Time Travel With Your Fridge?
If the history of thermodynamics can teach us anything, it is that modest entropy reversals have not taken us back in time at all. But it is more fun to think otherwise, says guest Jimena Canales.
Jimena Canales is a faculty member of the Graduate College at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a research affiliate at MIT. She focuses on 19th and 20th century history of the physical sciences and science in the modern world. Her most recent book is titled The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. You can learn more about her here.
Since H.G. Wells combined the words "time travel" — and used them so systematically to refer to using a machine to travel to a certain date in the calendar — in The Time in 1895, scientists and the public at large have been fascinated with its possibility.
