Recent Time Travel References

At the Worldcon 2018 I had a very interesting conversation with Rafaela Yilun Fan, who is pursuing a Ph. D in Time Travel! She asked me for a list of my own favorite references on time travel. I have my list from 2011 of course. But time travel waits for no traveler, and the list of interesting works has only gotten longer. Herewith a few of my favorites from the last few years:

Alan Burdock. Why Time Flies: A mostly scientific investigation. 2017. physics, psychology, et cetera of time.

Craig Callender. What makes time special? 2017. Unusually deep examination of what we mean by time.

Allen Everett and Thomas Roman. Time travel and warp drives: A scientific guide to shortcuts through time and space. 2012. Title says it all.

Matthew Jones and Joan Ormrod. Time Travel in Popular Media: Essays on Film, Television, Literature, and Video Games. 2015. Interesting collection of essays. Has a section on Asian Time Travel Films & Television Series.

Paul J. Nahin. Time Travel Tales: The Science Fiction Adventures and Philosophical Puzzles of Time Travel. 2017. Usual first rate work by Nahin.

Fraser A. Sherman. Now and Then We Time Travel. 2017. Very good coverage of film & television. Recommends Aetherco, Epguides, and Wikipedia. All good sources as well.

Ryan Wasserman. Paradoxes of Time Travel. 2018. Good review of various paradoxes from a philosophical point of view.

David Wittenberg. Time travel: the popular philosophy of narrative. 2013. My favorite as an explanation of what the function of time travel is, from a narrative point of view. Why do authors use time travel?

The Large Hadron Collider — Followup

Paul Halpern‘s talk on The Large Hadron Collider at Philcon on 11/21/2009 came off well.  I’ve since had a chance to read his Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles since.  The talk was basically the book light or, if you prefer, the book is the talk heavy.   Good jobs either way.

Paul had  a lot of fun with the idea that someone (from the future) is maliciously trying to keep us pitiful humans from building a high energy collider; first the money difficulties the Superconducting Super-Collider had in Texas and then the explosion at the Large Hadron Collider.  But now that the LHC is in fact colliding (if not yet at full strength), perhaps the little blue men have given all this up as a bad job.
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