Timescape

I think this novel, by physicist Gregory Benford, is one of the best fictional representations of how science is really done and of the real world of scientists and graduate students.

It is also an early exploration of the concept of tachyons, particles that cannot move slower or as slow as the speed of light but always have to go faster. (These have been proposed only in theory, but what makes them exciting is that they would travel backward in time.) In the book, that property enables people in the future to communicate with us in their past.

Another thing… show more.

If you think about it, communication back in time from the present triggers the same kind of paradoxes as physically traveling to the past. If I send information to the past about which horse will win in what upcoming race, how come I didn’t already know that in the present to begin with? Timescape offers a great, scientifically knowledgeable account about how something like that might play out.

In a dreadful near-future, two scientists hit on the wild idea of sending a warning to the past, using (currently still hypothetical!) faster than light tachyon particles. In the near past two young scientists pick up the strange signals, as interference in an experiment, and realise they can be read as Morse Code. But the message is misunderstood, mangled, and almost lost in the same confusion and infighting that plagues Asimov’s earthling scientists. On the ‘Gods Themselves’ spectrum, but darker and deeper (though leavened by plenty of sex!). 

This book is set in the early 1990s, where an ecological catastrophe is threatening the entire world. Scientists are feverishly working to understand the tachyon, a subatomic particle that can travel faster than light. They want to harness this power to go back in time and warn their colleagues in the 1960s to cease the experiments that are now destroying the oceans. Ultimately, the book explores our ever-changing views of cause and effect, showing that we are all moving through a landscape of time and space that we don't understand. The book ends in a fashion very suitable for Hollywood,… show more.