Time Travel: A History

This mostly accessible book covers vast cultural, philosophic, and scientific terrain, under the premise of examining time travel -- a possibility, a paradox, a phenomenon? First, James Gleick is my favorite non-fiction author, bar none. So I'm a big fan. Second, the topic is of deep interest to me, not just because of my last name (Rip VW could be called a time traveller, sleeping for 20 years), but also because it is a fascinating trope in our culture that allows for some pretty fun storytelling. The scientific worldview that Gleick comes from is a frame for examination of ideas. He takes the idea of time travel and traces its origins, beginning with the H.G. Wells novel The Time Traveller, but of course starting much earlier than that, in fits and starts, with let's say the industrial revolution. That's where we get our "modern" sense of time as something that can be synchronized and structured by things like time zones. In physics, time begins to be "measured" around the time of Sir Isaac Newton, but Newton used his heartbeat to time his experiments, I believe. The invention of mechanical clocks and the discovery of longitude are outside the scope of Gleick's book, but they are important scientific and technological achievements -- not the subject of the book, but related to it. Newton's laws of physics take time as an essential element (velocity = distance/time). But what is time? Now we're really thinking. We discover through Gleick's analysis that time is both psychological and experiential, as well as paradoxical -- we know what it is until we try to describe it. Is it subjective or objective? Does it "flow" like a river? No, Gleick concludes, that is strictly a metaphor. And, I discovered by reading this book, the Latin motto tempus fugit means not, as I had assumed, time flies, but rather, time flees. Time escapes rational characterization. And time travel turns out to be both a logical impossibility (causes lead to effects, after all) and a possibility in physics (time can run backward or forward, based on the sign in an equation -- just as the irrational number i, the square root of -1, is a logical impossibility that creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, so too is -t). So, Gleick is having some fun with the idea of time travel, in a discursive, almost deconstructive way. He mentions an artist almost in passing, Chris Marker, who "may have been a time traveller," it appears, but created a work of art (film) named la jetee, about memory, remembrance, forgetfulness, and film, that I defy any modern filmmaker to beat. I haven't seen it, so I can't say with confidence that it is a good film, but it is interesting, to say the least. In any event, Gleick takes us through cultural and scientific ideas of time travel, ranging from time capsules (which he says are a somewhat foolish way to try to evade death) to novels like The Time Traveller, to Dr. Who (a hard-won favorite of mine, too), and aims at answering the question of whether time travel is possible or desirable, based on such cultural phenomena. His answer is yes, but with some caveats. First, he believes time travel is an act of the imagination that is valuable, much as dreaming or fiction generally is valuable. He isn't interested in the paradoxes or "rules" of sci-fi time travel so much, though he does mention them. Instead, what he's interested in are the stories that break the rules -- the so-called "bootstrap paradox" gets a whole chapter, for example, based on Robert Heinlein's comic short story in which a character named Bob interacts with various versions of himself who have traveled through time. What he's after is what those stories reveal about the nature of time and life itself. Second, he doesn't think time travel is really possible, although it turns out the laws of physics don't contradict it necessarily, except maybe entropy. He talks about popular physicist Richard Hawking holding a dinner party for time travellers, invitations issued after the fact, to which no one came, as an example of the logical fallacy of cause coming after effect. He also mentions the Biblical account in Joshua where God stops the sun to create a longer day, but dismisses it as wishful thinking, "who hasn't wished for more hours in the day?" He doesn't dismiss the possibility of time travel outright, either in fiction or in real life, but he comes to a conclusion of sorts about the limitation of the scientific equations to really describe reality, in that what appears possible in some senses based on Einstein's space-time continuum and other physics equations, isn't possible in our experience, except in fiction. Time travel is therefore essential to our culture. It is both possible and impossible. It is a paradox and a mystery, but also a cold hard fact, that time travel is not possible. Or is it? So much of our storytelling these days involves time travel that we've gotten used to it; it's part of the culture. In the end, Gleick's concluding chapter on our current times is a little disheartening. The future is dystopian these days, not just because that view of time travel has won out, whether from 1984 on or from the invention of the Internet, I'm not sure; but also because we have shorter memories and shorter futures than we thought we did in the 1960s, say. The Internet has a way of foreshortening both past and future -- after all, we have access to a wealth of knowledge there, but, as Gleick says, "who has time to think?" Books like Gleick's, though, give me some hope that we can rise above our current predicament and invent a future that is better than our present, still.

As usual, Gleick writes about his subject, the cultural phenomenon of interest in time travel, in a insightful and engaging manner. Fans of Gleick's earlier works, however, should know that this book is very different from its predecessors. In Chaos, Gleick described a branch of science that only graduate physics would encounter and explained it to a wider audience. While his work on information science was more wide-ranging it followed a similar pattern. Gleick's biographies of Feynman and Newton explained their contributions to science to those without a technical background. Time Travel, on the other hand, primarily focuses on answering the interesting question, "Why has time travel so consumed the interest of readers of literature since the late 19th century while before it appeared only in hints and scattered fragments?" To answer this, Gleick engages in a thorough review of time-travel literature but only dips his toes into the actual science of time. In other words, the book is more an exploration of a branch of literature than a non-technical introduction to a branch of science. Even so, Time Travel is a good read and I would recommend the book both to those familiar with Gleick's earlier work and those who have not have not enjoyed that particular pleasure.

