National Post (National Edition)
Time travel has a short history
POPULARITY OF CONCEPT ROSE ALONGSIDE MODERN SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES
Afew months ago, the Baby Hitler thought experiment — if you could travel back in time and kill the future Fuehrer, would you? — was all the rage on social media. The New York Times even did a poll. For lovers of time travel stories, it was déjà vu, all over again. As James Gleick writes in his new book Time Travel: A History, the Baby Hitler meme dates to at least 1941. It has since become one of the most popular riffs on time travel, an almost certainly impossible fantasy that has been revisited by everyone from Doctor Who, Bill and Ted, Marty McFly, and Bill Murray in Groundhog Day to the Terminator, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, and Homer Simpson, with his time-travelling toaster.
Gleick’s thesis is that time travel is an exclusively modern reverie, brought about by scientific discoveries about the nature of time itself. When H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, the first science fiction time-travel story, it was “kicking to be born” out of the late Victorian English imagination, in which time had ceased to be a mere measure of duration, and become something more like a traversable “fourth dimension.” Soon after, physicists would introduce baffling new concepts such as space-time, wormholes and time dilation. Fiction never looked back. Even philosophers took grudging notice. Gleick spoke with the National Post’s Joseph Brean.
Q Much of your book is about language, its loose grasp on logic, and logic’s loose grasp on the real world. You say “time” is a word that “maps weirdly between languages,” and you poke fun at the dictionary definition of “a non-spatial continuum in which events occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.” Was it hard to write about such a slippery concept?
A I started off writing about time travel, about a genre of storytelling, let’s say, and very quickly, of course, I find myself forced to grapple with questions of what is time about. Because that’s the real reason for my book, a sense that our shared understanding of time underwent a kind of upheaval all during the last century. The literature of time travel was partly an occasion for the upheaval, partly a symptom of it. I’m not saying it was the cause, but it went hand in hand.
Q The Time Traveller in Wells’ story goes only into the future. But there is a choice, for time travellers, between “the costumed pageant of history or the techno-marvels to come,” as you put it. Culturally, what do people prefer now?
A I tend to think that choice is very much a matter of personal preference, and says something about one’s own character, tastes and sensibilities. But I also think there has definitely been a change in the way we think about the future. Beginning with H.G. Wells, people who imagined going to the future were often imagining dystopian futures. Wells was such an optimist that it’s almost surprising that The Time Machine paints such a grim picture of the future. What does seem to be disappearing at the moment is a sense that there’s a bright shiny future ahead of us and technology is going to solve all our problems.
Q Your earlier books, Chaos for example, described frontier science filled with promise. This book is as much about literature as it is about science, and you are clear that time travel is probably impossible. (Stephen Hawking claimed to demonstrate this by hosting a party for time travellers, but sending invitations out after it happened. No one showed up.) Were you concerned about spoiling the nerdy fun?
A I am a little worried that people might buy my book and be disappointed to grad- ually realize that I’m not that optimistic, to put it mildly, about the prospects. There’s also a range of ways of thinking about time travel on the part of physicists themselves. Some of them to my surprise are much more willing than sci-fi writers to take seriously the possibility that time travel is possible ... The physicists I like best are the ones who remember their models are only models, and they’re not necessarily telling us definitive things about the nature of reality, which continues to be somewhat elusive.
Q Is there another kind of story “kicking to be born” today? Something about evolution or DNA maybe? Or quantum physics?
A I still haven’t got past the point of thinking about time and futurity, all the more now because our sense of time and our sense of the future right now seems to be in a new kind of turmoil, much like the kind of turmoil I describe 100 years ago, but this one is new and different and I haven’t got it all figured out. So much of our lives are becoming virtual and are being lived through screens, and meanwhile our connections to other people involve, on the one hand, simultaneity and instantaneity of transmission, and on the other hand, a new sort of confusion about time, a new mingling of the past and the present. I haven’t finished worrying about it.