The best thing about this book is that it takes readers for a brisk trot down a long list of scientists and their extraordinary discoveries, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose.

Apart from these giants of discovery, whose names resonate even in the popular imagination, the author visits others who are less well known.

What all these names have in common is that they have contributed to our understanding of the physics of time. This is a story of wild surmise, of dead ends and brilliant breakthroughs.

In that sense, it is a quintessential scientific history and Randles has the uncluttered storytelling technique to deliver it accessibly. This is true whether she's explaining high-end technical physics or detailing a subject that is more readily grasped.

From Einstein's "Special Theory of Relativity" (1905) onwards, the story takes us into theoretical realms that make medieval theology seem straightforward. In this grand parade of theories so counter-intuitive they scramble your brains, Schrödinger's Cat is given walk-on part and appears as a remarkably sensible concept.

Randles is good at reducing each theory to the basics without removing too much of the wonder and elegance. So far so good. The worst thing about this book is that, in her eagerness to include as much as possible of what's happening in timetravel research, Randles has included a number of enthusiasts we could have done without. The implications of the "double-slit experiments" conducted in the 1970s at the Universities of Munich and Maryland are mind-boggling enough, as are John Wheeler's alternative universes (and Randles does a good job of conveying the significance and the strangeness of such concepts) without a book of such obvious class having to devote either time or space to Father Pellegrino Ernetti's 'chronovisor', Tony Bassett's 'bio-energiser' or a couple of other ratbags. These 'researchers' would better suit books about the paranormal … or human gullibility.