Time Travel: A History by James Gleick (PDF)

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Best Books of 2016BOSTON GLOBE * THE ATLANTICFrom the acclaimed bestselling author of The Information and Chaos comes this enthralling history of time travel—a concept that has preoccupied physicists and storytellers over the course of the last century. James Gleick delivers a mind-bending exploration of time travel—from its origins in literature and science to its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick vividly explores physics, technology, philosophy, and art as each relates to time travel and tells the story of the concept’s cultural evolutions—from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from Proust to Woody Allen. He takes a close look at the porous boundary between science fiction and modern physics, and, finally, delves into what it all means in our own moment in time—the world of the instantaneous, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

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Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐In 1895, a young struggling writer who earned his precarious living by writing short humorous pieces for London magazines, often published without a byline, buckled down and penned his first long work, a longish novella of some 33,000 words. When published, H. G. Wells’s

⭐would not only help to found a new literary genre—science fiction, but would introduce a entirely new concept to storytelling: time travel. Many of the themes of modern fiction can be traced to the myths of antiquity, but here was something entirely new: imagining a voyage to the future to see how current trends would develop, or back into the past, perhaps not just to observe history unfold and resolve its persistent mysteries, but possibly to change the past, opening the door to paradoxes which have been the subject not only of a multitude of subsequent stories but theories and speculation by serious scientists. So new was the concept of travel through time that the phrase “time travel” first appeared in the English language only in 1914, in a reference to Wells’s story.For much of human history, there was little concept of a linear progression of time. People lived lives much the same as those of their ancestors, and expected their descendants to inhabit much the same kind of world. Their lives seemed to be governed by a series of cycles: day and night, the phases of the Moon, the seasons, planting and harvesting, and successive generations of humans, rather than the ticking of an inexorable clock. Even great disruptive events such as wars, plagues, and natural disasters seemed to recur over time, even if not on a regular, predictable schedule. This led to the philosophical view of “eternal return”, which appears in many ancient cultures and in Western philosophy from Pythagoras to Neitzsche. In mathematics, the Poincaré recurrence theorem formally demonstrated that an isolated finite system will eventually (although possibly only after a time much longer than the age of the universe), return to a given state and repeat its evolution an infinite number of times.But nobody (except perhaps a philosopher) who had lived through the 19th century in Britain could really believe that. Over the space of a human lifetime, the world and the human condition had changed radically and seemed to be careening into a future difficult to envision. Steam power, railroads, industrialisation of manufacturing, the telegraph and telephone, electricity and the electric light, anaesthesia, antiseptics, steamships and global commerce, submarine cables and near-instantaneous international communications, had all remade the world. The idea of progress was not just an abstract concept of the Enlightenment, but something anybody could see all around them.But progress through what? In the fin de siècle milieu that Wells inhabited, through time: a scroll of history being written continually by new ideas, inventions, creative works, and the social changes flowing from these events which changed the future in profound and often unknowable ways. The intellectual landscape was fertile for utopian ideas, many of which Wells championed. Among the intellectual élite, the fourth dimension was much in vogue, often a fourth spatial dimension but also the concept of time as a dimension comparable to those of space. This concept first appears in the work of Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, but was fully fleshed out by Wells in The Time Machine: “ ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four dimensions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.’ ” But if we can move freely through the three spatial directions (although less so in the vertical in Wells’s day than the present), why cannot we also move back and forth in time, unshackling our consciousness and will from the tyranny of the timepiece just as the railroad, steamship, and telegraph had loosened the constraints of locality?Just ten years after The Time Machine, Einstein’s special theory of relativity resolved puzzles in electrodynamics and mechanics by demonstrating that time and space mixed depending upon the relative states of motion of observers. In 1908, Hermann Minkowski reformulated Einstein’s theory in terms of a four dimensional space-time. He declared, “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.” (Einstein was, initially, less than impressed with this view, calling it “überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit”: superfluous learnedness, but eventually accepted the perspective and made it central to his 1915 theory of gravitation.) But further, embedded within special relativity, was time travel—at least into the future.According to the equations of special relativity, which have been experimentally verified as precisely as anything in science and are fundamental to the operation of everyday technologies such as the Global Positioning System, a moving observer will measure time to flow more slowly than a stationary observer. We don’t observe this effect