Time Travel

by James Gleick

  Gernsback was an extraordinary person: a self-made inventor, an entrepreneur, and what people of a later time would term a bullshit artist. Around town he wore expensively tailored suits, used a monocle to examine the wine lists of expensive restaurants, and ran nimbly from creditors. When one of his magazines failed, two more would rise up. Radio News was not destined to be the most influential of his magazines, nor was Sexology, the “Illustrated Magazine of Sex Science.” The Gernsback creation that mattered most to future history was a so-called pulp magazine—named for its cheap wood-pulp paper—sold for twenty-five cents an issue, called Amazing Stories. Its rough pages made room for a variety of advertisements: “450 Miles on a Gallon of Gas,” free sample from Whirlwind Mfg. Co. of Milwaukee; “Correct Your Nose, shapes flesh and cartilage while you sleep, 30 Day Trial Offer, Free Booklet”; and “New Scientific Wonder: X-Ray Curio, Boys, Big Fun, You apparently see thru Clothes, Wood, Stone, any object. See Bones in Flesh, price 10¢.” He found a ready market for what he was selling. He lectured to New York audiences about the marvels of the future and broadcast his lectures live on WRNY, and the New York Times reported them breathlessly. “Science will find ways to transmit tons of coal by radio, facilitate foot traffic by electrically propelled roller skates, save electric current by cold light and grow and harvest crops electrically, according to a forecast of the next fifty years made by Hugo Gernsback,” the paper declared in 1926. Weather control would be complete, and city skyscrapers would all have flat tops for landing airplanes.

  Huge high frequency electric current structures, placed on top of our largest buildings, will either dispel threatening rain, or, if necessary, produce rain as needed, during the hot spells or during the night….We may soon expect fantastic towers piercing the sky and giving off weird purple glows at night when energized….Fifty years hence you will be able to see what is going on in your favorite broadcast station, and you will meet your favorite singer face to face. You will watch the Dempsey of fifty years hence battle with his Tunney, whether you are on board an airship or away in the wilds of Africa, or such wilds as still exist.

  By the end of his life he had eighty patents to his name. He anticipated radar as early as 1911.

  Then again, he arranged what he claimed was the first-ever “entirely successful” test of hypnotism by radio: the hypnotist, Joseph Dunninger, who also served as head of the department of magic for Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine, put a subject named Leslie B. Duncan into a trance from a distance of ten miles. The Times reported that, too: “Duncan’s body was then placed over two chairs, forming a human bridge, and Joseph H. Kraus, field editor of Science and Invention, was able to sit on the improvised bridge.”

  All this came under the rubric of fact. For fiction, he had Amazing Stories.

  Beginning in April 1926, Amazing Stories was the first periodical solely devoted to a genre that did not, until this moment, have a name. In Paris in 1902, Alfred Jarry wrote an admiring essay about the “scientific novel” or “hypothetical novel”—the novel that asks, “What if…?” The hypothetical novel might later prove futuristic, he suggested, depending on the future. Maurice Renard, a practitioner himself, declared this a whole new genre, which he called “the scientific-marvelous novel” (le roman merveilleux scientifique). “I say a new genre,” he wrote in Le Spectateur; after all, genre was a French word. “Until Wells,” he added, “one might well have doubted it.”

  Credit 3.2

  Gernsback dubbed it “scientifiction.” “By ‘scientifiction,’ ” he wrote in the first issue, “I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” He had published quite a few of these before, even in Radio News, and had written a serial novel of his own, Ralph 124C*4 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (self-published in his Modern Electrics magazine and described by Martin Gardner much later as “surely the worst SF novel ever written”).*5 It took just a few more years for “scientifiction” to become “science fiction.” Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in one of his bankruptcies, but the magazine continued for almost eighty years and helped define the genre. “Extravagant Fiction Today—Cold Fact Tomorrow” was the magazine’s motto.

  “Let it be understood,” Gernsback wrote in a short treatise for would-be writers, “that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story….It must be reasonable and logical and must be based upon known scientific principles.”*6 In the first issues of Amazing Stories he reprinted Verne, Wells, and Poe, along with Murray Leinster’s “Runaway Skyscraper.” In the second year he reprinted the entire Time Machine. He didn’t bother paying for these reprints. He offered writers twenty-five dollars for original stories, but they often had trouble collecting. As part of his tireless promotion of the genre, Gernsback founded a fan organization, the Science Fiction League, with chapters in three countries.

