Borrowed Tides

Description for BORROWED TIDES by Paul Levinson: A voyage and an adventure as sublime as any in the history of the universe. Aaron Schoenfeld has parlayed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and a sharp tongue into an improbable second career as director of a project to plan and execute the first interstellar voyage. The trip to Alpha Centauri will take many years and might end up being a one-way journey for the crew. His old acquaintance Jack Lumet may be the unlikely source of an answer. An anthropologist obsessed with the myths of Native Americans, he once wrote a paper about Wise Oak, an Iroquois sachem who claimed to have ridden a cosmic version of the Hudson, a tidal river that flows both ways, to the stars and back. In a world where money for space journeys is hard to come by, even a slightly mad theory that suggests a possible shortcut to the stars is an attractive possibility for the people who believe more in humanity's destiny among the stars than they do in sa