Time Travel books, anyone?

After reading a few Wikipedia articles on time travel paradoxes and a little of the general physics and maths, (and watching a lot of Doctor Who, I guess...) I would love to find a good book on time travel. The only one I've found, via Amazon and LT's recommendation machine, is Time Travel in Einstein's Universe by J. Richard Gott. It seems to have good reviews, but if anyone could recommend other titles, I'd be very, very grateful.

I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about Ronald Mallett's book, Time Traveler, which gives a personal perspective on the idea of time travel. There's a fascinating and moving story about Mallett in the second half of this episode of This American Life.

i'd recommend a book on relativity. the special theory extends Galileo's ideas into a concept of absolute spacetime.

the ideas of timelike and spacelike seperation are more or less saying something about causality. the lightcone diagram is helpful!

I would recommend the new book The New Time Travelers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics by David Toomey. Great survey of the latest science on this topic.

Depending on your math background, you may want to check out some books on relativity. I'm thinking of Relativity Visualized or Relativity Explained or similar. There are also undergrad texts by Rindler and Resnick that are good. While not devoted to the subject of time travel specifically, they'll have a good intro to the basic concepts of space-time and the light cone, and well as curved spacetime and singularities. If you're really ambitious, there's always Gravitation by Thorne, Archibald and Wheeler.

How to build a time machine, perhaps?

I assume you mean non-fiction? The only book on time travel I have in my library is The Time Machine, I think.

You people are brilliant, thank you so much!

How about a tagmash for (non-fiction, time travel)?

I read Asymmetries in Time by Paul Horwich some time ago. I think it's got some chapters on time travel too but as I remember it, it mainly focuses on entropy.

I haven't catalogued it yet, (still looking and learning about LT) but
look at "How to build a time machine" by Paul Davies

Well, I the definitive historical review still seems to be "Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics and Science Fiction", Paul J. Nahin, ISBN 1-56396-371-X

It's kind of an academic history of how the idea of time travel has appeared through the years. Not exactly a book you'd read from cover to cover in one go, but a good resource for the bookshelf to dip into from time to time.

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I bought Time Travel in Einstein's Universe, flicked through it, read a few pages, found it a bit tedious, and never went back to it. Perhaps I didn't give it a proper go, but I'm flicking through it again now, it is seems a bit "blah" to me. A bit unexciting. But perhaps someone who is new to the content might find it more interesting. I'm already familiar with the content, so I was hoping to find something novel in the writing, layout, diagrams or exposition, and nothing like that really jumped out at me.

Kip S. Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps" ISBN 0-333-63969-3
has a "Wormholes and Time Machines" chapter (ch.14, pp.483-521), but it's only one chapter in a big book that's otherwise mostly about black holes.
I'd take issue with a couple of Thorne's conclusions, but then again, wormhole and time machine theory isn't exactly a subject with a lot of accompanying physical evidence! This is definitely "What If" territory.

There's probably one or two others (there's a popular genre of "science of star trek"-type books now), but those are the ones that spring to mind. Or you could always try typing "chronology protection" or "closed causal loop" into Google Scholar
http://scholar.google.com/
, and see what science papers turn up!

There's a free online archive of recent science papers (lodged by the authors) at
http://www.arXiv.org/
, which might be worth a guddle if you are really bored.

Or there's always science fiction ... Theorists who are interested in this sort of thing sometimes get hired as consultants for tv shows or start writing their own novels as an outlet, as a way of exploring these sorts of ideas in public without being ridiculed by their colleagues.

And you could always go back and revisit H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine"!
It still stands up pretty well, I think.

The book: 'fabric of reality' gives over a good chapter to time travel. I understood the subject a lot better after that. I'd recommend the book as a whole. It's a lot about quantum mechanics and inter-disciplinary convergence. It was also a real eye opener for me. Exciting, lucid and readable.

Physycs of Impossible http://www.librarything.com/work/3429501
And,... Just for fun, The End of Eternity http://www.librarything.com/work/21149

Given that this thread is about time travel, I have no qualms affirming raggedprince's post from 3.5 years ago. Fabric of Reality has some fairly unique things to say. I highly recommend it.

Hi. I've recently started reading The new time travelers : a journey to the frontiers of physics by David Toomey for the second time, and just re-read the section about "the Jinn of time machines". I found it even more fascinating than the first time I read it (2007) - possibly because I understood it a bit better the second time around. This part of the book discusses a 1992 paper by Lossev and Novikov which sounds really intriguing.

The original academic paper itself is available online (though it's not free - http://iopscience.iop.org/0264-9381/9/10/014). I wasn't sure if it would be suitable for a lay reader (even a technically minded one).

I would be very interested to know if there are any other more recent books than Toomey's which either look at any new developments in these theories (about how self-consistent closed time loops may be permissible within the laws of nature, despite the interesting issues they create) or simply have a longer discussion than Toomey on this particular area of time machine theory.

If there aren't any, then I'll probably just buy the paper online - in which case if anyone knows if it's cheaper for me to locate a back copy of the Journal of Classical and Quantum Gravity than buy the single article (£20+VAT apparently), please let me know.

Thanks.

Before buying that article, you could check out this freely-available preprint of a shorter follow-up by Novikov, to see whether you would find this literature comprehensible:
http://ccdb5fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?200038305

I have not read Toomey's book (or any other on the subject), but I suspect he provides a still-comprehensive summary of this work. The INSPIRE physics literature database does not record any citations of either the article you found or the shorter one linked above over the past ~20 years, which is not promising. That said, an earlier and shorter article on the same topic by Novikov does have a few dozen citations:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.45.1989

If you remain interested in any of these articles, I work for an institution that has subscriptions to both Class. Quantum Grav. and Phys. Rev., so if you want, I can provide copies for you (and the journals would probably prefer the additional download from an institutional subscriber rather than £20 direct from you).

David

Thank you for your helpful response.

I did find the pre-print understandable and it helped me decide that I probably wouldn't get any more insights from the main paper than I got from Toomey - the original book had a lot more helpful commentary.

Your check of the INSPIRE database was also helpful for two reasons - one that it got me checking the arXiv server for related topics, which I hadn't thought of before; and also, as you suggested, the lack of citations since 1992 doesn't seem promising.

I appreciate your offer of a copy of the article, but I think I'll manage without. It looks like there are plenty of papers on arXiv with Closed Timelike Curves in the title, so I'll have a look through those for any similar ideas.

The Toomey book is a good summary of recent history of several aspects of time travel theory, and it includes several areas of research which were speculated on by one scientist in one year, then refuted by another scientist a couple of years later. So maybe that's what happened with this one.

Regards

Matt