Time Travel: A History

by James Gleick Narrated by Rob Shapiro

Overview

“A time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey.” -The Millions
“A bracing swim in the waters of science, technology and fiction.” -Washington Post
“A thrilling journey of ideas.” -Boston Globe

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.

The story begins at the turn of the previous century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book and an international sensation: The Time Machine. It was an era when a host of forces was converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. James Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture-from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen. He investigates the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

(With a color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations throughout)*

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Anthony Doerr

Time Travel, like all of Gleick's work, is 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 into those Gordian knots I so loved as a boy…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…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.

Publishers Weekly - Audio

12/05/2016
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.)

From the Publisher

Exhilarating. . . . A veritable theme park of playful attractions, which Mr. Gleick explores with infectious gusto.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. . . . A wonderful reminder that the most potent time-traveling technology we have is also the oldest technology we have: storytelling.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Mind-blowing. . . . A fascinating argument that the most important time is the present.”
—TIME Magazine
 
“Illuminating and entertaining. . . . There isn’t a paragraph in Gleick’s book without good sentences and fascinating information.”
—The New York Review of Books

“A bracing swim in the waters of science, technology and fiction.”
—Washington Post
 
“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 Francisco Chronicle
 
“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.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
“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.”
—The Millions
 
“A brilliant, wise, insightful and mind-boggling look at the nature of time.”
—The Missourian
 
“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.’”
—The Atlantic, “The Best Books We Read in 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
 
“Intoxicating. . . . The consummate temporal tour guide, Gleick deftly navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel.”
—The Guardian
 
“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 pleasurable romp over Wells’s fourth dimension and polished Victorian machinery.”
—Nature
 
“A grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst. . . . 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.’”
—Brainpickings
 
“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

Library Journal

04/01/2016
A National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist multiple times over, Gleick returns with something that will appeal to lovers of sf as well. Starting with H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, written when the telegraph, the railroad, and the excavation of ancient cultures were rapidly changing our sense of the world's steady tick-tocking, he moves from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who as he tracks time travel as a relatively new and ever-evolving concept in human culture. With a 100,000-copy first printing and an eight-city tour.

OCTOBER 2016 - AudioFile

Does time move like a river, or is it more like an elevator? Is time the antithesis of eternity? Narrator Rob Shapiro provides an excellent reading with a blend of authority and wonder as author James Gleick attempts to answer these questions and more in his creative and entertaining survey of time-travel fiction and science. In particular, he compares the physics theories of Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman to the literature of David Foster Wallace, Robert Heinlein, and James Joyce. The audiobook also serves as a history of the science fiction genre (originally called “scientifiction”) and explains how the genre owes a debt to the innovative approach to time travel proposed in H.G. Wells’s TIME MACHINE. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171878160
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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