The fascination of science

When some of my colleagues first found out that I was writing a
book on wormholes and time machines—remember black holes
are respectable—they poured scorn on the project, claiming that it
was not real physics, that I was selling out to vulgar popularization.
This was the stuff of the X-Files and had no place in serious science.
It is true that we do not need to grapple with such deep
and profound questions as how and why the Universe came into
being to convey the excitement of twentieth century physics. If
we care to look around us we see that the whole world is filled
with wonder. Why do I not write about that? Why ask questions
about what might, or might not, go on in the middle of a black
hole when I could be asking such simple questions as ‘Why is the
sky blue?’ ‘Why isn’t it green or yellow instead?’. Unfortunately,
what saddens me is not that most people don’t know the answer
to this question, but rather that they probably don’t care. Anyway,
this book has been about sharing my lifetime fascination with the
concept of time.
Scientists are a strange breed. No, I don’t mean that we are
eccentric social misfits, but rather that we have remained childlike
in our never-ending desire to want to know ‘why’. I find it
fantastic that the atoms that make up my body were created inside
some distant star billions of years ago; a star that exploded as a
supernova, showering the cosmos with its ashes. Some of these
ashes then slowly condensed together and heated up again to form
a new star, our Sun, and its planets. If you are not awed by this too
then we are very different people. But, hey, we can’t all be turned
on by science; there is too much else going on, and life is short.
I suppose questions about the meaning of time, whether it
flows, whether the past and future coexist with the present and
whether we will one day be able to visit them are questions which
transcend scientific curiosity. In a sense that has made this book
easy to write since I have not had to work hard at convincing you
that the subject matter is interesting.
Talking of time, it is probably time I ended this book and
spent some long overdue quality time with my family. But have
I achieved what I set out to do? So time travel to the past may never be possible, wormholes may not exist in our Universe, and
there may be nothing on the ‘other side’ of a black hole. But I
wished to get across to non-scientists some of the most profound
concepts of space and time, and if they can be made more palatable
and interesting by speculating on the possibility of building a time
machine then why not?
I hope this book has been entertaining as well as informative.
I never set out to write an introductory course in relativity theory,
but what I have offered you, I hope, is a glimpse of what modern
physics is about and an opportunity to share with me the sheer
excitement of contemplating some of the deepest questions of
existence. I hope you have enjoyed it.