By J. Richard
Gott
Subtitled The Physical Possibilities of Travel
Through Time, this book starts off well but soon collapses into
a black hole of dense physics, boring theories and repetitious statistics.
Most of it isn’t hard to follow, but I couldn’t deduce
whether the author was trying to reach a mass audience or publish a
thorough scientific paper. The first chapter is a good introduction,
with Gott comparing various time travel theories to their counterparts
in time travel fiction and movies. Interesting points are sprinkled
throughout, but the book gets progressively worse. The penultimate
chapter proposes that the universe could have created itself, but has
to explain every universe origin theory in order to get there. These
are not uninteresting, but are not time travel, as the book promises.
And the last chapter merely uses statistics to predict future events,
a vague plan at best even if the author didn’t keep repeating
his examples.