Scan barcode
aligrint's review
2.0
Gleick's 'Time Travel' includes one scene with a physicist rolling his eyes wearily, explaining that, yes, time travel is possible in the case of black holes, but that he would rather not talk about it. Unfortunately I felt like that guy when I was reading this book.
There are only so many times I can read that time is like 'a river', or read a paragraph-length biography of someone's life in order to support their two sentences of historical contribution. The historical viewpoint, too, gives the story a sort of interrupted flow. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to 'start from the beginning' but I wish that the physical approaches (time as a field, as a measure of entropy, as relative or absolute) were enumerated rather than unveiled one by one, deep in mostly unnecessary context.
This might sound like a review written by some guy who heard about time travel and wants a time machine as soon as possible, with as little interference as possible. And maybe I've worn out my nonfiction reading ability by overdosing on these mile-deep scientific/literary history books. But anyway, Time Travel seemed, well, like a lackluster use of my time, a book that tried to be too much in and of itself and that never really developed into anything or built on itself, perhaps like our thinking about time travel itself.
There are only so many times I can read that time is like 'a river', or read a paragraph-length biography of someone's life in order to support their two sentences of historical contribution. The historical viewpoint, too, gives the story a sort of interrupted flow. Sure, it makes a lot of sense to 'start from the beginning' but I wish that the physical approaches (time as a field, as a measure of entropy, as relative or absolute) were enumerated rather than unveiled one by one, deep in mostly unnecessary context.
This might sound like a review written by some guy who heard about time travel and wants a time machine as soon as possible, with as little interference as possible. And maybe I've worn out my nonfiction reading ability by overdosing on these mile-deep scientific/literary history books. But anyway, Time Travel seemed, well, like a lackluster use of my time, a book that tried to be too much in and of itself and that never really developed into anything or built on itself, perhaps like our thinking about time travel itself.
ac_church's review against another edition
3.0
Don't know what I expected really, but mostly it's a lot of physics and philosophy talk that went over my head and summaries of key time travel stories with a bit of additional commentary. I enjoyed Gleicks snappy ironic style, and a couple of first chapters, especially H.G. Wells' profile, but the middle of the book with long summaries of physics and philosophy debates of yore completely lost me. I'm drawn to sci-fi much more by the social commentary and the stories, not the hard science, and the moral, psychological, and existential implications of time travel are more interesting to me than endless and frankly pointless theories on what time is or how it works. Good book, but not for me.
chaosmavin's review against another edition
5.0
Amazing!!!!!! Loved this!!! It's essentially a combination of the historical amalgam of time travel through the literary, philosophical and actual science. It has reference to so many things I will now have to go back and read or watch...which put's Powell's Time Travel shelf to shame. Gleick is a pleasure to read with is easily digestable theoretical connections often made using the words of others to both illustrate and emphasize the point. If you dig time travel you def need to read this...I will leave you with one of my favorite passages:
“What times existed which were not brought into being by you?” Augustine asked the Lord in his Confessions. “In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come.” We mortals live in time, but God is beyond that. Timelessness is one of His best powers. Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end."We have our present moment, and God has a timescale distinct from ours and, indeed, beyond our imagining. Boethius seemed to say something of the kind in the sixth century: “Our ‘now,’ as though running time, produces a sempiternity, but the divine ‘now,’ being quite fixed, not moving itself and enduring, produces eternity.” Sempiternity is mere endlessness—duration without end. To get outside of time altogether, you need the real thing. “Eternity isn’t a long time,” the mythologist Joseph Campbell explained. “Eternity has nothing to do with time…. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.” Or as it is said in Revelations, “There shall be time no longer.” We might decide that the words outside of time are a trick of language. Is time a thing to get “outside of,” like a box, or a room, or a country—a place invisible to us mortals? In Corinthians it is written: For things which are seen, are temporal: but things which are not seen, are eternal."
