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Time Travel: A History

by James Gleick (Goodreads Author)

3.6 · Rating Details · 1,356 Ratings · 276 Reviews

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 ...more

Hardcover, 336 pages

Published September 27th 2016 by Pantheon Books

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Mar 16, 2017 Mike rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, history, reviewed, time-travel

Why is it so difficult—so degradingly difficult—to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue! —Vladimir Nabokov (1969)
Time is a funny thing, everyone knows what it is and no one can (easily) explain it. But that doesn't stop Gleick from taking a crack at it. Marshaling the collective resources of literature, science, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and religion he walks us down the many side streets an
Why is it so difficult—so degradingly difficult—to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue! —Vladimir Nabokov (1969)
Time is a funny thing, everyone knows what it is and no one can (easily) explain it. But that doesn't stop Gleick from taking a crack at it. Marshaling the collective resources of literature, science, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and religion he walks us down the many side streets and cul-de-sacs of this essential and mysterious...thing.

While ostensibly about Time Travel, this book is a much more comprehensive review of Time in general. He does, however, start off with THE time travel classis: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and puts it in its fascinating historical context:
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.
Strange to think such a pervasive idea in modern culture is so relatively young. Gleick walks the reader through some other noteworthy time travel stories and speaks about its place in the literary and popular culture landscape.

Then he gets to the interesting stuff: just what is this time we are traveling though and what does it even mean to time travel. As The Doctor put it:
"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually — from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint — it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff."
It is a difficult concept to grasp because it is so fundamental to the human experience. Physics might offer some keys but its conception of time may no job with how we experience it:
Perceiving all the present, an omniscient observer would likewise perceive all the past and all the inevitable future at the same time. Indeed, present and past and future would be without meaning to such an observer: he would always perceive exactly the same thing. He would see, as it were, a Rigid Universe filling space and time—a Universe in which things were always the same.
That, itself, leads into the question of free will and the nature of God:
For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end. But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think? Without sequential time, thought—a process—is hard to imagine. Consciousness requires time, it seems. It requires being in time.
Heavy stuff, let me tell you.

Gleick also delves into the cultural aspects of time and offers fascinating contrasts to how different cultures grapple with this concept:
The language forces this upon us. Who was the first person to say that time “passes” or time “flows”? We are seldom conscious of the effect of language on our choice of metaphors, the effect of our metaphors on our sense of reality. Usually we give the words no thought at all. When we do, we may well wonder what we’re really saying...

Other cultures have different geometries. Aymara speakers, in the Andes, point forward (where they can see) when talking about the past and gesture behind their backs when talking about the future...

The cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, a student of spatiotemporal metaphors and conceptual schemas, notes that some Australian aboriginal communities orient themselves by cardinal direction (north, south, east, west) rather than relative direction (left, right) and think of time as running east to west. (They have a strongly developed sense of direction, compared to more urban and indoor cultures.) Mandarin speakers often use vertical metaphors for time: 上 (shàng) means both above and earlier; 下 (xià) means below and next.
The history and study of time is both mind bending, confusing, and fascinating. We take so much for granted when it comes to time, but the way to influences us, both in the physical sense and in the cultural sense, is rather neat. Gleick does a very good job of synthesizing these disparate ideas into a comprehensible set of chapters while providing a near overwhelming set of quotes and sources to augment the discussion. While it can get a bit dry at times, the exploration of time and time travel is as rewarding as it is profound. ...more

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Oct 05, 2016 Jeremy Bagai rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

A disappointment, largely because I so love Gleick's earlier works (Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood in particular are magnificent), and also because I was (mis)led to expect an incisive and exacting comparison of the way Time Travel has been used in literature and movies -- a typography showing how TT mechanics differ between the movies Primer and Looper.

There is a hint of this. But it is so fleeting, in ...more

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Oct 12, 2016 Ruth Toner rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, essays

This was disappointing. Gleick's previous book, The Information, is one of the very few books I can actually say changed my view of the world, with its crystal clear explanations of diverse scientific and mathematical topics woven together into a compelling scientific whole. Time Travel, unfortunately, is neither clear nor coherent. In this case, Gleick weaves his way between the cultural history, scientific development, and philosophy of time. However, the book works neither as literary critici ...more

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Oct 15, 2016 Santiago Ortiz rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: work, science, science-fiction, technology, philosophy, audiobook, storytelling

Beautifully written essay, a flow of thought exuberant in clever ideas and witt quotes (“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”). It's not really a book about time travel, but a book about time, a book that travels time –through history, philosophy, physics, storytelling, logic.

