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时空的未来

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本书汇集了霍金等六位有关时空理论的物理学家的文章,探讨了黑洞、引力波、时空隧道等科学理论,还从时空弯曲与量子世界的角度对未来的时空做了深入的探讨,有助于我们更加清晰地了解未来世界的图景。

这是当今著名的时空理论家告诉我们黑洞、引力波和时间旅行的科学,也是霍金本人参与编著的又一本科普佳作。

这书中所涉及的知识层面广泛而深刻,但平实的语言使之浅显易懂。

226 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

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1618 people want to read

About the author

Stephen W. Hawking

242 books12.8k followers
Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.
Hawking was born in Oxford into a family of physicians. In October 1959, at the age of 17, he began his university education at University College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA degree in physics. In October 1962, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where, in March 1966, he obtained his PhD degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology. In 1963, at age 21, Hawking was diagnosed with an early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually, over decades, paralysed him. After the loss of his speech, he communicated through a speech-generating device initially through use of a handheld switch, and eventually by using a single cheek muscle.
Hawking's scientific works included a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Initially, Hawking radiation was controversial. By the late 1970s, and following the publication of further research, the discovery was widely accepted as a major breakthrough in theoretical physics. Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a vigorous supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Hawking achieved commercial success with several works of popular science in which he discussed his theories and cosmology in general. His book A Brief History of Time appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Hawking was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2002, Hawking was ranked number 25 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. He died in 2018 at the age of 76, having lived more than 50 years following his diagnosis of motor neurone disease.

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5 stars
146 (33%)
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154 (35%)
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113 (25%)
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24 (5%)
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for Peter Tillman.
4,042 reviews477 followers
November 5, 2022
This slim volume consists of six essays, based on talks presented at the Kipfest on the occasion of Kip Thorne's sixtieth birthday. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Physics at Caltech is best known to the general public for his 1988 wormhole "time machine" proposal, and indeed much of the book is taken up exploring the question, "is time travel possible?"

Physicist Richard Price leads off with a concise refresher-essay, "Welcome to Spacetime." Danish physicist Igor Novikov explores classic time-travel paradoxes, with some cool diagrams and novel results: in essence, "closed timelike curves" 2 are theoretically possible, but paradoxes aren't allowed -- with a time-machine, you could visit your grandfather, but you couldn't kill him. The universe wouldn't permit it -- which in essence is Hawking's Chronology Protection conjecture. Hawking speculates that the unfortunate time-traveler would be incinerated by (literally) a bolt from the blue. Well, what he actually says is, "one would expect the energy-momentum tensor to be infinite on the Cauchy horizon" , which (sigh) is a pretty typical Hawking attempt at "popular" science.

Fortunately, Thorne himself is a master popularizer, and he ends up explaining Hawking's ideas as well as his own. His essay amounts to an update chapter for his wonderful 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy, which I enthusiastically recommend. Thorne reluctantly concludes that things really don't look very good for wormholes, especially for time travel -- though he does leave a tiny ray of hope for some super-advanced future civilization to make wormholes for space travel . Thorne notes that our grasp of basic physics is so crude that we can really only understand maybe 5% of the stuff that fills our universe -- the "normal" baryonic matter that makes up people, planets and stars. Thorne guesses that 35% of the universes's mass is in some unknown form of "cold dark matter", and the remaining 60% is some even more mysterious form of "dark energy" -- so there's certainly plenty of room left for discovery!

The book concludes with a nice explanation of why good popular-science books are needed, by noted pop-science writer Timothy Ferris, and with Alan Lightman's essay on "The Physicist as Novelist". Lightman, a former student of Thorne's, went on to write Einstein's Dreams and other well-regarded novels.

