Future of Spacetime

Stephen W. Hawking is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech, is the author of the bestselling books Black Holes and Time Warps and The Science of Interstellar. Thorne was an executive producer for the 2014 film Interstellar. For “bridging the worlds of science and the humanities,” Thorne received Rockefeller University’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. He lives in Pasadena, California. Igor Novikov is a theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and is a professor of astrophysics at the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen. Timothy Ferris is a science writer and has held professorships at four universities, teaching subjects as diverse as astronomy, philosophy, English, journalism, and history. He is currently an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley. Alan Lightman is a physicist and writer. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities. Richard Price is a leading American physicist, known for his work in general relativity. He is currently a professor at University of Texas Brownsville.

• Chronology protection, Stephen W. Hawking; Can we change the past?, Igor Novikov; Speculations about the future, Kip S. Thorne; on the popularization of science, Timothy Ferris; The physicist as novelist, Alan Lightman.

"This is story making that lifts the human spirit out of our sometimes petty terrestrial concerns and places us among the stars."