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Mar 30, 2017 Vipassana rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

An interesting history on the idea of time travel and so, Time as well. What Gleick seems to suggest is that the idea of time travel has caused us to think about time with much more rigour. While, this history is intriguing, I couldn't help but think of a few other writers who could have tackled this subject better. His flow from one concept to the other seems disjointed at times. However, the ideas here about time in science, fiction and philosophy are a treat to read.

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Nov 19, 2016 Atila Iamarino rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fisica, literatura

Esperava um livro que falasse mais sobre o conceito de tempo, na linha do A Informação, o livro anterior do autor. Mas, como o título promete, é um livro mais voltado para viagem no tempo, como entendemos ou concebemos isso, principalmente através da literatura. Uma ótima reflexão, discussões pontuais sobre como entendemos o tempo e quem pensou a respeito, de escritores a físicos e filósofos, mas mais literário do que concreto ou conceitual. Vou procurar mais sobre com autores como o Sean Carrol ...more

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Oct 02, 2016 Shannon rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Dnf 60%
I thought is would be more philosophical and exploratory of time travel logic but its basically an anthology of story summaries.
If you are interested in a dry and factual retelling of every literary story and philosophical comment that has happened that involved time travel, this book is for you.

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Mar 07, 2017 Nooilforpacifists rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, lit-crit

Perhaps I read too much science fiction growing up, especially time travel stories. Perhaps I thought about the theories and paradoxes over-much on my own: see my review of "Dark Matter".

It's true, I forgot to use, as the classic example of the "impossibly theory", Adolf Hitler--half the mediocre time travel stories try (unsuccessfully) to kill Hitler. Stephen Fry's (awful) "Making History" is one such; it's also been done under the "multiple universes" theory, most notably in Alfred Bester's t ...more

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Jul 24, 2016 jeremy rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, gen-nonfiction

a cultural, scientific, and literary history of time travel, james gleick's new book is expansive, ever-engaging, and almost endlessly fascinating. tracing the origins of time travel (from conception to pop culture plot point), gleick enthusiastically chronicles all things time travel-related (including physics, technology, paradox, literature, film, philosophy, culture, futurism, and much more). time travel muses also on the nature of time and our very human relationship to it, exploring, too, ...more

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Dec 07, 2016 Muthuvel Deivendran rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: anthology

A verbose history of Time Travel in Science Fiction (almost 85℅) and in culture.

Book concentrates mostly on the perceptions of sci-fi authors on time, it's nature and possibility of Time travel, and the reality. Starting from H.G Wells, the book covers many works of authors like Asimov, Heinlein, Proust and many more. Also some glimpses on few physicists' and mathematicians' approach on paradoxes due time travel and possibilities of universes. Enjoyable at some level but not overwhelming.

Most of ...more

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Feb 10, 2017 Paul rated it it was ok

Shelves: history, science, philosophy

This is a really good long-form magazine essay unsuccessfully lengthened into a book. Technically, I didn't finish it. I made it about a third of the way through and realized that my enjoyment was decreasing and the redundancy in each chapter was increasing. Although technically unfinished, I'm marking this as "read" because I feel I received the entirety of the book's value in those first eight chapters (100 pages). It gets two stars, rather than the usual one for unfinished books, because the ...more

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Feb 28, 2017 Carlos rated it liked it · review of another edition

Very interesting book, but lacks cohesion and at some points tries to connect opposing point of views that don't end up coordinating. This book needs to be taken slow and with the previous understanding that all talk in it remains theoretical , no it's not going to tell you how to travel in time.... but it will give you all the mentions that time travel has had in the history of literature and media . Very interesting but a tad dry for a reader with no knowledge of theoretical physics.

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Apr 14, 2017 David rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-history

Available as a well-read and entertaining 10-hour audio download.

Although I enjoyed listening to this going to and from work, the bicycle repair shop, etc., I hesitate to recommend it outright.

