Time Travel

Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn't. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead, time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.

Basically, Time Travel by James Gleick is a big circular overview of how the evolving scientific understanding of the nature of “time” in the nineteenth century affected the imaginations of that era's novelists, who then invented the concept of time travel, and how these novels then inspired philosophers to further explore the nature of time (which affected the scientists who then inspired the next generation of novelists who introduced new quandaries for the philosophers: can you go back and kill Hitler or your own grandfather?) As Gleick attempts to cover the evolution of all three fields as regards time travel – scientific, literary, philosophical – this is a book crammed with references, and no one idea is explored with any real depth. But as this exploration was perfectly suited to my interests – and as a nonscientist/philosopher I was sometimes stretched to the limits of my own understanding – it was, for me, a perfect overview of the connections between these fields that I hadn't considered before. I found this book to be both entertaining and enlightening.

Despite Marcel Proust being mentally transported into the past by the scent of madeleines or Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle sleeping his way into the future, Gleick picks H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as the first true exploration of the notion that humans could be physically moved through “time” as though it was a distinct fourth dimension; a truly radical idea for the era, but which we now accept as a given. Over the years we've allowed storytellers to invent the science behind time travel (from Wells' steampunk contraption to a DeLorean's flux capacitor), or let them get away with using magical devices, or since we now tend to blandly accept time travel as a trope, the process can be dismissed simply as wibbly wobbly timey wimey...stuff. Building on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, quantum physicists have proven that at a subatomic level, time can indeed be reversed and particles sent into the past (and described as easily as changing the “t” in an equation to “-t”), and to the layperson, this has had the effect of making time travel seem plausible, when a hundred years ago it was the most radical idea imaginable. Gleick makes the point that simply by writing about time, novelists, scientists, and philosophers have changed our notion of the nature of time:

We have a tendency to take our words too seriously, which happens (paradoxically) when we are unconscious of them. Language offers a woefully meager set of choices for expressing what we need to express. Consider this sentence: “I haven't seen you for a [?] time.” Must the missing word be long? Then time is like a line or a distance – a measurable space. The language forces this upon us. Who was the first person to say that time “passes” or time “flows”? We are seldom conscious of the effect of language on our choice of metaphors, the effect of our metaphors on our sense of reality.

By thinking of time as a line that runs infinitely behind and in front of us, this led to the rise of fatalism – the idea that the future is as fixed as the past, and therefore free will is an illusion – and in the mid-twentieth century, this was the model that the novelists, scientists, and philosophers were all working from. (And it took the novelists to imagine the forking and branching that led to the currently acceptable notion of multiverses.) Neither the math nor the literary imagination could disprove the idea of a fixed (if infinitely branching) timeline, and I found it especially interesting that it was David Foster Wallace, in his honors thesis in Philosophy, who ultimately refuted the notion of fatalism:

Words represent things but the words are not the things. Fatalism is a philosophy built out of words, and ultimately its conclusions apply to words – not necessarily to reality.

Again and again, it was Gleick's circling from literary plot to scientific theory to philosophical “proofs” that I found so interesting, and I can accept that this exploration and this format may not have widespread appeal. In particular, I really appreciated the following perspective on the nature of consciousness as a followup to what I recently read in Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus:

Physicists have developed a love-hate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand it's none of their business – leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate the observer – the measurer, the accumulator of information – from the cool description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.

The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and continually compares these models to their predecessors. Whatever consciousness will turn out to be, it's not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the four-dimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamic system, occurring in time, evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and able as well to create anticipation for the future.

As I've written before, the nature of time has long been of particular interest to me, and Gleick's perspective – that it is the storytellers who both push the limits of the science and mold our understanding through the use of the words they use – was fascinating to me. As for the writing, it was satisfying enough for me to have ordered another book from Gleick.