About Time

Australian physicist and popular science writer Davies (God and the New Physics) takes readers on a mind-expanding journey as he explores the bizarre properties of Einstein's relative, flexible time; modern cosmology's assertion that time originated billions of years ago in the Big Bang; recent efforts to topple that theory; and paradoxes opened up by the prospect of time travel, which, according to Davies, is a scientific possibility. Making technical concepts accessible, Davies surveys attempts by Stephen Hawking, Murray Gell-Mann and others to reconcile Einstein's ideas with quantum physics. Among the time-bending phenomena he investigates are black holes, collapsed stars that may abolish time at their centers; kaons, subatomic particles attuned to the expansion of the universe; and antiworlds, hypothetical neighboring regions of space-time in which time flows backward. The author's speculations on causality, God and eternity make this a rewarding tour de force for nonspecialists. Illustrations. (Mar.)