Back in time
WHY WE ACHE TO SEE BEYOND THE HORIZON OF OUR OWN TEMPORAL EXISTENCE
Time Travel: A History By James Gleick Pantheon 352 pp; $35.95
The clichés and tropes of time travel in popular culture are so worn, so tattered from use and abuse, it’s somewhat shocking to learn — or to be reminded — that the concept of sending a person through time via scientific means is barely a century old.
“H. G. Wells was there first, but not ... trying to explain the universe,” James Gleick writes near the beginning of his enthralling new book Time Travel: A History. “He was just trying to gin up a plausible- sounding plot device for a piece of fantastic storytelling.” That story, naturally enough, was The Time Machine, published serially by The New Review in early 1895. While Wells had dabbled with the idea of time travel in an earlier story, The Chronic Argonauts — and though a story by Edward Page Mitchell, The Clock That Ran Backwards, published in 1881, predates both of Wells’ works — it was The Time Machine that popularized the concept of time travel. It was also the genesis of the term itself, which as Gleick notes, “first occurs in English in 1914 — a back-formation from Wells’s ‘ Time Traveller’”, as well as many of the tropes and concepts which would “colour every timetravel story that followed.”
Over the course of the book Gleick — noted science writer and author of seminal works Chaos: Making a New Science and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood — explores not only the storytelling Wells’s novel shaped, but the rise of sciences and philosophies concerned with the nature of time itself. It’s no accident that The Time Machine appeared when it did: the Victorian era had seen a rise in abstract geometry, including explorations of the so-called “fourth dimension,” and philosophical inquiries into the nature of time, as well as the blurring of the terrain between the two ideas.
The exploration of the nature of time was, in the late 19th century, a relatively recent development according to Gleick. “No one bothered with the future in 1516,” he writes. “It was indistinguishable from the present.” The popular consciousness revolved instead around geography: “sailors were discovering remote places and strange peoples, so remote places served well for speculative authors spinning fantasies.” As he puts it, “Utopia was just a faraway island.” Time was a given, and not given much thought. People moved into the future one day at a time.
By the mid-19th century, though, along with the discoveries of Darwin and Newton and the birth of the age of standardized time (for consistency in train schedules and weather forecasting), notions of both an epochal past and a consistent progression into the future changed the way people viewed what they had once taken for granted. “Clocks reified time and then Newton made time — let’s say, official,” Gleick writes. Enter the Time Traveller, and, in short order, Einstein, Bergson, Bohr and Feynman, not to mention Borges, Stoppard, Bradbury, Proust and, yes, Doctor Who: all explorers of “the problem of time.”
Gleick is a graceful writer with a knack for synthesis and explanation. Few are able to shift so deftly between analyses of science and discussions of art, as if they are simply different aspects of the same concern, rather than deeply entrenched camps with separate traditions and languages — but Gleick makes it look easy.
Most significantly, though, he makes the discussion itself easy. Time Travel demonstrates his ability to explore even the most arcane concepts at an approachable, non- specialist level, pushing the limits of comprehension but careful not to push past them. As someone who over the last three decades has struggled multiple times to work through (and actually understand) Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time ( failing spectacularly), I’m always gratified, and relieved, to read Gleick.
This synthesis of science, philosophy and literature revolves around a seemingly unassailable truth: “Time travel as described by Wells and his many heirs is everywhere now, but it does not exist. It cannot.” This, of course, does not stop Gleick even as he states it, nor detract from the sheer joy on display in this book. In writing of the paradoxes and possibilities (of lack thereof ) to time travel, playfully rhapsodizing on the impossibility of defining time itself without resorting to circularity (which, to this reader’s eyes, is a lovely, poetic grace note to the whole field of inquiry), leaping headlong from theory to theory, speciality to speciality, Gleick captures — both in the text and in his approach to the text — the sheer imaginative force of the notion of time travel, along with the fundamental human yearning at its heart. Time Travel is a perfect companion and supplement to Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which is, among many other things, an exploration of the nature of time and the universe.)
Whether we are rooted most in physics, philosophy, psychology, literature, television or movies, we ache to leap into the future, to answer questions we have not yet thought to ask, to see, just for one moment, beyond the horizon of our own temporal existence. We may not be able to do so, but in Gleick we have an ideal fellow traveller.