But there aren’t! Time travel turns out to be a very new idea that essentially starts with H.G. And that it must always have been part of human culture, that there must be time travel Greek myths and Chinese legends. I assumed, as a person who always read sci-fi a lot when I was a kid, that time travel is an obvious idea we’re born knowing and fantasizing about. When does the idea of time travel first appear in the West? And how did it impact popular culture? All of these notions are aspects of a complicated subject that has no bumper sticker answer. We also think of time as a medium we are passing through every day, a river carrying us along. We think of time as something we waste, spend, or save, as if it’s a quantity. First, that we have a lot of contradictory ways of talking about time. I try to steer away from aphorisms and dictionary definitions, just to say two things. The physicist John Archibald Wheeler said, “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once.” If you look it up in a dictionary, you get stuff like, “The general term for the experience of duration.” But that’s just completely punting because what is duration? Over the past century-plus, we’ve learned a great deal. The best way to understand time is to recognize that we actually are very sophisticated about it. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” I think that is actually not a quip, but quite profound. Augustine said-and many people have said the same thing since, either quoting him consciously or unconsciously-“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know. Let’s cut right to the chase: What is time?
Speaking from his home in New York City, he recalls how Stephen Hawking once sent out invitations to a party that had already taken place why the Chinese government has branded time travel as “incorrect” and “frivolous” and how the idea of time travel is, ultimately, about our desire to defeat death. These are some of the ideas that bestselling author James Gleick explores in his thought-provoking new book, Time Travel: A History. What if we could travel back in time, we wonder, and change history? Assassinate Hitler or marry that high school sweetheart who dumped us? What if we could see what the future has in store? More than 50 scientific papers are published on time travel each year, and storytellers continually explore it-from Stephen King’s JFK assassination novel 11/22/63 to the steamy Outlander television series to Woody Allen’s comedy Midnight in Paris. Wells imagined that time was a fourth dimension-and Einstein confirmed it-the idea of time travel has captivated us.
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