Timescape

 "I laugh at what you call dissolution-
  for I know the amplitude of time."
                        -Walt Whitman


Timescape was written by Gregory Benford and published in 1980.  It won a Nebula award and John W. Campbell award  in 1981.  I had this one in my to read pile for a while, and it's a hard science tour-de-force that I wish I had read sooner.  50% hard science and 50% character development, and utterly realistic all the way through, mainly about time-traveling-faster-than-light-tachyon-particles as a means to send messages to warn the past to prevent the present catastrophe of world-killing bacterial ocean bloom caused by fertilizer and chemical runoff into the oceans.  (Phew!) Certainly plausible stuff.  Plus there is a lot of stuff about class struggle to make this a relatively contemporary update of Wells' archetypal Time Machine.  Connie Willis' Doomsday Book certainly owes a lot to this book as well...can anyone tell me why is Cambridge the center of time travel in the world of Sci Fi?  Is it cos of Wells?  So Class issues can be discussed here?, so much more easily than in America?, and does the continent matter cos America has no class (but of course we do)?  Of special interest is his conception of time itself as the great unknown topic in physics, in that those tachyons travel faster than the speed of light, so like they can travel to the past and warn them about our ever fucked up present, and we can avoid all of this environmental nonsense, and a doom straight outta Day of the Triffids....

"The past is not ever dead,
 it's not even past"
                -William Faulkner  

Sure, Mr. Benford name drops all the coolies like Philip K. Dick, Herbert Marcuse, and Richard Feynman, but what he really excels at doing is creating that elusive sense of wonder...and making physics dramatic, poetic, and mind blowing... I folded many pages over by the halfway point (to re-read)....and the final pages of this novel are fantastic and moving, and this book has been one of Modernmoonman's faves since I started this blog.... Here's a taste of the text:

     "Look, the point here is that our distinctions between cause and effect are an illusion.  This little experiment we've been discussing is a causal loop --no beginning, no end.  That's what Wheeler and Feynman meant by requiring only that our description be logically consistent.  Logic rules in Physics, not the myth of cause and effect.  Imposing an order to events is our  point of view.  A quaintly human view, I suppose.  The laws of physics don't care.  That's the new concept of time we have now--as a set of completely interrelated events, linked self-consistently.  We  think we're moving along in time, but that's just a bias."

     "But we know things happen now, not in the past or future."

     "When is 'now'?  Saying 'now' is 'this instant' is going around in circles.  Every instant is 'now' when it 'happens.'  The point is, how do you measure the rate of moving from one instant to the next?  And the answer is, you can't  What's the rate of the passage of time?"

     "Well it's--" Peterson stopped, thinking.

     "How can time move?  The rate is one second of movement per second!  There's no conceivable coordinate system in physics from which we can measure time passing.  So there isn't any.  Time is frozen, as far as the universe is concerned."

This is a great Book, and a great introduction to the "Hard Sci Fi" writing of Gregory Benford.