It had lots of interesting ideas and cool bits. I especially liked the reflections on the plain fact that, although time travel in a vehicle as a concept was surely conceivable from before the time of the invention of writing, apparently no one really thought of it until H.G. Wells, thousands of years lat Available as a well-read and entertaining 10-hour audio download.

Although I enjoyed listening to this going to and from work, the bicycle repair shop, etc., I hesitate to recommend it outright.

It had lots of interesting ideas and cool bits. I especially liked the reflections on the plain fact that, although time travel in a vehicle as a concept was surely conceivable from before the time of the invention of writing, apparently no one really thought of it until H.G. Wells, thousands of years later. It seems like you didn't need the existence of machines to think of vehicular time travel. So why didn't anybody think of it? It seems especially strange now that you can no longer swing a digital dead cat around Amazon's best-seller list without hitting an .epub file detailing the adventures taken in some sort of box hurtling through the eons.

However, I also got the impression that the author got a decent-size advance, promised a book-length history of time travel, but then couldn't deliver. This is largely because, sorry kids, there is no time travel, no matter how appealing the possibility might appear to those of us who are finding the world as currently configured insufficiently rich in drama, justice, joy, adventure, or some combination of the preceding, but excessively rich in intimations of mortality.

In the absence of the real time travel deal, the author is condemned to chronicle the back and forth where popular fiction influences real science and back again. This is interesting, but it's hard to squeeze a really book-length book out of this as a topic, especially as the author has apparently received strict orders from the oppressive patriarchy not to mention the entire oeuvre of Connie Willis, a creative and prolific distaff practitioner of the genre.

But the back and forth where popular fiction etc is not quite enough to pad out a whole book, I fear, so I think the author got his friends over and, over a bottle of Knob Hill, asked them to wrack their brains for topics, however tangentially-related, that could be shoe-horned into this book. Hence, there is a long bit that says that flipping back and forth in a book is a type of time-travel, which is really isn't, sorry. Similarly, there is an especially ill-humored chapter where the sort of civic-minded boosters who propose, assemble, and bury time-capsules in the cornerstones of buildings come in for a sound tongue-lashing. Since most of these people are seemingly guilty of nothing worse than a sense of pride (justified or not) in where they are from and a human desire to preserve some small part of their personal experience from the oblivion which eventually engulfs all things, it seems simply mean-spirited to ridicule them just because their efforts are not particularly successful.

Briefly noted in the New Yorker, 19/26 December 2016 ...more

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Dec 05, 2016 Krista rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, 2016

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.

Basically, Time Travel by James Gleick is a big circular overview of how the evolving scientific understanding of the nature of “time” in

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.

Basically, Time Travel by James Gleick is a big circular overview of how the evolving scientific understanding of the nature of “time” in the nineteenth century affected the imaginations of that era's novelists, who then invented the concept of time travel, and how these novels then inspired philosophers to further explore the nature of time (which affected the scientists who then inspired the next generation of novelists who introduced new quandaries for the philosophers: can you go back and kill Hitler or your own grandfather?) As Gleick attempts to cover the evolution of all three fields as regards time travel – scientific, literary, philosophical – this is a book crammed with references, and no one idea is explored with any real depth. But as this exploration was perfectly suited to my interests – and as a nonscientist/philosopher I was sometimes stretched to the limits of my own understanding – it was, for me, a perfect overview of the connections between these fields that I hadn't considered before. I found this book to be both entertaining and enlightening.

Despite Marcel Proust being mentally transported into the past by the scent of madeleines or Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle sleeping his way into the future, Gleick picks H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as the first true exploration of the notion that humans could be physically moved through “time” as though it was a distinct fourth dimension; a truly radical idea for the era, but which we now accept as a given. Over the years we've allowed storytellers to invent the science behind time travel (from Wells' steampunk contraption to a DeLorean's flux capacitor), or let them get away with using magical devices, or since we now tend to blandly accept time travel as a trope, the process can be dismissed simply as wibbly wobbly timey wimey...stuff. Building on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, quantum physicists have proven that at a subatomic level, time can indeed be reversed and particles sent into the past (and described as easily as changing the “t” in an equation to “-t”), and to the layperson, this has had the effect of making time travel seem plausible, when a hundred years ago it was the most radical idea imaginable. Gleick makes the point that simply by writing about time, novelists, scientists, and philosophers have changed our notion of the nature of time:

