Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Russian edition
- Preface to the English edition
- 1 Origins of thinking about time
- 2 Science of time is born
- 3 Light
- 4 The pace of time can be slowed down!
- 5 Time machine
- 6 Time, space and gravitation
- 7 Holes in space and time
- 8 Energy extracted from black holes
- 9 Towards the sources of the river of time
- 10 Journey to unusual depths
- 11 Grand Unification
- 12 Sources
- 13 What produces the flow of time and why in a single direction only?
- 14 Against the flow
- 15 Can we change the past?
- Conclusion
- Name index
- Subject index
14 - Against the flow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the Russian edition
- Preface to the English edition
- 1 Origins of thinking about time
- 2 Science of time is born
- 3 Light
- 4 The pace of time can be slowed down!
- 5 Time machine
- 6 Time, space and gravitation
- 7 Holes in space and time
- 8 Energy extracted from black holes
- 9 Towards the sources of the river of time
- 10 Journey to unusual depths
- 11 Grand Unification
- 12 Sources
- 13 What produces the flow of time and why in a single direction only?
- 14 Against the flow
- 15 Can we change the past?
- Conclusion
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
Albert Einstein created general relativity theory using a minimum number of experimental data on gravitation; he selected this set of data with the intuition of a genius. Over the many decades since the creation of the theory, all its predictions that allowed observational or experimental verification were invariably proved correct.
Tiny corrections to the motion of the planets of the Solar System, predicted by the theory, were detected and then carefully measured. In 1919 Arthur Eddington discovered the bending of light rays in the gravitational field of the Sun, in agreement with Einstein's prediction.
Then the reddening of light emerging from higher gravitational fields was discovered, which again confirmed Einstein's prediction.
Finally, black holes, those exotic objects that are like nothing else in nature, were discovered - with a high degree of certainty - in the 1970s. In this case, relativity theory manifests itself not in some small corrections to well-known processes but in full-blown effects that drastically change the geometry of space and the properties of time.
Not a single fact that would throw a shadow of doubt on relativity theory was found in all these years. Taken together, the entire experience of science in the 20th century makes one treat seriously the other predictions of the theory, those that have not yet been confirmed by experiment or astrophysical observations. We have seen that modern physics, which describes the most profound structure of matter, evolves in the direction outlined by Albert Einstein.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The River of Time , pp. 229 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001