in everyday life because the phenomenon only becomes pronounced at velocities which are a substantial fraction of the speed of light, but even at the modest velocity of orbiting satellites, it cannot be neglected. Due to this effect of time dilation, if you had a space ship able to accelerate at a constant rate of one Earth gravity (people on board would experience the same gravity as they do while standing on the Earth’s surface), you would be able to travel from the Earth to the Andromeda galaxy and back to Earth, a distance of around four million light years, in a time, measured by the ship’s clock and your own subjective and biological perception of time, in less than six and a half years. But when you arrived back at the Earth, you’d discover that in its reference frame, more than four million years of time would have elapsed. What wonders would our descendants have accomplished in that distant future, or would they be digging for grubs with blunt sticks while living in a sustainable utopia having finally thrown off the shackles of race, class, and gender which make our present civilisation a living Hell?This is genuine time travel into the future and, although it’s far beyond our present technological capabilities, it violates no law of physics and, to a more modest yet still measurable degree, happens every time you travel in an automobile or airplane. But what about travel into the past? Travel into the future doesn’t pose any potential paradoxes. It’s entirely equivalent to going into hibernation and awaking after a long sleep—indeed, this is a frequently-used literary device in fiction depicting the future. Travel into the past is another thing entirely. For example, consider the grandfather paradox: suppose you have a time machine able to transport you into the past. You go back in time and kill your own grandfather (it’s never the grandmother—beats me). Then who are you, and how did you come into existence in the first place? The grandfather paradox exists whenever altering an event in the past changes conditions in the future so as to be inconsistent with the alteration of that event.Or consider the bootstrap paradox or causal loop. An elderly mathematician (say, age 39), having struggled for years and finally succeeded in proving a difficult theorem, travels back in time and provides a key hint to his twenty year old self to set him on the path to the proof—the same hint he remembers finding on his desk that morning so many years before. Where did the idea come from? In 1991, physicist David Deutsch demonstrated that a computer incorporating travel back in time (formally, a closed timelike curve) could solve NP problems in polynomial time. I wonder where he got that idea….All of this would be academic were time travel into the past just a figment of fictioneers’ imagination. This has been the view of many scientists, and the chronology protection conjecture asserts that the laws of physics conspire to prevent travel to the past which, in the words of a 1992 paper by Stephen Hawking, “makes the universe safe for historians.” But the laws of physics, as we understand them today, do not rule out travel into the past! Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, which so far has withstood every experimental test for over a century, admits solutions, such as the Gödel metric, discovered in 1949 by Einstein’s friend and colleague Kurt Gödel, which contain closed timelike curves. In the Gödel universe, which consists of a homogeneous sea of dust particles, rotating around a centre point and with a nonzero cosmological constant, it is possible, by travelling on a closed path and never reaching or exceeding the speed of light, to return to a point in one’s own past. Now, the Gödel solution is highly contrived, and there is no evidence that it describes the universe we actually inhabit, but the existence of such a solution leaves the door open that somewhere in the other exotica of general relativity such as spinning black holes, wormholes, naked singularities, or cosmic strings, there may be a loophole which allows travel into the past. If you discover one, could you please pop back and send me an E-mail about it before I finish this review?This book is far more about the literary and cultural history of time travel than scientific explorations of its possibility and consequences. Thinking about time travel forces one to confront questions which can usually be swept under the rug: is the future ours to change, or do we inhabit a block universe where our perception of time is just a delusion as the cursor of our consciousness sweeps out a path in a space-time whose future is entirely determined by its past? If we have free will, where does it come from, when according to the laws of physics the future can be computed entirely from the past? If we can change the future, why not the past? If we changed the past, would it change the present for those living in it, or create a fork in the time line along which a different history would develop? All of these speculations are rich veins to be mined in literature and drama, and are explored here. Many technical topics are discussed only briefly, if at all, for example the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory, which resolves a mystery in electrodynamics by positing a symmetrical solution to Maxwell’s equations in which the future influences the past just as the present influences the future. Gleick doesn’t go anywhere near experiments with retrocausality or the “presponse” experiments of investigators such as Dick Bierman and Dean Radin. I get it—pop culture beats woo-woo on the bestseller list.The question of time has puzzled people for millennia. Only recently have we thought seriously about travel in time and its implications for our place in the universe. Time travel has been, and will doubtless continue to be the source of speculation and entertainment, and this book is an excellent survey of its short history as a genre of fiction and the science upon which it is founded.

⭐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.