We have a tendency to take our words too seriously, which happens (paradoxically) when we are unconscious of them. Language offers a woefully meager set of choices for expressing what we need to express. Consider this sentence: “I haven't seen you for a [?] time.” Must the missing word be long? Then time is like a line or a distance – a measurable space. The language forces this upon us. Who was the first person to say that time “passes” or time “flows”? We are seldom conscious of the effect of language on our choice of metaphors, the effect of our metaphors on our sense of reality.

By thinking of time as a line that runs infinitely behind and in front of us, this led to the rise of fatalism – the idea that the future is as fixed as the past, and therefore free will is an illusion – and in the mid-twentieth century, this was the model that the novelists, scientists, and philosophers were all working from. (And it took the novelists to imagine the forking and branching that led to the currently acceptable notion of multiverses.) Neither the math nor the literary imagination could disprove the idea of a fixed (if infinitely branching) timeline, and I found it especially interesting that it was David Foster Wallace, in his honors thesis in Philosophy, who ultimately refuted the notion of fatalism:

Words represent things but the words are not the things. Fatalism is a philosophy built out of words, and ultimately its conclusions apply to words – not necessarily to reality.

Again and again, it was Gleick's circling from literary plot to scientific theory to philosophical “proofs” that I found so interesting, and I can accept that this exploration and this format may not have widespread appeal. In particular, I really appreciated the following perspective on the nature of consciousness as a followup to what I recently read in Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus:

Physicists have developed a love-hate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand it's none of their business – leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate the observer – the measurer, the accumulator of information – from the cool description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.

The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models to their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it's not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamic system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.

As I've written before, the nature of time has long been of particular interest to me, and Gleick's perspective – that it is the storytellers who both push the limits of the science and mold our understanding through the use of the words they use – was fascinating to me. As for the writing, it was satisfying enough for me to have ordered another book from Gleick.
...more

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Feb 23, 2017 Brian Clegg rated it liked it

It's hard to imagine a topic that is more rife with paradoxes than time travel (or 'Time Trave' as this book's trying-too-hard cover design appears to call it), so it shouldn't be surprising that this book itself is a paradox. There are few subjects more dripping with potential for fun popular science than time travel - but this isn't a popular science book. It's true that there are few writers who can rival James Gleick when he's on form at writing a popular science title. But this isn't one. Q It's hard to imagine a topic that is more rife with paradoxes than time travel (or 'Time Trave' as this book's trying-too-hard cover design appears to call it), so it shouldn't be surprising that this book itself is a paradox. There are few subjects more dripping with potential for fun popular science than time travel - but this isn't a popular science book. It's true that there are few writers who can rival James Gleick when he's on form at writing a popular science title. But this isn't one. Quietly, without fuss, he announces that time travel is impossible. It's not real. It could be a very short book... but it isn't.

Perhaps I should have got a clue from the amount of time Gleick spends in the first two chapters on The Time Machine. Of course, it makes sense now. He's going to give us a rollicking exploration of the science fiction that has made time travel a part of our everyday lives and tell us more about the writers who've made it happen. But the book doesn't do that either. Although Gleick gives us a spot of biographical information on H. G. Wells, we hear hardly anything about the other SF writers he references - and, in the end, this isn't much of a book about the science fiction of time travel either.

Instead what we get is hand-waving philosophising, bringing together a pop-philosophy mix of time in our culture, pure philosophy and a spot of philosophy of science, considering whether physicists really do believe that time does not exist. It's verbose, waffly and hard work for little reward.

If you are into the likes of Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust and David Foster Wallace you will probably love this book. But if, like me, you find them overblown and unnecessary then it will be something of a penance. Here's a short extract to get a flavour of the style:
These physical objects, worn or broken by the years, were like bottles containing messages written by our ancestors, to tell us who they were. 'Antiquities are Historie defaced, or some remnants of History, which have casually escaped the shipwrack [sic] of time,' Roger Bacon had said. By 1900, London had surpassed Paris, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam as the world's centre of trade in antiquities...
If you read that and think, 'Wow, great prose,' this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, your pretentious twaddle detector goes off, avoid it. I'd also note that this is not the only example of something in the book that raised an eyebrow. Roger Bacon only wrote in Latin, so this is a translation, and why Gleick has used such an old fashioned one, other than to be quaint, is hard to understand.

