Review
“A fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It’s witty . . . pithy . . . and regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind . . . . Throughout the book [Gleick] displays an acute and playful sensitivity to how quickly language gets slippery when we talk about time . . . a wonderful reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling.” —Anthony Doerr, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
“Exhilarating . . . Time travel has become a veritable theme park of playful attractions, which Mr. Gleick explores with infectious gusto.” —Michael Saler, The Wall Street Journal
“A grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst. Embedded in the book is a bibliography for the Babel of time—a most exquisitely annotated compendium of the body of time literature. What emerges is an inquiry, the most elegant since Borges, into why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the deepest mysteries of human consciousness and about what Gleick so beguilingly calls ‘the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture’...the kind of book that lodges itself in the imagination, planting seeds of ideas, insights, and revelations bound to go on blossoming for the remainder of this lifetime.” —Maria Popova, Brainpickings
“Like [David Foster] Wallace, Gleick’s a wide-ranging enthusiast and a graceful explainer….one of the great charms of this book is its author’s willingness to embrace multiple points of view and to credit art and experience as much as theory.” —Kate Tuttle, Los Angeles Times
“Extraordinary….Ultimately, Time Travel centers around a single question: Why do we need time travel? To find the answer, Gleick brilliantly stitches together moments at seemingly disparate points in history: He goes from explaining the plot of an episode of Doctor Who in one sentence to revisiting the invention of the Cinématographe in 1890s France the next. But what could be a dizzying narrative is deftly handled. And that’s because Gleick’s adventure in time travel is, in the end, not about distinctions between past and future, but a love letter to ‘the unending now.’” —Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic
“In his enthralling new book, James Gleick mounts H.G. Wells’s time machine for an invigorating ride through the most baffling of the four dimensions. In these pages, time flies.” —John Banville, author of The Sea
“James Gleick is a master historian of ideas—no one else can do what he does. Synthesis leads to elucidation leads to stunning, original insight. Time Travel, like so much of his work, is simply indispensable.” —Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“Time Travel is another of James Gleick’s superb, unclassifiable books—rich in obscure and illuminating information, laced with lyricism, wit, and startling and convincing insights. It is an exploration not only of the (theoretical) phenomenon of time travel but of our understanding of ‘time’ itself.” —Joyce Carol Oates
“Magnificent. A riveting history of an idea that changed us so profoundly, we forgot we had even been changed. But Gleick remembers.” —Lev Grossman, Books Editor of TIME and author of The Magicians Trilogy
“Against Kingsley Amis’ skeptical assertion that ‘time travel is inconceivable,’ Gleick adduces impressive evidence that the phenomenon has tantalized novelists, philosophers, poets, scientists, moviemakers, and even cartoonists as a transformative possibility. Readers follow the fictional ‘Time Traveler’ that H. G. Wells sends into future centuries; track the gyrations of time-spanning thought that Borges unfolds in his labyrinthine tales; ponder the temporal cause-effect paradoxes that Bertrand Russel surmounts; and puzzle over the reversibility of time in the physics with which Einstein revolutionized science….Ultimately, readers discern behind the modern mania for the phenomenon a human craving for immortality that—particularly in a secular age—fosters this mania. Both piquant and profound.” —Booklist *starred review*
“A dazzling voyage through the concept of time….Deeply philosophical and full of quirky humor—‘The universe is like a river. It flows. (Or it doesn’t, if you’re Plato.)’—Gleick’s journey through the fourth dimension is a marvelous mind bender.”—Publishers Weekly *starred review*
“Engaging…[Gleick’s] book resembles a salon where the guests include physicists (Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein), science-fiction writers (Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback and the inevitable Isaac Asimov), philosophers (Richard Taylor), logicians (Kurt Gödel) and scientist-philosophers (Arthur Eddington), among many other articulate souls. Their discussions draw upon the theater (Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”), TV series (“Doctor Who”) and movies (“La Jetée”), as well as books of philosophy and works in theoretical physics….Time Travel presents a great read—as well as a wide-ranging, rich list for further reading—for anyone intrigued by the scientific romance of time travel.” —The Washington Post
“Illuminating and entertaining….there isn’t a paragraph in Gleick’s book without good sentences and fascinating information.” —John Lanchester, The New York Review of Books
“Fascinating….Gleick’s hybrid of history, literary criticism, theoretical physics, and philosophical meditation is itself a time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey, and it works so well. Even though Gleick can elucidate complex ideas into accessible language, he’s even better at explicating notions that remain perplexing….Time Travel is as elegant and eloquent as it is edifying.” —Jonathan Russell Clark, The Millions
“The consummate temporal tour guide, Gleick deftly navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel, investigating its evolution in literature, exploring scientific principles that have hinted at or scotched the idea, and teasing apart the curious spell it cast across society with its suggestion of immortality….Intoxicating.” —The Guardian
“Far ranging, accessible, and witty, Time Travel tackles its elusive subject from unusual angles but with fine-tuned focus….Knowledgeable, curious and humane, Gleick proves to be the perfect tour guide for this mind-bending intellectual expedition into the past, present and future.” —San Antonio Express-News
“From Wells to Schrödinger to Twitter, [Gleick] doesn’t miss a beat, and he imparts a wry appreciation for humorous detail, making him one of the most enjoyable science writers in the field….Another fantastic contribution…from Gleick, whose lush storytelling will appeal to a wide range of audiences.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Mind-blowing . . . . A fascinating argument that the most important time is the present.” —TIME Magazine
“In Time Travel, James Gleick provides an absorbing history of the idea, eloquently elucidating the reasons for its enduring appeal…. Within physics, Gleick captures some of the intellectual ferment in his account of the debate about whether time is an illusion. Within literature, he’s particularly incisive in his account of alternative histories, which originated as an accident of time travel.” —New Scientist
“Gleick is particularly well equipped to explore how the idea of time travel evolved across the past century in science, literature, technology and philosophy. Far-ranging, lucid, accessible and witty, 'Time Travel' tackles its elusive subject from unusual angles but with fine-tuned focus.” —SF Gate
“Dazzling.” —The Boston Globe, “Best Books of 2016”
“Isaac Newton’s biographer takes a smart, scholarly look at this science fiction staple. With a little help from Gleick, you might finally understand Interstellar.” —Esquire Magazine, "Nine Books That You Need To Know"
“A brilliant, wise, insightful and mind-boggling look at the nature of time.” —The Missourian
“A pleasurable romp over Wells’s fourth dimension and polished Victorian machinery; ‘golden age’ science-fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, who provided the templates for modern treatments of time travel; and the Doctor Who franchise. Gleick also explores more highbrow offerings from writers such as David Foster Wallace and Jorge Luis Borges (who envisaged time as a “Garden of Forking Paths”), and filmmaker Chris Marker, whose 1962 sci-fi short La Jetée inspired 1995 time-travel noir 12 Monkeys.” —Nature
“An engaging and entertaining look at science that will always remain fiction. It’s lucidly written, a breeze to read and erudite in assessing a vast range of literary and popular media treatments of time travel as dream and desire.” —Science News
“A whirling polymathic joy ride…It’s a work of history that, in its attempt to buck chronology, dissolves the illusory distinctions between science and art, theory and fiction. Gleick reveals a unified culture connected by existential questions and desires to escape the bounds of time and space….Time Travel is most delightful, and fun, when Gleick pulls the lever and connects Everett and Jorge Luis Borges; Isaac Asimov and Augustine; Robert Heinlein and David Foster Wallace; and other thinkers separated, merely, by time and space.” —Joshua Alvarez, Brooklyn Rail
“There’s much to commend….Anyone who picks up Time Travel: A History will find quotes and witticisms galore, a plethora of absorbing historical footnotes and trenchant observations on humanity’s relationship with time….A stunningly learned tour…Joyous.” —Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Tor.com
“Gorgeous.” —Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
“I thoroughly enjoyed it….An entertaining and informative read, and also a fantastic resource for anyone interested in time travel stories.” —Jonathan H. Liu, GeekDad.com
About the Author
JAMES GLEICK (around.com) is our leading chronicler of science and technology, the best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His books have been translated into thirty languages.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ONE
Machine
A man stands at the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods—a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, adds a drop of oil, and plants himself on the saddle. He grasps a lever with both hands. He is going on a journey. And by the way so are we. When he throws that lever, time breaks from its moorings.
The man is nondescript, almost devoid of features—“grey eyes” and a “pale face” and not much else. He lacks even a name. He is just the Time Traveller: “for so it will be convenient to speak of him.” Time and travel: no one had thought to join those words before now. And that machine? With its saddle and bars, it’s a fantasticated bicycle. The whole thing is the invention of a young enthusiast named Wells, who goes by his initials, H. G., because he thinks that sounds more serious than Herbert. His family calls him Bertie. He is trying to be a writer. He is a thoroughly modern man, a believer in socialism, free love, and bicycles. A proud member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, he rides up and down the Thames valley on a forty-pounder with tubular frame and pneumatic tires, savoring the thrill of riding his machine: “A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go.” At some point he sees a printed advertisement for a contraption called Hacker’s Home Bicycle: a stationary stand with rubber wheels to let a person pedal for exercise without going anywhere. Anywhere through space, that is. The wheels go round and time goes by.
The turn of the twentieth century loomed—a calendar date with apocalyptic resonance. Albert Einstein was a boy at gymnasium in Munich. Not till 1908 would the Polish-German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his radical idea: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” H. G. Wells was there first, but unlike Minkowski, Wells was not trying to explain the universe. He was just trying to gin up a plausible-sounding plot device for a piece of fantastic storytelling.
Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn’t. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.
Why not before? And why now?
###
The time traveller begins with a science lesson. Or is it just flummery? He gathers his friends around the drawing-room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. They are stock characters from central casting: the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Editor, the Journalist, the Silent Man, the Very Young Man, and the Provincial Mayor, plus everyone’s favorite straight man, “an argumentative person with red hair” named Filby.
“You must follow me carefully,” the Time Traveller instructs these stick figures. “I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, that they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.” School geometry—Euclid’s geometry—had three dimensions, the ones we can see: length, width, and height.
Naturally they are dubious. The Time Traveller proceeds Socratically. He batters them with logic. They put up feeble resistance.
“You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”
“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.
“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”
“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—”
“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”
“Don’t follow you,” said Filby [the poor sap].
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”
Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.”
###
Aha! The fourth dimension. A few clever Continental mathematicians were already talking as though Euclid’s three dimensions were not the be-all and end-all. There was August Möbius, whose famous “strip” was a two-dimensional surface making a twist through the third dimension, and Felix Klein, whose loopy “bottle” implied a fourth; there were Gauss and Riemann and Lobachevsky, all thinking, as it were, outside the box. For geometers the fourth dimension was an unknown direction at right angles to all our known directions. Can anyone visualize that? What direction is it? Even in the seventeenth century, the English mathematician John Wallis, recognizing the algebraic possibility of higher dimensions, called them “a Monster in Nature, less possible than a Chimaera or Centaure.” More and more, though, mathematics found use for concepts that lacked physical meaning. They could play their parts in an abstract world without necessarily describing features of reality.
Under the influence of these geometers, a schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott published his whimsical little novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in 1884, in which two-dimensional creatures try to wrap their minds around the possibility of a third; and in 1888 Charles Howard Hinton, a son-in-law of the logician George Boole, invented the word tesseract for the four-dimensional analogue of the cube. The four-dimensional space this object encloses he called hypervolume. He populated it with hypercones, hyper pyramids, and hyperspheres. Hinton titled his book, not very modestly, A New Era of Thought. He suggested that this mysterious, not-quite-visible fourth dimension might provide an answer to the mystery of consciousness. “We must be really four-dimensional creatures, or we could not think about four dimensions,” he reasoned. To make mental models of the world and of ourselves, we must have special brain molecules: “It may be that these brain molecules have the power of four-dimensional movement, and that they can go through four-dimensional movements and form four-dimensional structures.” For a while in Victorian England the fourth dimension served as a catchall, a hideaway for the mysterious, the unseen, the spiritual—anything that seemed to be lurking just out of sight. Heaven might be in the fourth dimension; after all, astronomers with their telescopes were not finding it overhead. The fourth dimension was a secret compartment for fantasists and occultists. “We are on the eve of the Fourth Dimension; that is what it is!” declared William T. Stead, a muckraking journalist who had been editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, in 1893. He explained that this could be expressed by mathematical formulas and could be imagined (“if you have a vivid imagination”) but could not actually be seen—anyway not “by mortal man.” It was a place “of which we catch glimpses now and then in those phenomena which are entirely unaccountable for by any law of three-dimensional space.” For example, clairvoyance. Also telepathy. He submitted his report to the Psychical Research Society for their further investigation. Nineteen years later he embarked on the Titanic and drowned at sea.
By comparison Wells is so sober, so simple. No mysticism for him—the fourth dimension is not a ghost world. It is not heaven, nor is it hell. It is time.
What is time? Time is nothing but one more direction, orthogonal to the rest. As simple as that. It’s just that no one has been able to see it till now—till the Time Traveller. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh . . . we incline to overlook this fact,” he coolly explains. “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
In surprisingly short order this notion would become part of the orthodoxy of theoretical physics.
