Paul Nahin TIME MACHINES Quiz

Test your understanding of the concepts presented in the book TIME MACHINES.
I have given page references from the 2nd edition for some quotes for those interested enough to look up the asnwers.

List the different types of Paradoxes mentioned:

1) ______ (Nulify yourself)
2) ______ (Time Dilation)
3) ______ (Cheating)
4) ______ (Genetic)

Fill in the blanks:

When was the first time traveler in English literature?
xix.-1 The first time traveler in English literature. _____ Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. [1st twonky]

19.1 Einstein’s famous gravitational field differential tensor equations,.. “Curved spacetime tells matter how to ______, and matter tells spacetime how_____.”

18.2 The supernatural is precisely what this book is not about. This book is about ______.

49.3 Free Will versus ______. The Bible offers us no definitive help on this issue. [Nahin is certainly not a Calvinist]
Nahin quotes eleventh century Jewish philosopher Bahya ibn Paquda who lists several Bible passages supporting both predestination and free will:

[Predestination]
1 Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
2 It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.
(Psalms 127:1,2, KJV).

[Free will]
11 For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every man to find according to his ways.
(Job 34:11, KJV).

57.-1 The various forms of changing-the-past paradoxes, and of what seems to be a lack of ______, are of course prominent among the reasons why philosophers and theologians have been so attracted to the question of the possibility of time travel.

64.-1 free will falling to defeat in the face of the overpowering dominance of ______.

85.2 One of the central concepts in relativity is the world line, which is the complete story of a particle in spacetime…Mixing the two theories – the classically smooth general relativity and the discrete quantum mechanics – to get something called ______ is the Holy Grail of physicists today. (240.-2)

85.-1 quantum time the smallest increment of time that has any meaning – sometimes called the ________, a term first used in a 1935 non-time-travel story, “The Ideal,” by Stanley G. Weinbaum – may have a non-zero value.
[That is, it may take a certain minimum amount of time for anything to happen, yet another problem for Stephen Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture.]

100.-2 Einstein: according to his general theory of relativity, time and space would cease to exist if the universe were empty. Spinoza: “there was no Time or Duration before ______.”

105.3 Stephen Hawking’s famous book A Brief History of Time. In it he concludes that there is no need for ______ because in circular time there is no first event and hence no need for a First Cause.

154.2 [the block universe] looks like fatalism disguised as physics. It seems to be a mathematician’s proof of a denial of ______ dressed up in geometry.

263.-1 Agathron and Aristotle not withstanding, some medieval theologians argued passionately that the ______ could be changed (but only by God). The eleventh-century Italian cleric Peter Damian is a famous exponent [shouldn’t that be proponent?] of that radical view. See McArthur and Slattery (1974), Remnant (1978), and Gaskin (1977). Writing in his De Omnipotentia Dei (On the Divine Omnipotence in Remaking What Has Been Destroyed and in Undoing What Has Been Done”), Damien made it clear that he believed nothing could withstand the power of God, not even the ______.

360.2 Novikov also is not quite ready to put his faith in quantum theory’s ability, as we presently know it, to forbid time travel. As he and a colleague have written – see Lossev and Novikov (1992) – “our understanding of the fundamental structure of the vacuum and the effects of quantum fluctuations is so inadequate that from existing quantum theory only we should definitely exclude the possibility of the very existence of the ______…but experimentally it exists.”