Time Travel. A History

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK

Chaos: Making a New Science

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier

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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Copyright © 2016 by James Gleick

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Gleick, James.

Title: Time travel / James Gleick.

Description: New York : Pantheon Books [2016]

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002323. ISBN 9780307908797 (hardcover). ISBN 9780307908803 (ebook). ISBN 9780375715204 (open market).

Subjects: LCSH: Space and time—Popular works. Time travel—Popular works.

Classification: LCC QC173.59.S65 G54 2016. DDC 530.11—dc23. LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016002323

Ebook ISBN 9780307908803

www.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket by Peter Mendelsund

v4.1_r1

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To Beth, Donen,

and Harry

Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?

—Charles Lamb (1817)

The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels.

—Marcel Proust (1927?)

And tomorrow

Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.

—W. H. Auden (1936)

Contents

Cover

Also by James Gleick

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One: Machine

Chapter Two: Fin de Siècle

Chapter Three: Philosophers and Pulps

Chapter Four: Ancient Light

Chapter Five: By Your Bootstraps

Chapter Six: Arrow of Time

Chapter Seven: A River, a Path, a Maze

Chapter Eight: Eternity

Chapter Nine: Buried Time

Chapter Ten: Backward

Chapter Eleven: The Paradoxes

Chapter Twelve: What Is Time?

Chapter Thirteen: Our Only Boat

Chapter Fourteen: Presently

Acknowledgments

Sources and Further Reading

Illustration Credits

About the Author

ONE

Machine

Being young, I was skeptical 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.