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A review by chaosmavin
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
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."