Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
May 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phyed..35..213a&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 35, Issue 3, pp. 213 (2000).
Physics
Physics Education
Scientific paper
Black Holes Wormholes & Time Machines is a welcome addition to the collection of books written with the purpose of explaining interesting aspects of 20th century physics to a general audience. Throughout the book it is clear that the author, Jim Al-Khalili, must be a wonderful public lecturer. His style, informal yet precise, is just what is needed to convey these difficult concepts to an audience of non-specialists.
As the title might suggest, the author has chosen to specifically address certain topics that have been introduced into the public imagination through the mass media (primarily movies and television). He does an admirable job, both of connecting to these media-generated perceptions (with frequent references, for example, to Star Trek) and of correcting them (or at least placing them in the proper context) insofar as the current knowledge of physics is concerned. What emerges is a well thought-out journey through the theories of special and general relativity as well as appropriate aspects of cosmology.
The book eschews the standard, historical approach, which would introduce special relativity, followed by general relativity, and finally some cosmology. Rather, it begins with the promise and the paradoxes of time travel (exemplified in the movie The Terminator) and then winds its way carefully through all of the physics relevant to the possible existence of a time machine. Along the way, the reader is introduced to aspects of special and general relativity, including higher dimensional space-times and geometries. The astrophysical and cosmological journey visits the Big Bang, open and closed universes, and black holes.
By meticulously piecing together the puzzle of time (and along the way meeting such oddities as parallel universes and wormholes) the author comes to the climactic chapter entitled `How to Build a Time Machine'. There may be readers who are disappointed that this ultimate question is unraveled, not so much like an instruction manual (as its title might suggest), but rather as a series of speculations emphasizing what is not forbidden according to our current knowledge in these fields. Still, I doubt that many will be put off after reading a book that so lucidly connects some of the most esoteric topics in all of science.
Perhaps the best thing the book does is to paint an accurate image of science as an endeavour in which the answers (and even the questions) are constantly changing in the light of new knowledge. Unlike A Brief History of Time or The First Three Minutes, this is a book that can be understood and truly appreciated by any fan of Star Trek or Back to the Future. All that is needed is the desire to explore a bit of the physics behind the images created in those stories. The book would make a great gift for such a person. And, it would also be useful as supplemental reading in a course on physics or modern physics aimed at non-science majors.
Mellema Steven H.
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