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)
Entertainment Weekly (20 May 2016)
Mathematical Circus (Spectrum)
modern audience, Wolfe decided, was the show’s original book—a patchy story about a local political race, which is used mainly as a pretext for the musical numbers and vaudeville-style comedy bits. (Two short-lived Broadway revivals of Shule Along, in 1933 and 1952, reworked the S H U F F L E A L O N G : J U L I E TA C E R VA N T E S; W A I T R E S S : J O A N M A R C U S; D E A R E VA N H A N S E N : M AT T H E W M U R P H Y; A M E R I C A N P S YC H O : J E R E M Y D A N I E L book
increasingly imperiled—a denouement neatly encapsulated in the astringent climactic number, “They Won’t Remember You!” “What the show is ultimately about to me is that everybody wants to be remembered,” says Wolfe. “Remembered for having done something that mattered. I was deeply afected by the idea that these people, the best part of them, made something glorious, and none of them were able to duplicate that success ever again. I found that very moving. And I found it even more moving that
art, including The Lightning Field, a grid of 400 lightning rods on a high plain in New Mexico IT’S O.K. IF YOU’RE READING this on a screen. The medium matters less than expected for a book called Paper, according to Mark Kurlansky, master of the mononymous title (Cod, Salt). In popular legend, paper was invented in 105 C.E. by Cai Lun, a eunuch in the Chinese court, and over the next 2,000 years spread ideas and changed the world, thanks largely to Gutenberg. Kurlansky says that’s all wrong—and
headquarters rivals the White House’s Domestic Policy Council. That doesn’t mean Clinton’s team is conident of victory. Far from it. But its leaders have settled into a governing-over-glamour plan in a way that Trump’s Republican rivals never did, and the candidate has far more discipline and a thicker skin than any of the 16 whom Trump vanquished. Before the bakery visit, her economic advisers were on a conference call explaining to reporters why Trump’s economic plan wouldn’t work. It wasn’t
Grieve, a linguist at the U.K.’s Aston University, says that thanks to the web, new words can travel faster and existing ones can quickly become new obsessions. Here are a few examples: 20 TIME May 23, 2016 Baeless (bey’-les) On leek (awn fleek) Tookah (took’-uh) Single; without a mate On point; looking good Marijuana; Mary Jane; weed; pot I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y T O M A S Z W A L E N TA F O R T I M E PEACHES MONROEE WAS A YOUNG woman of no particular fame when she posted a video