James Gleick’s Time Travel riffs on the topics that might pop up in a serious bull session about time: eternity; memory; the theory of relativity; causation; personal identity (what makes me the same person today as yesterday); free will versus determinism; the subjective time of poets, novelists, and (some) philosophers versus the operational time of physicists (and other philosophers); time as a cycle, as an arrow, as an eternal recurrence; time travel and its paradoxes. It is in part a treasury of quotations. The opening chapters alone cite (among others) St. Augustine, Newton, Richard Feynman, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Susan Sontag, Saint Paul, Tennyson, Poe, Borges, and one of my favorite comedians, Stephen Wright: “Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”
The hook is the publication, in 1895, of H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine, the first story about traveling in time. Fiction had previously shown heroes, like Rip Van Winkle and Hank Morgan (the Connecticut Yankee), who one day found themselves in a different era. But they hadn’t gone adventuring. Gleick asks: Why then? What changed?
He’s full of suggestive anecdotes. There is no record, he says, of anyone celebrating the centennial of anything until Americans celebrated the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876. The phrase “turn of the century” didn’t exist before the twentieth. The idea of sending messages to the future, to inform them about ourselves, seems to have
