Time Machine Tales: The Science Fiction Adventures and Philosophical Puzzles of Time Travel
About this audiobook
This audiobook contains a broad overview of time travel in science fiction, along with a detailed examination of the philosophical implications of time travel. The emphasis of this book is now on the philosophical and on science fiction, rather than on physics, as in the author’s earlier books on the subject. In that spirit there are, for example, no tech notes filled with algebra, integrals, and differential equations, as there are in the first and second editions of Time Machines.
Writing about time travel is, today, a respectable business. It hasn’t always been so. After all, time travel, prima facie, appears to violate a fundamental law of nature; every effect has a cause, with the cause occurring before the effect. Time travel to the past, however, seems to allow, indeed to demand, backwards causation, with an effect (the time traveler emerging into the past as he exits from his time machine) occurring before its cause (the time traveler pushing the start button on his machine’s control panel to start his trip backward through time).
Time Machine Tales includes new discussions of the advances by physicists and philosophers that have appeared since the publication of Time Machines in 1999, examples of which are the chapters on time travel paradoxes. Those chapters have been brought up to date with the latest philosophical thinking on the paradoxes.
About the author
Paul J. Nahin has taught at Harvey Mudd College, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Universities of New Hampshire (where he is now professor emeritus of electrical engineering) and Virginia. Nahin has published a couple of dozen short science fiction stories in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Omni, and Twilight Zone magazines, and has written fourteen books on mathematics and physics. He has given invited talks on mathematics at Bowdoin College, the Claremont Graduate School, the University of Tennessee, and Caltech, has appeared on National Public Radio’s Science Friday as well as on New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Front Porch, and advised Boston’s WGBH Public Television’s NOVA on the script for their time travel episode. He gave the invited Sampson Lectures for 2011 in Mathematics at Bates College.
John Lescault has been an audiobook narrator for over twenty-five years and has recorded more than three hundred titles, spanning works of fiction and nonfiction. He has also provided narration for NPR’s Performance Today, Nightline, and Deaf Mosaic. He has appeared with the National Symphony Orchestra as Beethoven and Dvorak at the Kennedy Center.
