Time Travel

by James Gleick

  “O earth, what changes has thou seen!” wrote Tennyson. “The hills are shadows, and they flow / From form to form, and nothing stands.” Lately, too, there was a science called archeology—grave robbers and treasure hunters in the service of knowledge. Archeologists, digging, were exposing buried history. At Nineveh, at Pompeii, at Troy, vaults were opened; past civilizations appeared, frozen in stone, but lifelike. Archeological digs exposed diagrams ready-made, with time a visible dimension.

  Less obviously, people could see layers of time all around. Travelers riding in steam-driven railroad trains looked out their windows onto a landscape where oxen plowed the fields as they had done in medieval times, horses still hauled and harrowed, yet telegraph wires split the sky. This caused a new kind of confusion or dissociation. Call it temporal dissonance.

  Above all, modern time was irreversible, inexorable, and unrepeatable. Progress marched onward—a good thing, if you were a technological optimist. Cyclical time, crosswinds of time, eternal return, the wheel of life: these were romantic notions now, for poets and nostalgic philosophers.

  The Normal School, later renamed the Royal College of Science, was a lucky place for H. G., the youngest son of a shopkeeper and a former housemaid. As a teenager he had spent three unhappy years serving as a draper’s apprentice. Now, in the college’s new five-story elevator-equipped building, he studied elementary biology with (“under the shadow of”) Thomas H. Huxley, the famous Darwinian—a mighty intellectual liberator, Wells thought, bravely battling the priests and know-nothings, establishing the facts of evolution from painstakingly assembled fossil evidence and embryological material, filling up the “great jig-saw puzzle,” the confirmation of the tree of life. It was the most educational year of his life: “a grammar of form and a criticism of fact.” He had less use for the course in physics, of which he later remembered little but his own ineptitude in trying to contrive a barometer from some bits of brass and wood and glass tubing.

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  After finishing at the Normal School, he supported himself with some schoolteaching before “collapsing” (his word) into literary journalism. Here he found an outlet for the kind of high-flown scientific speculation he had enjoyed in the Debating Society. One essay for the Fortnightly Review, “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” grandly assessed “the series of dissolving views that we call the march of human thought.” His next, titled “The Universe Rigid,” was declared incomprehensible by the review’s formidable editor, Frank Harris, who summoned the twenty-four-year-old author to his office and tossed the manuscript into the trash bin. The Universe Rigid was a construct of four dimensions—like a block. It does not change over time, because time is already built in.

  The four-dimensional frame led as if by iron necessity to the Universe Rigid. If you believed in the laws of physics in those days—and the students of the Normal School in the nation of Newton most assuredly did—then apparently the future must be a strict consequence of the past. Wells proposed to design a “Universal Diagram” by which all phenomena would be logically deduced.

  One began with a uniformly distributed ether in the infinite space of those days and then displaced a particle. If there was a Universe rigid, and hitherto uniform, the character of the consequent world would depend entirely, I argued along strictly materialist lines, upon the velocity of this initial displacement.

  And then? Chaos!

  The disturbance would spread outward with ever increasing complication.

  Edgar Allan Poe, similarly inspired by scientific speculation, wrote in 1845, “As no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result.” In a story called “The Power of Words,” published in the Broadway Journal, he invents some angels who explain:

  We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and, in so doing, we gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended, till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth’s air, which thenceforth, and for ever, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. This fact the mathematicians of our globe well knew.

  The actual mathematician Poe had in mind was the arch-Newtonian Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, for whom the past and the future were nothing more or less than physical states, rigidly connected by the inexorable mechanics of the laws of physics. The present state of the universe (he wrote in 1814) is “the effect of its past and the cause of its future.” Here is the Universe Rigid:

  Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.

  Some people already believed in such an intelligence; they called it “God.” To Him nothing would be uncertain or unseen. Doubt is for us mortals. The future, as the past, would be present to His eyes. (Or would it? Perhaps God would be content to see creation unfold. Heaven’s virtues might include patience.)

