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Days of the future past.(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
A review of How to Build a Time Machine, by Paul Davies, Viking, 2002, 132 pages.

"Where exactly are the past andfuture?'

PAUL DAVIES NEEDS ONLY 23 PAGES to explain how to conjure up a device capable of transporting its users into the past. Yet he can't answer the most basic questions about the nature of time. It makes you wonder if the past he's talking about is the one that already happened.

With 19 books to his name, the renowned physicist knows how to impart complex ideas economically and persuasively. Davies leaves no room for doubt that time is intimately bound up with space. Time is stretched, or "dilated," not only by velocity through space but also by dose proximity to massive objects. Einstein's theory of light, special relativity, and his theory of gravity, general relativity, both demonstrate the existence of spacetime.

Muons are subatomic particles known to decay in about two microseconds, or two-millionths of a second. As researchers at Switzerland's CERN laboratory demonstrated in 1966, when muons are circulated at 99.7% the speed of light, they last twelve times longer, exacfly the amount predicted in Einstein's special theory of relativity. But the effect doesn't require extremely high speeds. In 1971 Joe Hafele and Richard Keating measured differences between atomic clocks on the ground and others flown around the world in conventional aircraft.

Though it's not much by...

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