The Future of Spacetime is written for a general audience -- aside from Hawking's essay, everything should be understandable to any science-literate reader. I particularly recommend it to readers who've liked Thorne's earlier pop-science works. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

My 2002 review: https://www.sfsite.com/11a/fs139.htm
Profile Image for Mark.
67 reviews21 followers
May 14, 2011
This is a collection of six lectures given in celebration of Kip Thorne's 60th birthday (an academic tradition). The lecture topics aren't exceptionally cohesive because the lecturers were selected based on the fact that they are all (1) famous scientists and (2) connected to Thorne in some way. For instance, Stephen Hawking is Thorne's collaborator and rival, and he lectures about time travel, whereas Alan Lightman is Thorne's ex-grad-student and he lectures about being a scientist-novelist.

This is a great resource if you are curious about what the cutting edge minds currently think about the possibilities of time travel. Could time travel into the past be possible or not? And if it is possible, how do you resolve the paradoxes that might result? Both Hawking and Novikov weigh in on this topic at length. Thorne's lecture is more of an overview about the upcoming interesting steps in spacetime research and so he spends a good deal of time discussing gravitational waves, though he does briefly touch on time travel at the end. Novikov's lecture involves a series of fascinating thought experiments (originally calculated by Kip Thorne) concerning time-traveling billiard balls and whether any paradoxical results are possible (for instance, a version of the grandfather paradox: if the corner pocket is a time machine, can a billiard ball time travel into the past and collide with itself, thereby preventing itself from entering the corner pocket/time machine in the first place?).

On that note, the lectures by Lightman (on being a novelist) and Ferris (on science popularization) should be readable by all, but on the whole these lectures were given FOR physicists BY physicists and so it is not a light read. For instance, I'd recommend being pretty solid with spacetime physics before jumping into the lectures on time travel.
46 reviews5 followers
November 23, 2019
This is a collection of articles dealing with leading edge problems in spacetime physics, and they were written by physicists who are active in the field. I thought this book was written for a non-scientific audience and would be an easy read. It wasn't. You don't need a degree in physics to read this, but you do need to be well informed on relativity, quantum mechanics and black holes. If you are looking for a casual read on physics, this isn't it. This book was part of celebration of Kip Thorne's birthday, and was published by Cal Tech. (Kip Thorne is a world renowned physicist.) The articles were written by and for him and his associates. Be prepared to be mentally challenged.

Having said all that, I found this to be a well written and informative book.
Profile Image for Henri.
217 reviews2 followers
December 10, 2021
3.8🌟

不错的时空科普读物。
让人断掉时光机器的念头。
Profile Image for Brandon Minster.
278 reviews3 followers
February 16, 2024
I've never seen a group of authors more enthusiastic about killing their own grandfathers. These dudes are quite morbid.
Profile Image for Rob.
86 reviews93 followers
September 3, 2007
these essays are all over the place. there's a 50-page introduction that tries to teach you the basics relativity, but it's much too numbers-based and super-boring -- i can't imagine any layman would get much out of it. but at least then you figure that you're going to get five hardcore physics lectures.

which the first two are, by hawking and novikov. they were quite enjoyable serious discussions of time-travel -- whether it might be physically possible and what about the whole "going back and killing your grandfather" paradox -- and i almost gave the book 3 stars for them.

but then the kip thorne essay has some physics but is just a list of predictions and him listing all his "russian friends" and eminent former students and how great his projects are and how cool his friends are. so then he must be cool, too, right?

then the book really goes into the tank. the last two essays have nothing to do with relativity at all. tim ferris writes about how important science writing is (he being a science writer). and finally alan lightman (author of Einstein's Dreams and PhD in physics) writes this excrutiating essay about how wonderful it is to be a novelist who used to be a physicist. i.e., how wonderful it is to be himself. i was thinking of reading Einstein's Dreams, but the guy seems like such an egomaniac that now i don't think so.

if this is at your library, get it for the hawking and novikov. but don't buy it.
29 reviews2 followers
February 12, 2013
The Future of Spacetime was a hodgepodge, but a good hodgepodge. It's a collection of essays written regarding a research focus of Kip Thorne, who at the time of writing, had just celebrated KipFest: the 60th birthday celebration for one of physics' celebrated authors and thinkers.

