Time Travel: A History

JAMES GLEICK (around) is our leading chronicler of science and technology, the best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His books have been translated into thirty languages.around

Within physics, Gleick captures some of the intellectual ferment in his account of the debate about whether time is an illusion. The consummate temporal tour guide, Gleick deftly navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel.” —The Guardian “An engaging and entertaining look at science that will always remain fiction. There isn’t a paragraph in Gleick’s book without good sentences and fascinating information.” —The New Yor

Aran Joseph Canes said Good read but unlike Gleick's earlier work. As usual, Gleick writes about his subject, the cultural phenomenon of interest in time travel, in a insightful and engaging manner. Fans of Gleick's earlier works, however, should know that this book is very different from its predecessors.In Chaos, Gleick described a branch of science that only graduate physics would encounter and explained it to a wider audience. While his work on information science was more wide-ranging it followed a similar pattern. Gleick's biographies of Feynman and Newton explained their contributions to science to those without a technical background.Time Travel, on the other hand, primarily focuses . Time And Its Fascinating Mysteries John D. Cofield As a teenager one of my favorite books was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. I would have given anything to be able to hop onto that Victorian bicycle-type machine, screw on the levers, and roar off into the distant future or ancient past. As James Gleick makes clear in this fascinating book, countless others have shared my dream, both before and after Wells' own time. Time Travel: A History is not an easy book to categorize: it is part scientific treatise, part philosophical musing, and part literary review. It is, however, an easy book with which to fall in love, one of those special though hard to define volumes that makes its. "a dizzying survey of time travel, time, memory, dreams, by way of literature, film, philosophy, and physics" according to David Evans. Time Travel: A History, could have been pretty short. After all, to quote physicist Stephen Hawking, "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."But instead of restricting himself to an examination of actual time travel, Gleick leads us through a history of the concept of time travel, which is strikingly modern. Before H.G. Wells, authors and their protagonists dreamt of the past and the future, but no one actually traveled there. Then we leap into a deep discussion of time itself, of memory, and of our dreams of the pa

Wells to Doctor Who, from Proust to Woody Allen. Best Books of 2016BOSTON GLOBE * THE ATLANTICFrom the acclaimed bestselling author of The Information and Chaos comes this enthralling history of time travel—a concept that has preoccupied physicists and storytellers over the course of the last century. James Gleick delivers a mind-bending exploration of time travel—from its origins in literature and science to its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick vividly explores physics, technology, philosophy, and art as each relates to time travel and tells the story of the concept's cultural evolutions—from H.G. He takes a close look at the porous boundary between science fiction and modern physics, and, finally, delves into what it all means in our own moment in time—the world of the instantaneous, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.