Visit Your Local PBS Station PBS Home PBS Home Programs A-Z TV Schedules Watch Video Donate Shop PBS Search PBS

NOVA Online (click here for NOVA home)
Fall of the Leaning Tower Time travel (see links below for navigation)

Welcome to the companion Web site to the NOVA program "Time Travel," originally broadcast on October 12, 1999. In the program, leading physicists delve into the mystery of whether time travel is possible, and if so, how one might go about building a time machine. Here's what you'll find online:
  • Sagan on Time Travel
    Listen to the late astronomer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author's insightful and delightfully droll views on everything from wormholes ("very Alice in Wonderland") to the nature of time ("one of those concepts that is profoundly resistant to a simple definition"). (text and RealAudio)

  • Traveling Through Time
    In this excerpt from his 1998 book Time: A Traveler's Guide, Clifford Pickover, an IBM researcher and science writer, declares that "time travel is possible." Find out why he is so sure.

  • Think Like Einstein (Hot Science)
    Albert Einstein showed that space is curved, time is relative, and time travel is theoretically possible. Here, do a simple thought experiment and learn to think like the century's greatest scientist.

  • Timespeak
    What you would call a time machine physicists term a "closed timelike curve." Steep yourself on the concepts and conjectures, the dialects and definitions that physicists rely on when musing about the possibility of time travel.
Plus Resources and a Teacher's Guide. Text Time Travel Home | Sagan on Time Travel | Traveling Through Time
Timespeak | Think Like Einstein | Resources | Teacher's Guide | Transcript | Site Map

NOVA Online | Editor's Picks | Previous Sites | Join Us/E-mail | TV/Web Schedule
About NOVA | Teachers | Site Map | Shop | Jobs | Search | To print


WGBH PBS Online NOVA Online is produced for PBS by the WGBH Science Unit
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, The Northwestern Mutual Life Foundation, and CNET.com.
© | created October 1999

Support provided by

For new content
visit the redesigned
NOVA site