Each essay took a decidedly different tone, with the preface, and first few essays delving into ever-deeper scientific concepts and jargon. I'll admit that I skipped a couple of pages in Hawking's essay when the terms got too technical and precise for me to follow. It was not one of his better attempts at science writing, going for esoteric over clear.

The real gem for me, and the reason it's rated four instead of three stars is the final essay by a gentleman whose name I forget and who I'm too lazy to get up and check. He's a fiction writer and physicist who studied under Kip Thorne. His essay covers his thoughts on the differences (and some similarities) between conducting physics and writing fiction. I felt myself drawn in when he started discussing an event very familiar to me, but one which I've only rarely heard discussed by anyone else: the removal of from one's conscious mind to a place of tranquil serenity in a place wholly mental, when body falls away. I've felt it in books, in the eureka moments of science and mathematics when a concept coalesces, and in moments with God. Reading this, expounded well, but expounded at all, was worth the extra star. Check it out.
Profile Image for James F.
1,685 reviews123 followers
May 12, 2015
Five talks given at Caltech in celebration of Kip Thorne's sixtieth birthday. The talks by Novikov and Hawking are on the possibility or impossibility of time travel, and don't go much beyond the treatment in Thorne's book. The talk by Thorne himself is a number of predictions as to what he expected would be discovered about black holes and gravity waves by 2010 or 2015, mainly by the NASA/ESA LISA satellites, leading up to a theory of quantum gravity by 2020 -- about five years later than Smolin's prediction, and equally wrong. (LISA was scheduled to be launched in 2010, but was delayed by NASA budget cuts and the project was eventually cancelled in 2011; ESA may launch its own version without NASA's help some time after 2020.) The talk by Ferris is on popularizing science, and the one by Lightman (a physicist and novelist) is on the resemblances and differences between science and literature; these were actually the most interesting. Not a serious study of anything, but a fast and fun book to read.
Profile Image for Art.
551 reviews18 followers
June 4, 2015
Six pieces here of varying interest. A long and detailed technical introduction precedes the five essays, including three about spacetime.

Kip Thorne offers the most accessible essay of the three science entries here. He includes practical analogies and good drawings that illustrate his predictions and speculations. Thorne deserves top billing of this anthology.

Timothy Ferris wrote about the popularization of science. He tells how reasoned and open-minded inquiry replaced fear, superstition and blind obedience to authority. Meanwhile, modern scientific illiteracy reveals itself when half of all Americans deny that humans evolved from earlier animals. Fewer than seven percent of Americans are scientifically literate, Ferris wrote, while forty percent still believe in astrology.

