Time Warps

How well-founded are our ‘commonsense’ ideas about time? Does time ‘really’ flow inexorably forward? Or is it ‘all in the mind’?

Starting out from the everyday experience of time, the rhythms of day and night and the seasons, and the International Date Line, John Gribbin goes on to the deeper mysteries of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, the implications of black holes and space-time tunnels, and the concept of parallel universes — the present best scientific knowledge about the nature of time.

But the story doesn't stop there, for the realization that these latest scientific theories are strikingly reminiscent of older philosophical ideas about time, from both East and West, leads us to consider also the mysteries of precognition, reincarnation and dream telepathy.

Throughout the book the running theme is summed up by the question ‘is time travel possible?’ The answer we end up with, dramatically coming from an author with a research background in the frontiers of astrophysics and relativity theory, is an unequivocal ‘yes’. Timewarps exist, offering new and startling insights into the whole nature of reality.