The Best Science Books of 2016
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1.
TIME TRAVEL
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Time
Travel: A History by science historian and
writer extraordinaire James Gleick, another rare enchanter of
science, is not a “science book” per se, in that although it draws heavily on
the history of twentieth-century science and quantum physics in particular (as
well as on millennia of philosophy), it is a decidedly literary inquiry into
our temporal imagination — why we think about time, why its directionality
troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the
deepest mysteries of our consciousness. I consider it a
grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents,
and literature as the catalyst.
Gleick, who examined the
origin of our modern anxiety about time with
remarkable prescience nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion
of time travel to H.G. Wells’s 1895 masterpiece The
Time Machine. Although Wells — like Gleick, like any
reputable physicist — knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he
created an aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and which has
since shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick argues that the art this
aesthetic produced — an entire canon of time travel literature and film — not
only permeated popular culture but even influenced some of the greatest
scientific minds of the past century, including Stephen
Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time
travelers and when no one showed up considered the impossibility of time travel
proven, and John
Archibald Wheeler, who popularized
the term “black hole” and coined “wormhole,” both key tropes
of time travel literature.
Gleick considers how a scientific
impossibility can become such fertile ground for the artistic imagination:
Why do we need time travel, when we
already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For
nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To
counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning
to end.
Wells’s Time
Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human
relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the
electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life
science of Darwin, the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection
of clocks. When the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and
philosophers were primed to understand time in a new way. And so were we all.
Time travel bloomed in the culture, its loops and twists and paradoxes.
Brain Pickings
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