Three and a half stars: Three stars for the book but four stars for Thorne and Ferris, who wrote the most interesting essays in this collection.
Profile Image for Roger Burk.
570 reviews39 followers
November 5, 2022
This is a kind of festschrift for the famous theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, published in 2002. The essays vary widely in style and subject. The one by the even more famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking tries to explain to the layman how time travel via wormholes ("closed timelike paths") might be possible--completely without success, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps the most interesting is the one by the honoree himself. in which he makes a number of predictions about the near future of quantum physics. He predicts the detection of gravitational waves, which happened in 2016 (and resulted in Thorne winning the Nobel Prize in 2017). He predicts a consequent explosion of understanding of high-mass cosmic events; perhaps this is underway in his rarified circles. He predicts another decades-long explosion from the detection of gravitational waves from the Big Bang. On the other hand, he also predicts the solution of quantum gravity by 2020, and we're still waiting.
Profile Image for Alexandr Iscenco.
Author 11 books18 followers
May 7, 2016
Довольно интересное собрание презентаций по физике пространства-времени, черным дырам, гравитационным волнам, квантовым флуктуациям и возможности путешествия во времени. Для тех, кому интересны такие темы, рекоммендую. Книга не содержит "тяжелых" физических уравнений, так что будет более или менее понятна читателю, не знакомому с физикой пространства-времени, но желающему познакомиться с ней.
2 reviews
September 21, 2012
It was fun, but just okay. It's been a long time and I'm glad I read it, but it's not heavy literature or comprehensive. The most important thing it taught me is that scientists can have a sense of humor.
Profile Image for Irina Goldberg.
501 reviews19 followers
August 27, 2021
The Future of Spacetime is a collection of essays written by Kip Thorne's friends for Thorne for his birthday. Some of the essays are brilliant, others are rehashings of previous writings and the rest are difficult to follow. I will keep this book to reread some of the essays.
Profile Image for Ryan.
128 reviews33 followers
January 25, 2008
Hawking and Thorne stand out in this collection. As a collection of lectures, don't expect the science here to be diluted or awash in new-age speculation.
Profile Image for Wendelle.
2,054 reviews66 followers
Read
November 29, 2017
4 gracious essays from incredible physicists
Profile Image for Gaurav Khanna.
23 reviews1 follower
January 3, 2021
Well written essays that provide a super-high level overview of the topics. Technical writeup isolated to first four chapters.
Profile Image for Voyt.
257 reviews20 followers
November 4, 2022
Spacetime =Matter + Energy.
POSTED BY ME AT AMAZON 2002
We have 4 scientific essays here, about space, gravity and possibilities of traveling in time, many drawings, figures and pictures and only two math equations.
However, this writings are, in my opinion, for "advanced" laymen, who collect, cherish and have fully digested at least a "Brief History of Time" or other popular science books dealing with cosmology, quantum and relativity.
Introduction (essay number one) by Richard Price presents known facts about relativity, but author uses innovative way to teach us about different types of transformation between reference frames. With elegance he introduces concept of spacetime diagrams and worldliness. Good beginning.
Then comes Igor Novikov: his essay straightforward and easy to read. Supported by well designed drawings it explains how the wormhole can work and why it is rather impossible to kill your grandfather by traveling to the past.
If you have his book "River of Time", you will know what I am talking about.
Third essay by Stephen Hawking is rather hardly digestible highbrow dissertation, with plenty of inward shortcuts. Drawings and figures are not clear and without indications to which part of the text they belong. This part of the book is least meritorious, but... help can be found later.
The most impressive essay by Kip Thorne creates the hub of the book. Kip Thorne has proposed Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory in 1984 and is a cofounder of this project. He also believes in potential of a String Theory.
Thorne's current writing is an excellent addition to his famous book "Black Holes and Time Warps" published 8 years ago. He predicts now many interesting discoveries related to LIGO/LISA gravity waves project. If successful, this project will greatly contribute to new theory connecting general relativity with quantum fields and will help to solve mysteries of neutron stars and singularities. History of Thorne's bets with Hawking is funny and adds flavor to this chapter.
End of the book contains Glossary (whole 17 pages of it) and I read it with a big pleasure since this helped me to understand Hawking's text.
Last two essays about skills of popular writing in science were also interesting but of a less importance to me...
Profile Image for Michael Morgan.
Author 9 books62 followers
September 14, 2023
Infinite expansion, Big Crunch, singularity, static... There are many hypotheses about the fate of the Universe. Of them all, the theory of black hole evaporation formulated by Stephen Hawking is among the most fascinating. It is a model developed by Michael Wondrak, Walter van Sujlekom and Heino Falcke, astrophysicists at Radboud University in the Netherlands. According to this theory, the Universe is slowly evaporating. In this book, the two outstanding authors trace fascinating theoretical models related to space and time, their meaning in the immediate and ultimate cosmic boundary. The style is not academic, but like a conversation between friends. Wonderful.
Profile Image for Phos.
17 reviews8 followers
April 27, 2021
One of the best science books I have ever read. Hawking exposes difficult concepts in a very didactic way. The last chapter is beautiful and an ode to science.
Profile Image for Elizabeth.
87 reviews19 followers
February 22, 2021
Algunos ensayos estaban realmente excelentes. Sin embargo, como la mayoría de los libros de "divulgación científica" creo que no es apto para todo público, ya que requiere muchos conocimientos previos de física avanzada.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews

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