The Future of Spacetime

Where the science of black holes, gravitational waves, and time travel will likely lead us, as reported by spacetime's most important theoreticians and observers.

Our minds tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patterns of nature, aimed at readers who share their fascination with the deepest mysteries of the universe.

• Richard Price: "An Introduction to Spacetime Physics"
• Stephen Hawking: "Chronology Protection"
• Igor Novikov: "Can We Change the Past?"
• Kip S. Thorne: "Speculations about the Future"
• Timothy Ferris: "On the Popularization of Science"
• Alan Lightman: "The Physicist as Novelist"

Stephen W. Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the bestselling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. Thorne was an executive producer for the 2014 film Interstellar. For “bridging the worlds of science and the humanities,” Thorne received Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. He lives in Pasadena, California.

Igor Novikov is a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and is a professor of astrophysics at the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen.

Timothy Ferris is a science writer and has held professorships at four universities, teaching subjects as diverse as astronomy, philosophy, English, journalism, and history. He is currently an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley.

Alan Lightman is a physicist and writer. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.