Time Travel: A History
James Gleick
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0307908798
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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 civilizations, 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.
(With a color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
The New York Times (02 October 2015)
growth—via inancially oriented strategies like low interest rates, more and more consumer credit, tax-deferred debt inancing for businesses, and asset bubbles that make people feel richer than we really are, until they burst—is at an end. This pinch is particularly evident in the tumult many American businesses face. Lending to small business has fallen particularly sharply, as has the number of startup irms. In the early 1980s, new companies made up half of all U.S. businesses. For all the talk
plenty to talk about. □ 37 DERAILED AS THE NATION’S INFRASTRUCTURE CRUMBLES,WASHINGTON’S TRANSIT CHIEF BETS ON A NEW APPROACH BY ALEX ALTMAN P aul Wiedefeld knew Metro was a mess before he agreed to become its CEO. But it wasn’t until about a month into the job that he grasped the scale of the problems at Washington’s troubled transit agency. One morning late last year, he ducked into D.C.’s Union Station for a short ride to work. Nothing catastrophic had happened: there were no plumes of
everything from us, and nobody’s asking how,” his anguish rolls out in waves, the sound of year after year of just getting by. In the most wrenching scene—one that may be almost unbearable to watch if you’ve ever fought bitterly with a partner over money—a person he’s let down berates him with escalating, horrifying vitriol. Despair and shame cross his face like an eclipse snuing out the glow of the moon. You could call misguided (but hardly crazy) Kyle a Marxist-terrorist Robin Hood, a symbol of
Saudi Arabia’s reform plan is bold, modern and likely doomed By Ian Bremmer MILITARY A graduation photo of 16 female AfricanAmerican West Point cadets raising their fists in a racially charged salute was not in violation of the military’s restrictions on political expression, the U.S. Military Academy concluded after an investigation. TECHNOLOGY What Facebook isn’t telling you A new report from tech blog Gizmodo alleges that Facebook’s Trending feature is curated by humans, some of whom bury
network that may well be the dictionary of the future, one organized using the meanings of words, not their spellings. His database is part encyclopedia and part translator, in which terms come with illustrations—and will soon come with videos and animation. It includes entities as well as words, so a search for apple produces results that contain a picture of fruit as well as the ‘A new word is more likely to take of and spread now than in the past because it’s easier for it to move.’ JACK