Time imprisons us. I never met my paternal grandfather, but I am told he was an extraordinary sprinter in his youth. I am slightly obsessed with the notion of visiting the 1930s to watch that Jamaican-born teenager course down the track at his high school in New York. And yet I must, fist shaking in the air, face the fact that this will never happen – can never happen.

To understand the science of time travel is a curse. I am despondent that the laws of physics conspire to prevent any conceivable time machine from working. Stephen Hawking calls it "chronology protection": were it possible to go back and change the flow of events, the laws would have to be such that the universe would cease to make sense.

I admit that an incomprehensible universe would be a high price to pay for the chance to watch my grandfather run. But in my defence, I would travel away from that moment to perform the only mandatory task for anyone handed a time machine – the early assassination of Adolf Hitler. And here's the irony: we struggle to imagine a present without a Hitler in our collective past. Too much would be different to make sense; our minds, it seems, quickly provide a hint of the strictures of physics. So all we can do is work on the science, look for a chink in nature's defence, and let our writers – be they physicists or not – have fun with the scarcely imaginable consequences of success. Here are some of the best outcomes of that endeavour, in no particular order.

1. Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality by Ronald Mallett

When Ronald Mallett was just 10 years old, his father died from a heart attack. While grieving, the boy read HG Wells' The Time Machine and decided he would dedicate his life to making time travel possible so that he could go back and warn his father of the impending catastrophe. Young Ronald grew out of poverty to become a professor of physics at Connecticut University and develop his own unique blueprint for a time machine. It's a true story – and Spike Lee has bought the movie rights.

2. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne

In the 1980s, while writing Contact, Carl Sagan needed help with a plot point. He wanted to know how his alien civilisation might feasibly have created a useable time machine. His cosmologist friend Kip Thorne gave him an answer: wormholes, tunnels that connect different areas of space and time. A few years after Sagan's book came out, Thorne published a scientific paper on the idea and started working on this book. Innumerable wannabe time travellers have lost hours in these pages while mind-travelling through the universe.

Philippa Pearce has no black holes or wormholes – she simply dreams up a grandfather clock that strikes 13 and opens a portal to the 19th century. None are so willing to suspend disbelief as readers under a certain age, but the book remains just as engrossing for adults.

In 1980, Adams wrote about a computer that could point you to the nearest restaurant. We're halfway to Adams's vision already – all we need is for Google to offer locations in time as well as space. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is brilliantly conceived, and its take on the farce of human existence seems to become more relevant with every passing news cycle.

Lightman is a physicist who can write fiction and non-fiction while pursuing his own research. Only some of the stories in this collection are explicitly about time travel, but it is a theme that hovers over the book. The concept is entirely fresh, the prose is beautifully evocative, the ideas profound and resonant; the stories bear repeated reading. Einstein would have loved this book.

The first time I watched Back to the Future with my 10-year-old son, I got some sense of how absorbed The Time Machine's first readers must have been: goggle-eyed, brain working overtime, questions tumbling from their mouths. We are almost too familiar with time travel these days; if I had a time machine, I'd like to go back to talk to those first readers and recalibrate my sense of wonder.

In 1991, Gott joined the select group of people that have come up with a way to make a time machine. It involves using highly accelerated subatomic particles to bend the fabric of the universe and thus create loops in time. Or, possibly, a black hole. Those worried by the prospect of Geneva's Large Hadron Collider destroying the planet might find comfort in the idea that it could also make time travel possible.

Yes, Wells again. This one's a novella published in 1888 – seven years before the Time Machine. It's wonderful: a murder mystery, an exploration of mob mentality in a small village, a mind-bending introduction to time travel, and gripping to the end.

Laugh-out-loud funny one moment, astute social commentary the next. Twain's protagonist takes advantage of his knowledge to set up the infrastructure of a civilised society. The book is a thinly-disguised celebration of what Twain valued most about 19th-century American life: religious tolerance, egalitarianism, education for all, scientific thinking, human dignity and manufacturing industry. It would be interesting to bring Twain to our times and ask whether he thinks America has stayed true to its origins or become a new version of medieval Britain.

An unapologetically entertaining guide for a project you'll never undertake. First drag your black hole across the universe to the place and time you'd like to work with. (If you can't find a black hole, a neutron star will probably do.) Then you'll need a source of something called negative energy – which may or may not exist. Then … oh, why bother? Why? Because it's fun.

Can We Travel Through Time? The 20 Big Questions of Physics is published by Quercus. Buy it at the Guardian bookshop.