Timescape

In 1998 the world is failing. Blooms of a diatom mutation are spreading through the oceans, the food chain is breaking, and at Cambridge the physicist John Renfrew works on a proposal that his colleagues find embarrassing: using tachyons to send a warning into the past, to a set of coordinates in La Jolla in 1963, in the hope that someone there will be listening. Somebody is, though he does not know it. Gordon Bernstein is a young assistant professor with a tenure case to build and an experiment that has begun producing noise where there should be a clean signal, and every sensible instinct tells him to blame the equipment and move on. Instead he starts to read it. Benford, a working physicist, is less interested in the paradox than in the sociology of the laboratory: the funding, the seminars, the grudges, the terror of being wrong in public, and the way real discovery arrives disguised as an inconvenience. The two timelines are given equal weight and equal ordinary detail, and the novel remains the standard reference for how scientists actually behave when the data will not go away.