The Greatest Science Books of 2016
2.TIME TRAVEL
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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