| Travelling through time, as we all know, is a dangerous business. One small change in the past and you could mess up the future! In this science fiction novel, Willis proposes a (vaguely mathematical) view of spacetime as a self-regulating chaotic system.
The plot is this: A time traveller whose job is to try to locate an ugly flower vase that disappeared from a British cathedral just before it was bombed by the Nazis goes back to the Victorian era to help another traveller (also love interest) correct the anomaly she created by saving a cat from drowning. Frequent references to Three Men in a Boat, the classic British comedy by Jerome K. Jerome.
The words "chaos" and "nonlinear" are thrown around and there is one brief reference to Charles Dodgson's (aka Lewis Carroll's) theory of condensation of matrices. Otherwise, there is no math here. |