  This one sentence by Laplace has more enduring life than the rest of his work combined. It pops up again and again in the philosophizing of the next two centuries. Whenever anyone starts talking about fate or free will or determinism, there is the marquis again. Jorge Luis Borges mentions his “fantasies”: “that the present state of the universe is, in theory, reducible to a formula, from which Someone could deduce the entire future and the entire past.”

  The Time Traveller invents “an omniscient observer”:

  To an omniscient observer there would be no forgotten past—no piece of time as it were that had dropped out of existence—and no blank future of things yet to be revealed. Perceiving all the present, an omniscient observer would likewise perceive all the past and all the inevitable future at the same time. Indeed, present and past and future would be without meaning to such an observer: he would always perceive exactly the same thing. He would see, as it were, a Rigid Universe filling space and time—a Universe in which things were always the same.*4

  “If ‘past’ meant anything,” he concludes, “it would mean looking in a certain direction; while ‘future’ meant looking the opposite way.”

  The Universe Rigid is a prison. Only the Time Traveller can call himself free.

  * * *

  *1 He defined free love as “the liberation of individual sexual conduct from social reproach and from legal controls and penalties.” And he “practised it tirelessly,” as David Lodge wrote.

  *2 Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.

  *3 Predating them by several decades, a science-fiction writer named Ray Cummings put those words into the mouth of a character called the Big Business Man in his 1922 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom. Later, Susan Sontag said (quoting “an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy”), “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”

  *4 This passage appears in an early serialized version in the New Review (volume 12, page 100) but not in the final book.

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  Fin de Siècle

  Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future. But your mind is more free. It can think, and is in the present. It can remember, and at once is in the past. It can imagine, and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your mind can travel through time!

  —Eric Frank Russell (1941)

  CAN YOU, citizen of the twenty-first century, recall when you first heard of time travel? I doubt it. Time travel is in the pop songs, the TV commercials, the wallpaper. From morning to night, children’s cartoons and adult fantasies invent and reinvent time machines, gates, do
orways, and windows, not to mention time ships and special closets, DeLoreans, and police boxes. Animated cartoons have been time traveling since 1925: in “Felix the Cat Trifles with Time,” Father Time agrees to send the unhappy Felix back to a faraway time inhabited by cavemen and dinosaurs. In a 1944 Looney Tunes episode, Elmer Fudd dreams his way into the future—“when you hear the sound of the gong it will be exactly 2000 AD”—where a newspaper headline reveals, “Smellevision Replaces Television.” By 1960 Rocky and His Friends was sending the dog Mr. Peabody and his adopted boy, Sherman, through the WABAC Machine to straighten out William Tell and Calamity Jane, and the next year Donald Duck made his first trip into prehistory, to invent the wheel. “Wayback Machine” became a thing, so a sitcom character says, “Dave, don’t mess with a man with a Wayback Machine—I can make it so you were never born.”

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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.

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  HOW STRANGE, then, to realize that time travel, the concept, is barely a century old. The term first occurs in English in 1914*1—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.�
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  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.” Nebogipfel turned into the Philosophical Inventor and then into the Time Traveller. But he did not so much evolve as fade. He lost his honorary initials and even his name; he shed all the lively word painting and became nondescript, a gray spectre.

  Naturally it seemed to Bertie that he was the one striving: learning his craft, shredding his drafts, rethinking and rewriting late into the night by the light of a paraffin lamp. He struggled, certainly. But let’s say instead that the story was in charge. The time for time travel had come. Donald Barthelme suggests we see the writer as “the work’s way of getting itself written, a sort of lightning rod for an accumulation of atmospheric disturbances, a St. Sebastian absorbing in his tattered breast the arrows of the Zeitgeist.” That may sound like a mystical metaphor or a bit of false modesty, but a lot of writers talk that way and they seem to mean it. Ann Beattie says Barthelme is giving away an inside secret: