Time travel [a history]

Review by New York Times Review

I WAS 10 years old when my brother handed me Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" with the endorsement that it was "probably the raddest story ever." The action opens in 2055, and the United States has just elected a moderate presidential candidate named Keith over a strongman named Deutscher, "an anti-everything man for you, a militarist, Antichrist, anti-human, anti-intellectual." Hmmm. In the story a hubristic big-game hunter named Eckels pays Time Safari Inc. $10,000 to ride a time machine 60 million years back in time to shoot a rather vividly rendered T. rex. But there's a Red Riding Hood-style catch: Eckels must stay on "the Path," an antigravity sidewalk Time Safari Inc. has suspended over the jungle floor. Why? Because, the lead hunter explains, "the stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our Earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations." Eckels, of course, stumbles off the Path and squashes a butterfly, "a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time." When the hunting party gets back to the future, guess who the president-elect is? "Not that fool weakling Keith," declares the desk jockey at Time Safari Inc. "We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" (All of which makes one worry that a dino-hunter from 2055 has recently been mucking around in the underbrush of the Mesozoic.) At age 10,1 was gripped by Bradbury's dramatization. I read the story a half-dozen times, then stepped gingerly through the yard, wondering if every ant I squashed spelled doom for civilization in 3924. As I grew, so did the number of time travel stories I devoured. I watched Superman spin the Earth backward; I watched John Connor send a young soldier (who was somehow also his dad?) back in time to protect his mom from a Terminator; I watched Keanu Reeves offer Genghis Khan a Twinkie in Bill and Ted's (not so) Excellent Adventure. Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" made me long to wake in an era when my Casio wristwatch would strike folks as sorcery, and Martin Amis's "Time's Arrow" wrecked my assumption that all narratives had to proceed from Then to More-Recently-Than-Then. Indeed, as a world culture, we have indulged in so many time travel stories that, in 2011, China's State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television officially denounced them, charging that they sually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism and reincarnation." That's enough to start any storyteller building her time machine. Enter James Gleick's "Time Travel: A History." 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? "If you say," he writes, "that an activity wastes time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a sort of container, have you contradicted yourself?" (A footnote here: Gleick is a brilliant footnoter; never more than in this book have I been reminded of how footnotes can function as breaks in the time of a writer's sentences, wormholes in the space-time of a paragraph.) As in his 2011 exploration of information theory, "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," Gleick's greatest skill in "Time Travel" is to synthesize: He sees practice in theory, literature in science, Augustine in Rivka Galchen. If this new book can sometimes feel like a mind-smashing catalog of literary and filmic references to time travel, it's also a wonderful reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling. Read averse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby's Now; open a 1953 book by Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes with Eckels. Gleick's epigraph to his penultimate chapter comes from Ursula Le Guin: "Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time," and she's right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go. A reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology is storytelling. ANTHONY DOERR'S most recent book is "All the Light We Cannot See."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* 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 Russell surmounts; and puzzle over the reversibility of time in the physics with which Einstein revolutionized science. Though Gleick focuses on the time-travel stories and speculations that have proliferated since 1900, he draws insights from ancient figures Plato, Aristotle, the Buddha, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Augustine who plumbed the mystery of time's flow, eternity's stasis. Ancient fatalism contrasts sharply with the progressivism that defines the trajectory of history for modern thinkers and emboldens would-be time travelers who dream of improving a flawed past (Why not assassinate Hitler in 1935?). Yet as he probes a twenty-first-century cyberworld blending past and future into an often-hallucinatory present, Gleick wonders about the current meaning of time travel. 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.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Voice actor Shapiro chooses a conversational style of delivery for the audio edition of Gleick's mind-bending book on the cultural history of the concept of time and that concept's evolution in literature and science. Shapiro does an excellent job of relaying this in-depth look at the impossible. Given the complexity of the author's research, a narrator could easily fall into professorial lecturing or an exhaustive, ear-numbing exposition of complex concepts, but Shapiro, while keeping his pacing steady, uses cadence to help convey Gleick's complex ideas and manages to make his delivery upbeat and engaging. He mines the material for its humor and gives what he finds just the right smile-inducing spin. His smooth, confident narration makes the audiobook both entertaining and informative. A Pantheon hardcover. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science) examines the concept of time travel by means of a longitudinal review of fiction, science (especially physics and astronomy), philosophy, pop culture, and sociology. He begins in the late 19th century with H.G. Wells and his story of the time machine. This was not the first mention of time travel in literature, but it was the first time the idea of a time "machine" was offered. The work then moves on to more pragmatic aspects of time travel incorporating the laws of thermodynamics, Isaac Newton's work on gravity, and the concept of space and time being related. Addressing time capsules, going to the past and killing Hitler, speculative and historical fiction, alternative universes, the paradox of time travel, self-fulfilling prophecies, Isaac Azimov, Doctor Who, and quantum physics, the examination of the topic is vast and spectacular. Narrator Rob Shapiro's baritone lulls the reader into the vast arena of Gleick's mind. Shapiro is also able to convey the humor found throughout the book. VERDICT Fans of Gleick's previous works, scientific postulators, philosophers, and anyone interested in the topic and concept of time travel will find much to enjoy.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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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. Excerpted from Time Travel: A History by James Gleick All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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