  So the idea of science fiction as a genre, distinct from literary fiction and presumably inferior, was born here, in trashy magazines barely distinguishable from the funnies or pornography. Yet so was a cultural form, a way of thinking, that soon could not be dismissed as trash. “I can just suggest,” wrote Kingsley Amis when not much time had passed, “that while in 1930 you were quite likely to be a crank or a hack if you wrote science fiction, by 1940 you could be a normal young man with a career to start, you were a member of the first generation who had grown up with the medium already in existence.” In the pages of the pulps, the theory and praxis of time travel began to take shape. Besides the stories themselves, there were letters from probing readers and notes from the editors. Paradoxes were discovered and, with some difficulty, put into words.

  “How about this Time Machine?” wrote “T.J.D.” in July 1927. Consider some other possibilities. What if our inventor journeys back to his schoolboy days? “His watch ticks forward although the clock on the laboratory wall goes backward.” What if he encounters his younger self? “Should he go up and shake hands with this ‘alter ego’? Will there be two physically distinct but characteristically identical persons?…Boy! Page Einstein!”

  Two years later Gernsback had a new scientifiction magazine, this time called Science Wonder Stories, sister publication to Air Wonder Stories, and the December 1929 issue featured on its cover a story of time travel called “The Time Oscillator.”*7 It involved, yet again, some odd machinery with crystals and dials and some professorial discourse on the fourth dimension. (“As I have before explained, time is only a relative term. It means literally nothing.”) This time the travelers head off into the distant past—which prompted a special editor’s note from Gernsback. “Can a time traveler,” he asked, “going back in time—whether ten years or ten million years—partake in the life of that time and mingle in with its people; or must he remain suspended in his own time-dimension, a spectator who merely looks on but is powerless to do more?” A paradox loomed; Gernsback could see it plainly, and he put it into words:

  Suppose I can travel back into time, let me say 200 years; and I visit the homestead of my great great great grandfather….I am thus enabled to shoot him, while he is still a young man and as yet unmarried. From this it will be noted that I could have prevented my own birth; because the line of propagation would have ceased right there.

  Henceforth this would be known as the grandfather paradox. It turns out that one person’s objection is another’s story idea. Gernsback invited comments from readers by mail and received quite a few, over a period of years. A boy in San Francisco suggested yet another paradox, “the last knock on time traveling”: What if a man were to travel into the past and marry his mother? Could he be his own father?

  Page Einstein indeed.

  * * *

  *1 Sir Boyle is also remembered for this: “Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity ever done for us?”—a joke that reads differently now that we have tim
e travel. Posterity does plenty for us: sends us assassins and bounty hunters on covert missions to change the course of history, for example.

  *2 When the American astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth in March 2016 after nearly a year of high-speed orbit, he was reckoned to be 8.6 milliseconds younger, relative to his groundling twin brother, Mark. (Then again, Mark had lived through only 340 days while Scott experienced 10,944 sunrises and sunsets.)

  *3 J. B. Priestley, who loved Wells and credited him with inspiring his Time Plays, said, “Although he was never rude about it he deplored the way in which I was bothering my head about Time in the thirties. He was like a man who, having wrongly given up playing an instrument for which he had a flair, then refused to listen to anybody else playing it.” Another disappointed admirer, W. M. S. Russell, echoed Priestley’s complaint at a centennial symposium in 1995: “More than a century after his wonderful achievement, let us be remembering, not the disillusioned elder, but the young creator of The Time Machine.”

  *4 Spoken aloud: “One to foresee…”

  *5 Kingsley Amis also took the time to read this book. “Ralph 124C 41+ concerns the technological marvels invented or demonstrated by the ridiculously resourceful eponymous hero….After some trouble with a pair of rival suitors, one human, the other Martian, Ralph restores a dead girl to life by a complicated deep-freeze and blood-transfusion technique. Other wonders include the hypnobioscope…and three-dimensional color television, a term which Gernsback is credited, if that is the word, with having invented.”

