He’s struggling with a complex experiment using tachyons to send a message to the past. There, a young physicist named Gordon Bernstein is at work in a nuclear resonance laboratory. In the relativistic conception of time, it’s also 1963 in La Jolla, California.
Image: Meanwhile, 35 years earlier (but at the “same” time) From The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III. The diagram shows Nobel Prize-Winner Richard Feynman’s original thought experiment on electron diffraction. Timescape by Gregory Benford (1980) 514 pages ★★★★☆ Winner of the Nebula Award for Best NovelĪ representative physics experiment in 1963. This is a novel about time travel that only a physicist could have written. In a desperate hope to address the looming crisis, a team of physicists at the University of Cambridge‘s Cavendish Laboratory is attempting to send a message back through time to the point just before which those pesticides were first put on the market: 1963. Now a massive toxic bloom is spreading in the Atlantic off the Brazilian coast-and a menacing yellow cloud is forming above it. Decades ago, the widespread introduction of certain synthetic pesticides led to a precipitous drop in agricultural production. Although the town is a privileged and wealthy academic community, it’s suffering like the rest of the world from an ecological catastrophe. Timescape opens in Cambridge, England, in 1998. But the story at the core of this novel is suspenseful to a fault and beautifully executed. It’s far above the level of most people’s understanding, or at least above mine. And Benford indulges his characters’ tendency to think aloud about the most profound questions in theoretical physics. But above all it’s an account of how scientific research is conducted in the age of Big Science. Timescape is a story of unintended consequences, of husbands and wives, of environmental collapse, and of academic politics. But it will challenge your reading comprehension unless you’re well versed in contemporary physics. It’s a brilliant story, and gracefully written. And if paradoxes like these rattle your nerves, you may want to avoid reading Gregory Benford’s masterful hard-science-fiction novel about time travel, Timescape. And Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Black holes don’t just make matter and light disappear they suck up information, too.