cloth ISBN 978-0-226-22498-5, paper ISBN 978-0-226-04548-1, electronic ISBN 978-0-226-22500-5; the DOI on the record, 10.7208/chicago/9780226225005.001.0001, is the publisher’s identifier for the electronic edition and resolves to the BiblioVault landing page for the book. The corpus skeleton recorded the kind as paper; it is a book, and the kind has been corrected here. WHAT WAS READ. The book itself was not read for this page. The description, the maturity tags and the claim locators below were written from the publisher’s own record — the About This Book description, the author biographies, the endorsements and the complete table of contents, retrieved from the BiblioVault page the DOI resolves to — together with the two Everett and Roman research papers already held on this site. Chapter numbers used as locators are the book’s own, from that table of contents; no wording of the book is reproduced anywhere on this page. AUTHORS as described by the publisher: Allen Everett, professor emeritus of physics at Tufts University; Thomas Roman, professor in the Mathematical Sciences Department at Central Connecticut State University. Both taught undergraduate courses in time-travel physics. STRUCTURE. Fourteen chapters and seven appendices, moving from clocks and reference frames through special relativity, the light cone, forward and backward time travel, the arrow of time, general relativity, wormholes and warp bubbles, the paradoxes, exotic matter, rotating cylinders and cosmic strings; the appendices include Hawking’s theorem and the light pipe in the Mallett time machine. The publisher notes that the argument uses no mathematics beyond high school algebra, and maintains a companion site of video demonstrations. Kip Thorne’s endorsement on the publisher’s page names it the book he sends people to when they ask whether time travel or rapid interstellar travel by spacewarps is possible.

How to cite it

Allen Everett, Thomas Roman (2011) Time Travel and Warp Drives: A Scientific Guide to Shortcuts through Time and Space doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226225005.001.0001

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