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Oliver Heaviside: an accidental time traveller. (English) Zbl 1407.78006

Summary: A little discussed aspect of Heaviside’s work in electromagnetics concerned faster-than-light (FTL) charged particles, precursors to the hypothetical tachyon and his discovery that such motion should produce a characteristic radiation signature (now called Cherenkov radiation). When Heaviside wrote, the time travel implications of FTL were not known (Einstein was still a teenager), and in this paper some speculations are offered on what Heaviside would have thought of FTL time travel, and of the associated (now classic) time travel paradoxes, including the possibility (or not) of sending information into the past.

MSC:

78-03 History of optics and electromagnetic theory
01A55 History of mathematics in the 19th century

Biographic References:

Heaviside, Oliver
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References:

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