An elegant, witty, and engaging exploration of the riddle of time, which examines the consequences of Einstein's theory of relativity and offers startling suggestions about what recent research may reveal.
The eternal questions of science and religion were profoundly recast by Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications that time can be warped by motion and gravitation, and that it cannot be meaningfully divided into past, present, and future.
In About Time, Paul Davies discusses the big bang theory, chaos theory, and the recent discovery that the universe appears to be younger than some of the objects in it, concluding that Einstein's theory provides only an incomplete understanding of the nature of time. Davies explores unanswered questions such as:
* Does the universe have a beginning and an end?
* Is the passage of time merely an illusion?
* Is it possible to travel backward -- or forward -- in time?
About Time weaves physics and metaphysics in a provocative contemplation of time and the universe

Paul Davies taught high school science for 23 years and currently drives buses to pay the bills. He is on the pastoral team of the Ancient Wells Healing Rooms in Adelaide, Australia, which gives him the chance to "play" from time to time - his term for ministering in the power of the Lord. Raised a Sydney Anglican, he discovered God was "still doing stuff" in the '80s and has been pursuing more of the Lord's presence and power ever since. He lives in Adelaide with three of his kids and dog (who is a terrible conversationalist).

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1: A Very Brief History of Time

Whose time is it anyway?

The quest for eternity

Escape from time

Cyclic worlds and the eternal return

Newton's time and the clockwork universe

Einstein's time

Is the universe dying?

The return of the eternal return

The start of it all

It happens when it happens

Chapter 2: Time for a Change

A gift from heaven

Goodbye to the ether

A timely solution

Interlude

Stretching time

The puzzle of the twins

Goodbye to the present

Time is money

Timescape

Chapter 3: Timewarps

The light barrier

Perpetual motion and the uphill struggle

Why time runs faster in space

The clock in the box

The best clock in the universe

The echo that arrived late

Going up in the world

Chapter 4: Black Holes: Gateways to the End of Time

Warp factor infinity

A dark mystery

Penetrating the magic circle

A singular problem

Beyond the end of time

Are they really out there?

Chapter 5: The Beginning of Time: When Exactly Was It?

The great clock in the sky

The big bang, and what happened before it

Older than the universe?

Einstein's greatest mistake

Two-timing the cosmos

Chapter 6: Einstein's Greatest Triumph?

The handwriting of God

Did the big bang ever happen?

What's a few billion years among friends?

A repulsive problem

The loitering universe

Chapter 7: Quantum Time

Time to tunnel

Watched kettles 166

Erasing the past

Spooky signals and psychic particles

Faster than light?

The time vanishes!

Chapter 8: Imaginary Time

The two cultures revisited

How time got started

The Hattie-Hawking theory

Imaginary clocks

Chapter 9. The Arrow of Time

Catching the wave

Signals from the future

A matter of time reversal

The particle that can tell the time

The lopsided universe

Chapter 10: Backwards in Time

Into reverse

Thinking backwards

Antiworlds

Winding the clock back

Hawking's greatest mistake
A time for everybody

Chapter 11: Time Travel: Fact or Fantasy?

Signaling the past

Visiting the past

Black-hole time machines

Wormholes and strings

Paradox
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Chapter 12: But What Time Is It Now?

Can time really flow?

The myth of passage

Does the arrow of time fly?

Why now?

Chapter 13: Experimenting with Time

How long does the present last?

Now you see it, now you don't

Filling in time

Subjective time

The back door to our minds

Chapter 14: The Unfinished Revolution

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index