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A review by hoboken
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
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.