This book will definitely divide readers - but as popular science I can't feel any love for it. ...more

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Jan 04, 2017 Jason rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've long believed that there is no such thing as white culture. What white people do, better than anyone in history, is curate. We are a group of people who appropriate, reorder and display the ideas of other cultures in an appealing way. This, interestingly, is why Kanye West is among the "whitest" of modern musicians. Enter James Gleick's Time Travel which, honestly, is the literary Life of Pablo. Gleick seamlessly weaves film, short stories, theoretical physics, pulp magazines and a wide arr ...more

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Feb 15, 2017 Mag rated it liked it · review of another edition

It was a somewhat enjoyable disappointment. If you feel like quasi philosophic discourse on the nature of time with very little science thrown in, then it's perfect. Rambling, meandering and erudite, the book cites many authors on the nature of time, yet provides surprisingly little information. Specifically on time travel, it discusses mainly the ideas science fiction authors, many of them scientists themselves, came up with. It treats reading books as a form of time travel, and Gleick mentions ...more

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Oct 24, 2016 Artur Coelho rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Depois do fortíssimo, profundo e fabuloso The Information, percebe-se que Gleick queira relaxar e dedicar-se a um tema mais leve. Isso explica as incongruências deste Time Travel, que apesar de ser interessante, não está ao nível a que Gleick nos habituou. Lê-se mais como longo ensaio literário, com Gleick a dissecar quer a literatura de FC quer o mainstream em busca dos indícios que formam as estruturas conceptuais do tema. Dá um pequeno salto à filosofia e ciência, mas é na literatura que mais ...more

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Nov 21, 2016 John Jr. rated it liked it

Shelves: science-history, cultural-history, literature-history-criticism, physics, astrophysics-cosmology

Here as elsewhere, James Gleick is the most elegant of companions. His tours take you places you probably wouldn’t have thought were related, much as James Burke did in his television series Connections . If this particular excursion feels a little more diffuse than others, that’s probably because Gleick’s subjects here—time, our scientific understanding of it, our view of history, our cultural fascination with ways of moving through time, whether in memory or through science fiction—are themse ...more

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Nov 02, 2016 Joachim Stoop added it · review of another edition

No rating. It would't be fair, 'cuz it wasn't what I expected and what I wanted to gain out of it

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Mar 25, 2017 Ersin Bactisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this book. It has lots of insights into people's thoughts concerning time. From scientists to scifi novelists and from philosophers to futurists. Time just flows while reading it. Sometimes it made me read paragraphs multiple times, just because some time concepts were so cool.

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Mar 12, 2017 John Lamb rated it really liked it · review of another edition

If you read a book in the woods, and forget most of it the next day, did it make a sound? I try to educate myself but if the end result is that I'm talking with a friend in a month and bring up this book and then flounder around for a bit with vague knowledge of Kip Thorne, Marcel Proust, and some cat in the box, then what was the point? In other words, how am I supposed to be a snob if I can't even remember what I am being a snob about? Maybe it is better to just carry the book around with the ...more

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Apr 21, 2017 Gary rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Why is there something rather than nothing? There is really no more fundamental question we ask ourselves as human beings. It might be a poorly formulated question but it gets at why we learn, why we listen to books at audible, and why we can believe Plato when he makes the statement "an unexamined life is not worth living". Sure we dance around with other variations of that question such as "what is the meaning of life", "what's my purpose" or "what is truth"? All the kinds of questions we ask Why is there something rather than nothing? There is really no more fundamental question we ask ourselves as human beings. It might be a poorly formulated question but it gets at why we learn, why we listen to books at audible, and why we can believe Plato when he makes the statement "an unexamined life is not worth living". Sure we dance around with other variations of that question such as "what is the meaning of life", "what's my purpose" or "what is truth"? All the kinds of questions we ask ourselves and gives us our purpose beyond ourselves. Time travel stories get at answering those kind of questions and this book connects the dots between that genre and those questions.

