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Zero - Charles Seife [84]

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the same point in time:

Step 2: Attach one end of the wormhole to something very heavy and the other end to a spaceship that’s going at 90 percent of the speed of light. Every spaceship year is equivalent to 2.3 years on Earth; clocks at either end of the wormhole will go at different speeds.

Step 3: Wait for a while. After 46 years of Earth time, bring the wormhole to a friendly planet. Traveling through the wormhole can take you from the year 2046 on Earth to the year 2020 on Zeelox or vice versa.

Step 4: If you were really smart, you could have started planning the mission far in advance. You could have sent a message to Zeelox long before you started, arranging for a spaceship from Zeelox to do the reverse process, beginning in 1974 (Zeelox time). Then in the year 2020 (Zeelox time), the other wormhole could transport you to Earth in the year 1994 (Earth time). If you use both wormholes, you can jump from 2046 (Earth time) to 2020 (Zeelox time) to 1994 (Earth time): you’ve traveled back in time more than half a century!

Selected Bibliography

Books and Periodicals

Aczel, Amir. Fermat’s Last Theorem. New York: Delta, 1996.

Anselmo, Joseph. “Controller Error Lost Soho.” Aviation Week & Space Technology, 7 July 1998: 28.

Aquinas, Thomas. Selected Philosophical Writings. Trans. Timothy McDermott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Aristophanes. The Wasps / The Poet and the Women / The Frogs. Trans. David Barrett. London: Penguin Books, 1964.

Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Trans. John McMahon. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1991.

———. Physics. Trans. Robin Waterfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Artin, E. Modern Higher Algebra. New York: New York University, 1947. (Lecture notes.)

St. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Beckmann, Petr. A History of Pi. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1971.

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. London: Penguin Books, 1955.

Bell, E. T. The Development of Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1940.

Berkovits, Nathan. “An Introduction to Superstring Theory and Its Duality Symmetries.” Los Alamos National Labs Archive: hep-th/9707242.

Blay, Michel. Reasoning with the Infinite. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. V. E. Watts. London: Penguin Books, 1969.

Book of the Dead. Trans. R. O. Faulkner. London: British Museum Publications, 1972.

Boyer, Carl B. A History of Mathematics. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968.

Bradford, Ernle. The Sword and the Scimitar. Milan: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974.

Bressoud, David. Factorization and Primality Testing. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1989.

Browne, Malcolm. “A Bet on a Cosmic Scale, and a Concession, Sort of.” New York Times, 12 February 1997: A1.

Bunt, Lucas, Phillip Jones, and Jack Bedient. The Historical Roots of Elementary Mathematics. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Cantor, Georg. Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers. Trans. Philip E. B. Jourdain. New York: Dover Publications, 1955.

Churchill, Ruel, and James Brown. Complex Variables and Applications. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

Cipra, Barry. “In Mao’s China, Politically Correct Math.” Science, 28 February 1997: 1264.

Closs, Michael, ed. Native American Mathematics. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Conway, John H. and Richard Guy. The Book of Numbers. New York: Copernicus, 1996.

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. New York: Image Books, 1994.

Danzig, Tobias. Number: The Language of Science. New York: The Free Press, 1930.

David, Florence Nightingale. Games, Gods and Gambling. New York: Dover Publications, 1962, 1998.

Davies, Paul. “Paradox Lost.” New Scientist, 21 March 1998: 26.

Dawson, John. Logical Dilemmas. Wellesley, Mass.: A. K. Peters, 1997.

Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Ed. David Weissman. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.

Diodorus Siculus. Historical

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