San Antonio College Library

"No single breakthrough in twentieth-century physics (with the possible exception of quantum mechanics) changed our view of the world more than that of Einstein's discovery of relativity. The notions that the flow of time is not a constant, that the mass of an object depends on its velocity, and that the speed of light is a constant no matter what the motion of the observer, at first seemed shocking to scientists and laymen alike. But, as Feynman...

Sir Arthur C. Clarke is a living legend, a writer whose name has been synonymous with science fiction for more than fifty years. An indomitable believer in human and scientific potential, Clarke is a genuine visionary. If Clarke has an heir among today's science fiction writers, it is award-winning author Stephen Baxter. In each of his acclaimed novels, Baxter has demonstrated dazzling gifts of imagination and intellect, along with a rare ability...

Historian Dominic Sandbrook explores the most innovative and imaginative of all genres - science fiction. He is joined by leading writers and film-makers, who tell the inside story of their best-known works. In this first episode, Dominic looks at science fiction's enduring fascination with outer space, from Jules Verne's pioneering 19th-century vision of a voyage to the moon to the galaxy far, far away of Star Wars. Along the way we learn what Star...

"What is time? What does it mean for time to pass? Is it possible to travel in time? What is the difference between the past and future? Until the work of Newton, these questions were purely topics of philosophical speculation. Since then we've learned a great deal about time, and its study has moved from a subject of philosophical reflection to instead became part of the subject matter of physics. This Very Short Introduction introduces readers to...

This volume brings together world leaders in cosmology, particle physics, quantum gravity, mathematics, philosophy and theology, to provide fresh insights into the deep structure of space and time. In one essay, Andrew Taylor explains the evidence for dark matter and dark energy.

Makes the ideas and theories of modern physics easily understood by anyone, from researchers to students to general science enthusiasts. Taking you on a journey through space and time, author Jim Al-Khalili covers some of the most fascinating topics in physics today, including space warps, the Big Bang, time travel, and parallel universes. Professor Al-Khalili explains often complex scientific concepts in simple, nontechnical terms and imparts an...

"Horizon's Time Trip is a thrilling journey deep into the strangeness of cutting-edge physics - a place where beautiful, baffling ideas are sometimes indistinguishable from the utterly crazy"--Publisher Includes interviews with Dr. Frank Tipler, who proposes time travel via spinning structures in space, and Dr. Richard Gott, leading advocate of cosmic strings as time travel hubs.

"The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to reconstruct the evolution of our changing conceptions of time in the light of scientific discoveries. It will adopt a new perspective and organize the material around three central themes, which run through our history of time reckoning: cosmology and regularity; stasis and flux; symmetry and asymmetry. It is the physical criteria that humans choose - relativistic effects and time-symmetric equations...

"In this book, Lawrence Sklar demonstrates the interdependence of science and philosophy by examining a number of crucial problems on the nature of space and time--problems that require for their resolution the resources of philosophy and of physics. The overall issues explored are our knowledge of the geometry of the world, the existence of spacetime as an entity over and above the material objects of the world, the relation between temporal order...