⭐My reading focus lately has been on the subject of time travel and physics. I just finished reading this 336-page soft cover book (Time Travel a history by James Gleick) and found it to be a somewhat interesting and only a fair read. In fact, I just reread the hardcover edition of this same book and my opinion has not changed concerning my rating.This book explores time travel from various perspectives. In its 14 chapters this book attempts to deal with its history in science fiction, to the physics of time travel and answers questions as to why humans are so fascinated with time travel.Topics in this book include Machine, Fin de Siecle, philosophers and pulps, ancient light, by your bootstraps, arrow of time, a river, a path, a maze, eternity, buried time, backward, the paradoxes, what is time, our only boat and presently.Even though I found this book somewhat informative; nevertheless, I would not call this book a fun read. In fact, at times it was boring, and this book is not as interesting as the many other books I have read on time travel.You may want to check out this book if you are doing some professional research on time travel, but if you are looking to be entertained as well as explore the physics of time travel there are many other books available to read.Rating: 3 Stars. Joseph J. Truncale (Author: The Mighty Pen: Your self-defense friend, Tactical use of the pen for self-defense).

⭐I purchased this book almost immediately after seeing it reviewed in the newspaper, not because the review was glowing but because it’s a subject that instantly appealed to me. The spectrum of books, movies, and tv shows that deal directly or indirectly with the “flow of time” provides rich pickings – Primer, Donnie Darko, Looper, Source Code, Edge of Tomorrow, Arrival, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately none of these are mentioned, and on the whole those sources that are – Back to the Future, Bill & Ted’s, The Terminator, Interstellar, 12 Monkeys – seem to be given a single sentence or a paragraph at most. There are several novels that get more attention (Proust, Gibson), but Gleick’s writing neither cast new angles on those that I’ve read nor inspired me to rush out and read those that I haven’t.Gleick is at his most engaging when talking about HG Wells’ The Time Machine, which he uses both as the starting point of the book and as the starting point of a “new mode of thought” about time. The central issue is that from hereon in the book is written more like a stream of consciousness, and without a strong coherent narrative I found it far less impactful than I had hoped. I am presuming that Gleick doesn’t feel that writing a book about time travel gives him a pass on providing a decent narrative. At times he even seems to contradict himself – one chapter starts by stating that time travel in fiction doesn’t usually incur physical symptoms such as discomfort or illness, and then he proceeds to name examples of exactly this phenomenon (there are numerous other books and movies that also contradict this).Despite all of the above, as a clearly intelligent man there is a light engagement to be had from Gleick’s flitting around the subject, like a conversation in which someone approaches a familiar subject from a different angle. Perhaps the reason I found this mildly underwhelming rather than refreshing or inspiring is that I think it could have been so much more – either as a a book about the science or as an in-depth cultural study. Another amazon reviewer supposes that readers who enjoy Proust may rate the book more highly, but that wasn’t my experience. I haven’t read Gleick’s other books, but there was little here to encourage me to do so.

⭐James Gleick is a wonderful raconteur. This book is less scientific inquiry than it is a survey of how writers and scientists toyed with the idea of time travel beginning with H.G. Wells. The only real omission is Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland predates The Time Machine and offers a far more engaging foray into the idea of time and space. Of course, other readers will probably find more omissions. Nevertheless, Gleick does a great job of moving back and forth and even sideways in time to show how different scientists and philosophers viewed time, notably Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel, who took walks together ruminating over whether time was a straight or curved line. Godel may have pushed the idea a bit too far for Einstein’s taste, but this is the way many physicists view time today. The question is whether time circles back on itself the way Godel imagined and disappears into space like the lines of a parabola. Along the way you get some interesting insights by Nabokov and Proust among other writers. Gleick also shows his sense of humor in referring to one of his favorite films, Groundhog Day. Gleick reveals his own skepticism of time travel, as he describes the various attempts to determine it empirically. This is a book anyone can relate to.

⭐This is a very unusual book – an exploration of time travel in our culture. Quite a cast of characters appear in these pages; Aristotle, Augustine, HG Wells, Jules Verne, Doctor Who, Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Kate Atkinson, to name just a few of philosophers, novelists, and scientists whose work has influenced the way we perceive of the possibility of time travel.This book looks at the literature, movies and science which have explored the possibilities – we have worm holes and Groundhog Day – in a very unusual style, which often feels as if the reader is listening to the author chatting about all that he knows about time travel.

⭐Did not find this a good read. Discursive, meandering and lacking in focus. This author can and usually doe much better. This one is an abberation.

⭐Well worth a read if you’ve an interest in time travel as a subject.

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