“What times existed which were not brought into being by you?” Augustine asked the Lord in his Confessions. “In the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present, you are before all things past and transcend all things future, because they are still to come.” We mortals live in time, but God is beyond that. Timelessness is one of His best powers. Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His “now” encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end."We have our present moment, and God has a timescale distinct from ours and, indeed, beyond our imagining. Boethius seemed to say something of the kind in the sixth century: “Our ‘now,’ as though running time, produces a sempiternity, but the divine ‘now,’ being quite fixed, not moving itself and enduring, produces eternity.” Sempiternity is mere endlessness—duration without end. To get outside of time altogether, you need the real thing. “Eternity isn’t a long time,” the mythologist Joseph Campbell explained. “Eternity has nothing to do with time…. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.” Or as it is said in Revelations, “There shall be time no longer.” We might decide that the words outside of time are a trick of language. Is time a thing to get “outside of,” like a box, or a room, or a country—a place invisible to us mortals? In Corinthians it is written: For things which are seen, are temporal: but things which are not seen, are eternal."
hahildebrand's review against another edition
4.0
I got a copy of this from Goodreads, which was nice, because I think I probably would have bought it anyway.
It's great - a thoroughly engrossing romp through time travel as envisioned and theorised through pop culture, science and philosophy. Eminently readable and thought-provoking.
It's great - a thoroughly engrossing romp through time travel as envisioned and theorised through pop culture, science and philosophy. Eminently readable and thought-provoking.
jetia13's review against another edition
3.0
i love time travel and all of its complications, but this was a little much.
archerisonline's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Read this as part of coursework for one of my university modules, and found a lot of it really interesting, but not entirely. Very subjective but I would have liked there to be less deep dive into the physics related to time travel, and a more streamlined focus on literature. Still, time travel is pretty cool ergo so is this book.
hoboken's review against another edition
5.0
Five stars. A tour de force of insight and connections. The physics, philosophy, literature, and paradoxes of time travel; poetry, essays, science fiction; scientists, writers, and crackpots. H.G.Wells of course, the man who started it, St. Augustine, Newton, Einstein, Hugo Gernsback—publisher of Amazing Stories, T.S.Eliot, Jose Luis Borges, Richard Feynman, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Charles Yu among many others and Schrödinger's cat, distilled through Gleick's elegant and clever writing.
What is time? Time is the fourth dimension. Time is a mental construct. Time comes first; eternity is created in our minds. It's impossible for any two things to be simultaneous. All Time is spread along a line equally accessible. The language we inherit at birth shapes our reality: it's been a long time, time like an ever rolling stream. Some cultures point to the front (where they can see) when talking about the past. What does it mean in English to move a meeting back?
What is memory? What is the memory of a memory? What about continuity? What about causation? “The never-ending effort to assemble a whole from a succession of instants is also the problem of identity. Are you the same person you used to be? How would you know?”
“Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one.” But the book contains multitudes.
What is time? Time is the fourth dimension. Time is a mental construct. Time comes first; eternity is created in our minds. It's impossible for any two things to be simultaneous. All Time is spread along a line equally accessible. The language we inherit at birth shapes our reality: it's been a long time, time like an ever rolling stream. Some cultures point to the front (where they can see) when talking about the past. What does it mean in English to move a meeting back?
What is memory? What is the memory of a memory? What about continuity? What about causation? “The never-ending effort to assemble a whole from a succession of instants is also the problem of identity. Are you the same person you used to be? How would you know?”
“Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one.” But the book contains multitudes.
stevenyenzer's review against another edition
3.0
The first half or so of Time Travel: A History is a perfect mix of science, science fiction, and philosophy, and Gleick manages high-level concepts with ease. Things start to slow down when he engages fully with pop culture, spending pages and pages digging into the plots of various time travel movies, books, and television shows. Ultimately worth the read but would have benefited from a little more focus.
andrejt's review against another edition
3.0
A short and mildly acidic history of the idea of time travel in the Western culture. Time travel is defined very broadly and includes things like time capsules or even memory. The book discusses mostly literature and to some extent film and philosophy. There's surprisingly little physics. It focuses mainly on the period since H. G. Wells, but there are a couple of digressions to St. Augustine, and such. 2.5 stars.