Time Travel: A History

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.) 

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irst time, that face looks like the 44% of Londoners who are not white. Khan never set out to be a representative for his faith, but that is the role thrust upon him in a European capital where the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is real. British authorities say that at least 800 people have left the U.K. to ight for ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Nearly half of these largely young ighters have returned, “London is the greatest city in the world,” says Khan, “but we’re at a crossroads.” PHOTOGR APH

less fan favorite Glenn, believed devoured concerned about stretching out plot and by zombies, was revealed to be alive avoiding endings. After more than half thanks to an implausible escape. a decade on the air, Game of Thrones is The season ended with an unseen no longer inclined to show an onscreen character getting bludgeoned; surely death as jarring, random and decisive as in the interim, the show’s writers will a death in real life. igure out which of their characters are And so the show

loners are shipped of to a country hotel, where they must ind a suitable mate in 45 days—or else be turned into the animal of their choice (in Farrell’s case, a lobster) and released into the Woods, never to return to the City, where the civilized, coupled-of humans live. Farrell has another choice, though that one—involving an adventurous loner played by Rachel Weisz, part of a colony of militant singletons led by an amusingly tyrannical Léa Seydoux—has even thornier complications. Adamant

Harvard and Yale did away with the title “master.” And at more than 50 schools in all, student protesters made demands—for greater faculty diversity, new courses, public apologies, administrators’ ousting. It’s been half a century since we’ve seen U.S. schools so roiled. The latest results from a long-running annual UCLA study, published in February, quantiied the phenomenon. The share of freshmen nationwide who said there was a “very good chance” they would participate in a protest while

likely to take of and spread now than in the past because it’s easier for it to move.” Yet writing deinitions remains a methodical exercise in observation and distillation. “We have to wait for words to settle both in meaning and pronunciation,” says Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster. “And those things take time.” So while dictionary makers may rightly wait years before giving a new word the full treatment, other experts are trying to give the reading public something

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