Fictional authors who describe time travel often have insight about the real problems concerning our existence. For 2400 years there's been a debate concerning "being" first posed by the pre-Socratics Heraclitus ("no man ever steps in the same river twice") and Parmenides ("there's only one substance in the universe" and it ain't you!). That debate was on the nature of 'Being' v. 'Becoming'. But, it has modern implications on the nature of Time, the now, identity, truth, being and reality . Einstein takes Time out of the universe with his block universe and Bergson want to keep it in with his psychological time. (The book brings these points up, but it doesn't mention that even Einstein would speak of his self proclaimed 'original sin' of tying the speed of light to a physical clock, and Karl Popper will tie Parmenides' "one" to Einstein's block universe).

Do we live in a deterministic universe or is there free will? That question gets at is there necessary existence or is there contingency around us, does cause always proceed effect or is there an Absolute Idea? As Hume is quoted to have said in this book, "we see the effect but we never can see the cause". What is the cause of the effect is not always obvious. Western thought and our science think in the terms of effect always is caused by something. Bertrand Russel, quoted in this book, is shown to have said that cause and effect are a convenient fiction of sorts, a way that science uses to explain the world but not necessarily understand the world. Eastern philosophical thought doesn't rely on cause and effect and the author will quote the Buddha and other Eastern thinkers to that effect. The East has a different perspective on the 'now' from the West. Time travel stories obviously delve into this and offer insights on how to think about the issues. The author connects the dots for the listener.

The now is never known except through the memories of the past and the expectations of the future. The more we embrace the now the less we can know of the forever. The nature of Time is elusive. Einstein takes it out of the universe. Others (just as smart) try to put it back into the universe. They make it an 'emergent property' of the universe itself, but never quite defining what emerges. Various time travel works of fiction get discussed while talking about these kind of topics within this book. Time travel stories allow for different takes on the eternal and what outside of time and space could mean. The author will connect the dots for the listener. He'll even bring in Marcel Proust and relate his masterpiece to time travel stories.

I think it's wrong when I see people call time travel books bunk because of the paradoxes. Absolute scientific knowledge about the real world is a fiction (science never proves anything it can just show something is not true). For example, force does not equal mass times acceleration. That was thought to be a bedrock, universal, necessary and certain statement until Einstein made his relativistic correction. There is a paradox at the core of understanding reality. One can even argue that the geocentric model is correct by constantly invoking auxiliary hypothesizes. The measurement problem in physics is real. The double slit experiment and Heisenberg uncertainty principal give us a violation of the second law of logic, the mutual exclusive law. Copenhagen Interpretation gives one resolution to the problem by making an observer necessary in order to collapse the wave function. Hugh Everret III takes it one step less by applying Ockham's Razor and eliminating an unnecessary entity, the observer, that leads to the Multi World Interpretation (MWI). There are other possible solutions, the book mentions a Bayesian solution, let your prior opinion of the past weigh your likelihood of the present and that determine your expectation of the future. All of these thoughts are in this book by way of explaining some time travel stories. I'm going to take it one thought further by stating why Bayesian is important. "All crows are black" is logically equivalent to "if it is not black then it is not a crow", so therefore, that non-black thing in front of you, say a white sheet of paper, is evidence in support of crows being black. Bayesian statistics is the only way I know how to discount that information appropriately. This book doesn't have that example, but it does speak about logic and necessity and contingency and possibility and impossibility and how we use paradoxes to get at truth and being.

Paradoxes are at the core of reason. Kierkegaard gets quoted to that effect in one of the chapter headings in this book. For a full explication of that I would recommend his "Fear and Trembling" available at audible. He'll describe how the contradictions within the story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac only make sense if you understand the absurdities entwined within the story, and that our life itself has an absurd nature surrounding it. Some of the absurdity is explained by our knowing the "now" and also knowing our finite nature in order to understand the infinite. The particular defines the general. We say cigarettes cause cancer, but we never say that a certain cigarette caused a specific person's cancer. (That example is in this book). We are made up of instances of the now, but we think of ourselves as selfsame. Time travel stories allow us to peek into the absurdity, the identity (selfsameness), and particular verse universal nature of reality. Each of these problems are illustrated within this book by time travel stories.

