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The concept of time travel has always fascinated me, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons. I’m not terribly interested in going back in time to change things — I’m quite satisfied with the way my life has been going and is going. But I would love to be a fly on the wall — heck, forget that, I’d like to make friends with the amazing people I’d admire throughout history.

Can you imagine what it might have been like to chum around with Abraham Lincoln? Budha? St. Mary? What if I could attend the very first World Con and meet my favorite authors before they became famous. How cool would that be?

Anyway, time travel has fascinated people for a long time. In his article, “A brief history of time travel, David Sapsted says, “for more than a century, the possibility has captivated both boffins and fiction writers - since H.G. Wells introduced the idea of a time machine in The Chronic Argonauts in 1888, and since Einstein’s theories gave the notion an awful lot of academic clout early last century.”

So I thought I’ll collect a list of links about time travel and present them to you here:

NOVA on Time Travel
HowStuffWorks.com’s How Time Travel Will Work
Time Travel for Beginners
The Time Travel Fund
The Time Travel Science Blog

Guest Writer: Sunil Tanna

Alternate histories are stories or scenarios which consider the question of what if the events of the past had turned out differently. For example, what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War, what if the Germans had won World War II, what if Al Gore had won the 2000 US Presidential Election, or what if Michael Portillo had become the British Prime Minister.

In most (but not all) alternate histories, these history is generally assumed to have gone the same way as our actual history, until some specific point (known as the “Point of Divergence”) when a particular event has a different outcome. Sometimes the event may be important, and seen as such as the time, (for example, a battle going to other way), whereas in other alternative history stories, even subtle changes can result in profound changes to history because of the butterfly effect. Read more »

Guest Writer: Eoghann Irving

Isaac Asimov is one of the best known science fiction writers of all time. In part that is probably due to the sheer volume of material which he wrote, but it is also due to the scale of his imaginative vision.

Over the course of 50 years, Asimov wrote over 500 books, essays and short stories. He won four Hugo Awards and one Nebular Award along with countless other lesser known awards.

Biography

Isaac Asimov was more than simply a science fiction writer. A biochemist with a Ph.D. to his name, Asimov also wrote a number of popularized science books which explain many scientific concepts in a historical way. A long time member of Mensa (whom he described as intellectually combative), he was more proud of being president of the American Humanist Association. Read more »