Space,Culture,time travel,future,paradox,past,Borges,H.G.In his new book Time Travel: A History, James Gleick presents a valuable literary history of the idea of time travel while also highlighting the various paradoxes associated with the topic. The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future That’s what makes us human-the ability to live in the past and live in the future at the same time. That’s what I think time travel is good for. The idea of the ‘long now’ embraces the past and the future and asks us to think about the whole stretch of time. As I was working on the book I suddenly realized that that’s terrible advice. Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. To answer the last question of the evening, about how his views about time changed during the course of writing Time Travel, Gleick said: I thought I would conclude that the main thing to understand is: Enjoy the present. “Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction. Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. “We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said.

And what is your second choice? (Try it, reader.)

Gleick invited audience members to query themselves: If you could travel in time, would you go to the future or to the past? When exactly, and where exactly? And why.

Other authors soon explored travel to the past and countless paradoxes ranging from squashed butterflies that change later elections to advising one’s younger self. Wells thought of himself as a futurist, and like many at the end of the 19th century he was riveted by the idea of progress, so his fictional traveler headed toward the far future. “Science fiction is a way of working out ideas,” Gleick said. It soon became a hugely popular genre that shows no sign of abating more than a century later. Wells’s 1895 book The Time Machine, which created the idea of time travel.

Time travel a history by james gleick