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.)
Mathematical Circus (Spectrum)
The New York Times (08 October 2015)
of Finance and the Fall of American Business, from which this week’s cover story is adapted. She mounts a provocative argument: that capitalism has lost its way—and that it is in the interest of capitalists to lead the rescue party. Some of them already recognize the need, Rana says: “Many of the inanciers who supported this book as sources came of age in an earlier time, when inance really was a helpmeet to business rather than the other way around.” Among the signs that worry her is a pullback
order that inance has created, they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating what may be the next debt bubble to burst. You and I, whether we recognize it or not, are also part of a dysfunctional ecosystem that fuels shortterm thinking in business. The people who manage our retirement money—fund managers working for asset-management irms—are typically compensated for delivering returns over a year or less. That means they use their inancial clout (which is
sprawling overhaul, which begins on June 4, will shut down sections of track and snarl huge swaths of the system to catch up on critical maintenance. There are tens of thousands of old wooden rail ties to swap out, fasteners to replace and aging insulators that keep sparking. Sleeves on power cables are missing or dangerously eroded by leaks in the tunnels. Some of the original 1976 trains are still in use; new ones are buggy. There is also the problem of workplace culture, as seen in the
enrolled rose to 8.5% from 5.6% in 2014. (Among black students, the share climbed from 10.5 % to 16%.) These igures were the highest the survey had recorded since it began in 1967, stretching back from the eras of protests against the war in Iraq, the antiapartheid movement, the Kent State shootings and the draft. Yet for all its ubiquity and urgency, the year’s groundswell—following recent years’ campus actions on sexual assault and student debt—has managed only to bale the broader pub15
E L B U C H E R F O R T I M E ; P L A N E T: M . K O M M E S S E R — E S O IN MARCH 2007, A RETIRED FBI AGENT named Bob Levinson, fretting about his income and his relevance, lew to the Iranian island of Kish. There he had arranged to meet an AfricanAmerican convert to Islam known as Dawud Salahuddin, who had lived in Iran since 1980, the year he assassinated an enemy of the Islamic Republic in the foyer of a suburban Washington home. Levinson’s hope was to recruit Salahuddin as a spy, though