“Time Travel’’ next limns the 20th century scientific revolutions that allowed researchers to ask seriously whether expeditions to the past or future might be possible, beginning in 1905, with Albert Einstein and his discovery that every observer measures his own time, that no two of us share the same moment. That grasp of the future as an undiscovered country gained power, he writes, during the Industrial Revolution, to be expressed by “the first true futurist” - Jules Verne - and then, more powerfully by Wells, until, Gleick argues, “e are all futurists now.” That, in his hands, is a history that begins with Gutenberg’s press, an invention that allowed us to preserve “our cultural memory in something visible, tangible, and shareable.” The creation of a record of experience, Gleick argues, enabled people to see the past as different from the present - and imagine that the future might be more than just a repeat of current experience. Wells published “The Time Machine’’ in which a traveler, equipped with a device that could carry him through what was just beginning to be called the fourth dimension, explored vast reaches of time.įrom there Gleick examines what he terms the discovery of the future. 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.The book follows a loosely chronological approach, beginning at the moment when, Gleick argues, the concept of time travel first entered the popular imagination.

He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, 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.

Time travel by james gleick