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Now, in the vein of his guided tour of black holes, Pickover offers Time: A Traveler's Guide. "This book," he tells us in the preface, "is mostly about the science of time travel and touches only briefly on mysticism. However, the line between science and mysticism sometimes grows thin." He adds that one of his goals is to help the reader "understand that time travel is possible." What the book is really about is Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly those aspects that touch on time.
Sir Arthur Eddington, the great Quaker physicist who invested considerable effort in bringing relativity to both scientific and popular audiences, was once asked if it were true that only three people in the world understood relativity. After some reflection, Eddington is said to have answered, "I understand it, and certainly Einstein understands it, but I am trying to think of who the third person might be." (Eddington led the expedition that took the photographs mentioned in the opening of this essay.)
Pickover's book is only the latest in a long series of attempts to explain relativity to nonscientists. One of the first was Einstein's own Relativity, The Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition (1921); the most famous is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), which has sold millions of copies. What sets Pickover's apart from the rest is his offbeat approach to the topic and his speculative exposition near the end, as some of the more shaky theoretical elements of the theory become incarnated as a working time machine.
But it would be a mistake to overlook the significance of what Pickover is doing: he is taking a body of rather difficult scientific material and making it both interesting and accessible. Readers who find conventional science exposition dry and lifeless will stay with Pickover to see if his characters actually do get to travel through time; readers eager to understand Einstein's very difficult theory will benefit from the excellent exposition.
Time: A Traveler's Guide opens with an alien named Mr. Veil playing the bassoon. We gather from the dialogue that he is an assistant of sorts to you, the reader. You are a scientist who delights in explaining relativity to your friends. In chapter 2 we are introduced to another assistant, a young woman named Constantia Gladkowska, to whom you are attracted. The majority of the book is an ongoing conversation between you, Mr. Veil, and Constantia as you explain the "physics of time travel" to them and prepare to travel back in time to watch Chopin perform. Along the way the reader learns about Mr. Veil's strange characteristics and Constantia's surprising origins (and her increasingly less insistent rejections of your amorous advances), not to mention a variety of details about life in the year 2063.
Each chapter has two parts: a conversation, generally bizarre but always interesting, between the trio mentioned above; and a conclusion, generally entitled "The Science Behind the Science Fiction," in which the relevant science is presented in a conventional manner. The conversational setting works well in allowing for some of the more curious bits of the science to get some extra attention in response to questions and objections; it also provides a lively setting for the exposition. The conclusion is complementary to the conversation, repeating and reinforcing what is often very difficult material.
Pickover's exposition of relativity begins in the traditional way, pointing out that simultaneity is an ambiguous concept because of the finite speed of light. Two separated events at locations A and B that appear to occur simultaneously to an observer midway between them will not appear to be simultaneous to observers at other locations. An observer close to B, for example, will see that event first and event A later. An observer at A will experience the two events in the opposite order. This is due to the fact that light does not travel infinitely fast but takes some time to get from the event to the observer.
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