Time Travel. James Gleick

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      Children learn about “time whirlwinds” and “time-travel stones.” Homer Simpson accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine. No explanation is necessary. We’ve outgrown the need for professors expounding on the fourth dimension. What’s not to understand?

      China’s official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—“casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, use absurd tactics, and even promote feudalism, superstition, fatalism, and reincarnation.” Indeed. Global culture has absorbed the tropes of time travel. In The Onion, a photograph of a man with a futuristic-looking e-cigarette occasions an article about a time-traveling “soldier of fortune with off-world military training.” People can work out his whole story just by looking at him. “Judging by his cool, calm demeanor and the fact that he was inhaling what looked like e-fumes from some kind of shiny black mecha-cigarette, I’m just going to assume this guy has journeyed here from hundreds of years in the future to apprehend a dangerous digi-convict of some kind,” says an onlooker. “Imagine his knowledge of future events. He could probably share information about so many astounding secrets if we dared ask.” Others reckon his sunglasses hide advanced ocular cybernetics and that he’s traversing the space-time continuum armed with a pulse rifle or particle cannon. “Further sources speculated, with growing alarm, that the man’s very presence in the bar might somehow cause an irreversible temporal paradox of some kind.”

      Nor does time travel belong solely to popular culture. The time-travel meme is pervasive. Neuroscientists investigate “mental time travel,” more solemnly known as “chronesthesia.” Scholars can hardly broach the metaphysics of change and causality without discussing time travel and its paradoxes. Time travel forces its way into philosophy and infects modern physics.

      Have we spent the last century developing a lurid pipe dream? Have we lost touch with the simple truth about time? Or is it the other way around: perhaps the blinders have come off and we are finally evolving, as a species, an ability to understand the past and the future for what they are. We have learned a great deal about time, and only some of it from science.

      HOW STRANGE, then, to realize that time travel, the concept, is barely a century old. The term first occurs in English in 1914^fn1—a back-formation from Wells’s “Time Traveller.” Somehow humanity got by for thousands of years without asking, What if I could travel into the future? What would the world be like? What if I could travel into the past—could I change history? The questions didn’t arise.

      By now The Time Machine is one of those books you feel you must have read at some point, whether or not you actually did. You may have seen the 1960 movie, starring the matinee-handsome Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller (he needed a name, so they called him George) and featuring a machine that didn’t remind anyone of a bicycle. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called this time machine “an antique version of the flying saucer.” To me it looks like a rococo sort of sledge, with a plush red chair. Apparently I’m not the only one. “Everyone knows what a time machine looks like,” writes the physicist Sean Carroll: “something like a steampunk sled with a red velvet chair, flashing lights, and a giant spinning wheel on the back.” The movie also features the Time Traveller’s erstwhile companion, Weena, played by Yvette Mimieux as a languid peroxide blonde of the year 802701.

      George asks Weena whether her people think much about the past. “There is no past,” she informs him, with no discernible conviction. Do they wonder about the future? “There is no future.” She lives in the now, all right. Everyone has forgotten about fire, too, but luckily George brought some matches. “I’m only a tinkering mechanic,” he says modestly, but he’d like to fill her in on a few things.

      Motion picture technology, by the way, was just coming over the horizon when Wells wrote his fantasy, and he took note. (The bicycle was not the only modern machine from which he drew inspiration.) In 1879 the photographic stop-motion pioneer Eadweard Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope for projecting successive images to give the illusion of movement. They made visible an aspect of time never before seen. Thomas Edison followed with his kinetoscope and met in France with Étienne-Jules Marey, who was already creating la chronophotographie, followed soon after by Louis and Auguste Lumière and their cinématographe. By 1894, London was entertaining crowds at its first kinetoscope parlor in Oxford Street; Paris had one, too. So when the Time Traveller begins his voyage it looks like this:

      I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind … The twinkling succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye. Then, in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness.

      One way or another, the inventions of H. G. Wells color every time-travel story that followed. When you write about time travel, you either pay homage to The Time Machine or dodge its shadow. William Gibson, who would reinvent time travel yet again in the twenty-first century, was a boy when he encountered Wells’s story in a fifteen-cent Classics Illustrated comic book; by the time he saw the movie he felt he already owned it, “part of a personal and growing collection of alternate universes.”

      I had imagined this, for my own purposes, as geared in some achingly complex spheres-within-spheres way that I could never envision in operation … I suspected, without admitting it to myself, that time travel might be a magic on the order of being able to kiss one’s own elbow (which had seemed, initially, to be quite theoretically possible).

      In his seventy-seventh year Wells tried to recall how it came to him. He couldn’t. He needed a time machine for his own consciousness. He put it almost that way himself. His brain was stuck in its epoch. The instrument doing the recollecting was also the instrument to be recalled. “I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct the state of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 … I find it impossible to disentangle … The old ideas and impressions were made over in accordance with new material, they were used to make up the new equipment.” Yet if ever a story was kicking to be born, it was The Time Machine.

      It flowed from his pen in fits and starts over a period of years, beginning in 1888 as a fantasy called “The Chronic Argonauts,” serialized in three installments in the Science Schools Journal, a periodical Wells started himself at the Normal School. He rewrote it and threw it away at least twice. A few dramatic early bits survive: “Conceive me, the Time Traveller, the discoverer of Futurity”—futurity!—“clinging senseless to his Time Machine, choking with sobs & with the tears streaming down his face, full of a terrible fear that he would never see humanity again.”

      In 1894 he revived “that old corpse,” as it already seemed, for a series of seven anonymous pieces in the National Observer and then produced a nearly final version, at last called The Time Machine, for serial publication in the New Review. The hero was called Dr. Moses Nebogipfel, Ph.D., F.R.S., N.W.R., PAID—“a small-bodied, sallow-faced little man … aquiline nose, thin lips, high cheek-ridges, and pointed chin … his extreme leanness … large eager-looking grey eyes … phenomenally wide and high forehead.” СКАЧАТЬ