This book has been very highly commended for its rich and fascinating discussion of the difficulties of defining "time" and "time travel", and for its astonishingly erudite and broad-ranging references to the vast documentary record of thinking about these subjects. That said, it should also be noted that this is not, as its subtitle claims, a "history" in any conventional sense. It is not organized chronologically, or in a continuous narrative, or with any particular attention to or analysis of causal relations, illuminating a continuous development of anything. It is, rather, an unorganized series of impressionistic discussions of various issues related to its main subject. It does not lead to any conclusions explaining its subject. Rich, yes; fascinating, no doubt; immensely learned—all of these. But its lack of intellectual discipline is a serious defect. Its greatest fallacy is to confuse "time" and "history", as if the distinction between them were of no importance. Possibly this is in part commercial—"History Travel" or any variant thereof simply would not attract readers; but I can think of no other reason to ignore this fundamental issue. Much is made of the fact that physicists describe the world and time in mathematical terms that are supposed to be constants, having no historical content--no references to "past", "present" and "future." "Time" is no longer thought of as unidirectional, as an "arrow", in which case it might be travelled, back into the past or forward into the future, with all the practical problems that might entail. "History", however, is unidirectional, which is what makes "time travel" impossible. There are other fallacies. If "time" were defined as "duration of motion" many conceptual problems would be cleared up. If "causation" were defined as "the co-incidence of mutually conducive conditions", there would be no need to worry about whether any event has a single cause, or whether a linear "chain" of causation ever exists. Bottom line: this book is a good read for many reasons; but clarity and intellectual rigor on a fundamentally important subject are not among them.

Bad news first: Though the title might suggest otherwise, this is not a book sent through a wormhole from the future to detail the glorious evolution of time ­travel. Darn it. Gleick even goes so far as to declare that literal time travel, as imagined and reimagined by writers over the decades, “does not exist. It cannot.” The good news? “Time Travel,” like all of Gleick’s work, is a fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It’s witty (“Regret is the time traveler’s energy bar”), pithy (“What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track”) and regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind into those Gordian knots I so loved as a boy. “Time Travel” begins at what Gleick believes is the beginning, H.G. Wells’s 1895 “The Time Machine.” “When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine,” Gleick argues, “he also invented a new mode of thought.” Western science was undergoing a sea change at the same time, of course: Lyell and Darwin had exploded older conceptions of the age of the Earth, locomotives and telegraphs were transforming space, and Einstein was about to punch a major hole in Newton’s theory of absolute time. Meanwhile, in literature, Marcel Proust was using memory to complicate more straightforward storytelling, and it wouldn’t be long before modernists like Woolf and Joyce were compressing, dilating, and folding time in half. But according to Gleick, Wells was the first to marry the words “time” and “travel,” and in doing so, “The Time Machine” initiated a kind of butterfly effect, the novel fluttering with each passing decade through the souls of more and more storytellers, who in turn influenced more and more of their successors, forking from Robert Heinlein to Jorge Luis ­Borges to Isaac Asimov to William Gibson to Woody Allen to Kate Atkinson to Charles Yu, until, to use Bradbury’s metaphor, the gigantic dominoes fell. Nowadays, Gleick writes, “Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children’s cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans and police boxes.” It’s also in the science. Gleick is a polymathic thinker who can quote from David Foster Wallace’s undergraduate thesis as readily as from Kurt Gödel or Lord Kelvin, and like many of the storytellers he thumbnails, he employs time travel to initiate engrossing discussions of causation, fatalism, predestination and even consciousness itself. He includes a humorously derisive chapter on people who bury time capsules (“If time capsulists are enacting reverse archaeology, they are also engaging in reverse nostalgia”), he tackles cyberspace (“Every hyperlink is a time gate”), and throughout the book he displays an acute and playful sensitivity to how quickly language gets slippery when we talk about time. Why, for example, do English speakers say the future lies ahead and the past lies behind, while Mandarin speakers say future events are below and earlier events are above?

Começando por uma análise do conceito de viagem no tempo na obra de H.G.Wells, o livro leva a uma profunda avaliação do próprio conceito de tempo

That's really hard. Furthermore, could you explain how to move into something that you can't absolutely figure out? This pleasant book deepens this impossible endeavour and in doing so explains in addition lots of mankind's ideas, concepts and theories about this much evasive subject. Readers will find out thoughts form philosophers, scientists and science-fiction writers, all very nicely presented. It's a pleasure to read it.

If you wish to write Sci Fi and be involved with time travel you need to read this book. There are ideas that float around about time and its relationship to everything about us.This delightful, well written well researched book is the place to begin.

This readable book covers the science, philosophy and literature behind modern thinking about time