The book mentioned the movie "Predestination" (2015 with Ethan Hawke from a Robert Heinlein book). Of course, I ended up watching that film after I finished listening to this book. The movie really illustrates why time travel fiction can be so fun to indulge in. A lot of people reject time travel prima facie, they hate the grandfather paradox. They shouldn't. All models of the world will have the 'originary' problem. Some thing will always have to be the cause of itself. Aristotle pretty much just says that the universe was always there and will always be there, it is its own cause. Augustine (and St. Thomas Aquinas) will push the problem back and say the universe was created out of nothing ( 'ex nihilo') by a creator, but the creator was always there and always will be. The problem of something causing itself becomes obvious when we think about it in terms of our grandparents but when we consider 13.7 billion years ago we forget the problem is still there. In the end, for there to be a ground or foundation something will have to be a cause of itself, the 'ouroboros' (I think the author uses that word too) effect is present if you go back 13.7 billion years or 100 years. One just spots the paradox quicker when it happens to be their grandfather or themselves in the scenario.

Literature,in general, usually gives us insights into 'human being'. Everybody understands what the human experience means in some way. We have different opinions and beliefs but we all have an experience of existing. Time travel stories give us insights into just plain old 'being', and it takes us towards the variation of the question "why is there something rather than nothing", or in other words what is 'being'. This book connects some of the dots between time travel fiction and how they relate to issues within philosophy and science and explained to me why I've always watched time travel movies and TV shows when they come on and how they can give us insights into 'being', time, identity, the now, truth, and reality, not a mean feat for any book.

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Jan 09, 2017 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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I loved this! I found James Gleick's Time Travel: A History on a list of the best non-ficition/science books of 2016 and got me the audiobook for my then upcoming Christmas and NYE travels (through space, not time).
I might not want to go as far as labeling it a science book as such, but it is a engrossing mash up of literary discussion, philosophy, physics and cultural observation. Glieck digs into a good 150 years of sea changes in the conception of time, reality and consciousness in western sc ...more

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Jan 17, 2017 Jon rated it liked it

This is my first James Gleick book, and many Goodreads reviewers found it inferior to its predecessor, The Information. It was a bit of a disappointment for me too. It was fascinating and amazingly clear when discussing spacetime, Einstein, Godel,--I think I understand all that a little better than before--but well over half the book is spent in dry, boring plot summaries of sci-fi novels, short stories, movies, and TV shows. Complete with many spoilers, if you were planning to read or watch any ...more

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Jan 02, 2017 Brynn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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"Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once." (9)

"In imagining the future, the reader could also see what the present would look like when it had become the past." (30)

"It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time... Time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things." (76)

"Memory both is and is not our past. It is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade. If the time traveler meets herse ...more

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Jan 14, 2017 Autumn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I enjoyed the cultural aspects of this book, how time travel has been depicted in movies and books. I also enjoyed the parts where he discusses the possibility (or not) but it was a bit too scientific for my right-brain intelligence. I found it fascinating, but stuck on the verge of fully understanding.

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Apr 05, 2017 Jennifer rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: library

One of the most interesting aspects of James Gleick's Time Travel is the way he clarifies what a recent concept it is. Until H. G. Wells published his novel, very few people had conceived that such a thing might be possible, even if only in the mind. Gleick looks at this staple of science fiction and twentieth-century physics speculation, and considers the ways time travel has entered human thought. From Thorne and Hawking to Groundhog Day, it's a good starting point on the subject.

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Apr 14, 2017 Haley rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book opens with advent of time travel in literature, then tips into the big questions and physics surrounding it (definitely pressing the limits of my meager knowledge of physics), then back into more contemporary literature involving time travel. It was a good read but my favorite part was the bibliography - all these great, new-to-me books to read.

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Mar 30, 2017 D.L. Morrese rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Can we travel through time? Well, sure. We're doing it now at a rate of one minute per minute. But can we change our speed or turn around and go back the other way, and, if so, what are the implications? Time travel in this way is a fairly new idea, and in this book, James Gleick provides an entertaining survey of it in fiction, philosophy, and physics. I found it quite entertaining.

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About James Gleick

James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 ) ...more

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“China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—“casually” — 0 likes

“So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): “The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live.” We” — 0 likes

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