It wouldn’t be right to suggest that the book had anything so straightforwardly utilitarian as a bottom line, but the overall impression I got from it is that no one-least of all practitioners of the hard sciences-has any definitive answers on what time is, or in what sense it can actually be said to exist.

He examines it from every angle, bringing to bear a formidable array of analytical instruments-philosophy, poetry, physics, science fiction, and psychology. Cyclical time, crosswinds of time, eternal return, the wheel of life: these were romantic notions now, for poets and nostalgic philosophers.”īut Gleick’s real subject here, in fact, is not so much time travel as time itself, that slipperiest of subjective phenomena. Progress marched onward-a good thing, if you were a technological optimist. ( Time Travel’s initial chapters, in this sense, touch on some of the same subjects Gleick explored in his 1999 book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.) “Above all,” writes Gleick, “modern time was irreversible, inexorable, and unrepeatable. Where once the world had seemed immutable, a system of rigid social orders and immemorial cultural practices overseen by eternal gods, it was now subject to the transformational effect of technology.

The notion that time and space might be part of a contiguous phenomenon, Gleick writes, emerged at some point in the 19 th century, spurred on by developments in mathematical theory and applied technology: “Time became vivid, concrete, and spatial to anyone who saw the railroad smashing across distances on a coordinated schedule-coordinated by the electric telegraph, which was pinning time to the mat.”Ī variety of cultural factors-the impact of Darwinian evolutionary theory, for one thing, and the rate of societal and technological change brought about by the rise of capitalism-ushered in a modern notion of time as inherently bound up with progress: a distinct sense that the future would be even less like the present than the present was like the past. But it’s an idea that had been in the air for a while before Wells made it his own (and everyone else’s).

“Scientific people know very well,” Wells’ Time Traveller put it, “that Time is only a kind of Space.” This notion, which would soon progress from the fictional realm into the orthodoxy of theoretical physics, seemed to materialize out of nowhere, like a balls-naked Arnold Schwarzenegger at the start of The Terminator. Wells’ novel is the entry point of Time Travel, James Gleick’s absorbing and enlightening new book: the portal through which we embark on a cultural history of this most strange and familiar of fantasies.

Time Travel by James Gleick