Time travel - a history

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out of otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of Being young, I was sceptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would. -John Banville (2012) a man stands at the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods-a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, adds a drop of oil, and plants himself on the saddle. He grasps a lever with both hands. He is going on a journey. And by the way so are we. When he throws that lever, time breaks from its moorings. The man is nondescript, almost devoid of features-"grey eyes" and a "pale face" and not much else. He lacks even a name. He is just the Time Traveller: "for so it will be convenient to speak of him". Time and travel: no one had thought to join those words before now. And that machine? With its saddle and bars, it's a fantasticated bicycle. The whole thing is the invention of a young enthusiast named Wells, who goes by his initials, H. G., because he thinks that sounds \*This passage appears in an early serialized version in the New Review (volume 12, page 100) but not in the final book. TWO ## Fin de Siècle Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future. But your mind is more free. It can think, and is in the present. It can remember, and at once is in the past. It can imagine, and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time! -Eric Frank Russell (1941) can you, citizen of the twenty-first century, recall when you first heard of time travel? I doubt it. Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children's cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, doorways, and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans, and police boxes. Animated cartoons have been time traveling since 1925: in "Felix the Cat Trifles with Time", Father Time agrees to send the unhappy Felix back to a faraway time inhabited by cavemen and dinosaurs. In a 1944 Looney Tunes episode, Elmer Fudd dreams his way into the future-"when you hear the sound of the gong it will be exactly 2000 ad"-where a newspaper headline reveals, "Smellevision Replaces Television". By 1960 Rocky and His Friends was sending the dog Mr. Peabody and his adopted boy, Sherman, through the WABAC Machine to straighten out William Tell and Calamity Jane, and the next year Donald Duck made his first trip into prehistory, to invent the wheel. "Wayback Machine" became \*Per the Oxford English Dictionary. One precursor, though: in 1866, an English travel writer concluding a railway journey through Transylvania mused in the Cornhill Magazine, "This charm of traveling would become perfect if we could travel in time as well as in space-. . . take a fortnight in the fifteenth century, or, still more pleasant, a leap into the twenty-first. It is possible to accomplish this object more or less in imagination". Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H.G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological--the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture--from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future From the acclaimed author of 'The Information' and 'Chaos', this is a mind-bending exploration of time travel. Gleick examines its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself. The story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H.G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological - the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilisations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture - from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself. Een korte geschiedenis van het (denken over) tijdreizen vanuit de literatuur, filosofie, logica, taalkunde en psychologie. NL-ZmNBD