BOOKS Time and a word – or more
Andrew May examines two very different approaches to the complex subject of time travel
10 Short Lessons in Time Travel
Brian Clegg
Michael O’Mara Books 2021
Hb, 186 pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781789292916 Time Travel
The Science and Science Fiction Nick Redfern
Visible Ink Press 2021
Pb, 332 pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781578597239
About the only common factor between these two books, apart from having “time travel” in the title, is that I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. I’m an established fan of both authors, owning a total of 16 books by them. But they’re on opposite sides of my living room, Brian Clegg on the science shelf and Nick Redfern filed under forteana.
And therein lies the difference between these two books. Redfern focuses on the fascinating but largely anecdotal evidence for anomalistic time travel in human history, while Clegg approaches the subject from the equally fascinating standpoint of modern physics.
It’s not Clegg’s first outing in this area. Ten years ago, in How to Build a Time Machine, he produced as perfect a booklength account of the serious science of time travel as you’ll find anywhere. His new book has a more lightweight feel, with plentiful boxouts and other magazine-style page furniture, including a list of the top five time traveller destinations from the age of dinosaurs to the JFK assassination.
Among the many large-font pull quotes, FT readers will be delighted to see one from our own Jenny Randles: “Distort time and you open the barriers that prevent us from travelling to the future or the past.” That’s in the context of Einstein’s theory of relativity, thanks to which many physicists believe that – in principle at least – time travel ought to be possible.
Turning to practicalities, Clegg discusses several possible ways to create a “closed time-like curve”, which is science-speak for a time machine. These range from Ron Mallett’s laboratory-scale ring laser proposal to vast cosmic constructs like Tipler cylinders and wormholes. But there’s much less detail on these topics than in
Clegg’s previous book – because, I suspect, this one is aimed at readers with a shorter attention span.
Several of the chapters – or “lessons”, to adopt the book’s central conceit – take wideranging detours into surrounding territory, from space drives and suspended animation to braintwisting philosophical paradoxes.
An endemic problem with modern physics, as far as science communicators are concerned, is that it’s almost exclusively concerned either with invisibly small subatomic particles, or with unimaginably vast cosmic scales.
Time travel, insofar as it’s allowed within the known laws of physics, is no exception. This makes it difficult to describe in a way that’s easily relatable to the ordinary reader. Fortunately this is something Clegg is extremely good at, and the result is a relaxed and entertaining read on a potentially difficult and abstruse topic.
For Nick Redfern, on the other hand, finding a human angle is no problem at all. After a few cursory pages on wormholes and suchlike at the start, his book is essentially about ordinary people having extraordinary experiences. He covers a wide range of fortean-type topics, from precognitive dreams to timeslips like the famous MoberlyJourdain incident at Versailles. His approach is fortean too, not pushing any particular theory but just presenting the data and leaving readers to make up their own minds.
Speaking for myself, it seems fairly obvious that – if there’s anything to these stories at all – they have more to do with the psychic or paranormal world than with wormholes or closed timelike curves.
As for more explicit claims of time travel, Redfern devotes a couple of chapters to the intriguing history of the Philadelphia experiment – the fascination of which lies, as much as anything, in the way the claims grew and developed over time. There’s also a chapter on the Internet’s most famous time traveller, John Titor, who (20 years on) seems to have come from a completely different “future” than the one we’re actually heading towards.
Just like Clegg, Redfern has a tendency to wander around his core subject, finding loose connections in such cosily familiar fortean topics as Bigfoot, crop circles and the Roswell incident. But I’m not complaining – it all adds to the entertainment value! Clegg ★★★★
Redfern ★★★★