  *6 He also proposed a few “don’ts,” including, “Don’t make your professor, if you have one, talk like a military policeman or an Eighth Avenue ‘cop.’ Don’t put cheap jokes in his mouth. Read semi-technical magazines and reports of speeches to get the flavor of academic phraseology.”

  *7 An editor’s note explained: “Stories of traveling in time are always exceedingly interesting reading, mainly for the reason that the feat has not yet been accomplished; though no one can say that it cannot be done in the future, when we have reached a much higher plane of scientific achievement. Traveling in time, either forward or backward, may well become a possibility.”

  FOUR

  * * *

  Ancient Light

  “Time is a mental concept,” said Pringle. “They looked for time everywhere else before they located it in the human mind. They thought it was a fourth dimension. You remember Einstein.”

  —Clifford D. Simak (1951)

  BEFORE WE HAVE clocks we experience time as fluid, mercurial, and inconstant. Pre-Newtonians did not assume that time was a universal, trustworthy, absolute affair. Time was well known to be relative—to use that word in its psychological sense, not to be confused with the newer sense that came into being circa 1905. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.*1 Clocks reified time and then Newton made time…let’s say, official. He made it an essential part of science: time t, a factor to be plugged into equations. Newton regarded time as part of the “sensorium of God.” His view is handed down to us as if engraved on tablets of stone:

  Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly…

  The cosmic clock ticks invisibly and inexorably, everywhere the same. Absolute time is God’s time. This was Newton’s credo. He had no evidence for it, and his clocks were rubbish compared to ours.

  It may be, that there is no such thing as an equable motion, whereby time may be accurately measured. All motions may be accelerated and retarded, but the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change.

  Besides religious conviction, Newton was motivated by mathematical necessity: he needed absolute time, as he needed absolute space, in order to define his terms and express his laws. Motion is defined as the change in place over time; acceleration is the change in velocity over time. With a backdrop of absolute, true, and mathematical time, he could build an entire cosmology, a System of the World. This was an abstraction; a convenience; a framework for calculating. But for Newton it was also a statement about the world. You may believe it, or not.*2

  Albert Einstein believed it. Up to a point.

  He believed in an edifice of laws and computation that had grown from a bare stone church into a grand ornate cathedral, supported by colonnades and flying buttresses, layered with carving and tracery—work still in progress, with hidden crypts and ruined chapels. In this edifice time t played an indispensable part. No one could grasp the whole structure, but Einstein understood more than most and had encountered a problem. There was an internal contradiction. The great achievement of the last century’s physics was James Clerk Maxwell’s unification of electricity, magnetism, and light—the achievement that was so visibly wiring the whole world. Electric currents, magnetic fields, radio waves, and light waves were one and the same. Maxwell’s equations made it possible to calculate the speed of light, for the first time. But they were not meshing perfectly with the laws of mechanics. Those light waves, for example—so clearly waves, according to the mathematics, but waves in what? Sound needs air or water or other substance to carry the vibrations. Light waves likewise implied an unseen medium, the so-called ether—“luminiferous,” or light bearing. Naturally experimentalists were trying to detect this ether, with no success. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley came up with a clever experiment in 1887 to measure the difference between the speed of light in the direction of the earth’s motion and the speed of light at right angles to it. They couldn’t find any difference at all. Was the ether necessary? Or was it possible to think purely of an electrodynamics of moving bodies, through empty space?

  We know now that the speed of light in empty space is constant, 299,792,458 meters per second. No rocket ship can overtake a flash of light or reduce that number in the slightest. Einstein struggled (“psychic tension”; “all sorts of nervous conflicts”) to make sense of that: to discard the luminiferous ether, to accept the speed of light as absolute. Something else had to give. On a fine bright day in Bern (as he told the story later), he talked it over with his friend Michele Besso. “Next day I came back to him again and said to him, without even saying hello, ‘Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.’ An analysis of the concept of time was my solution.” If light speed is absolute, then time itself cannot be. We must abandon our faith in perfect simultaneity: the assumption that two events can be said to happen at the same time. Multiple observers experience their own present moments. “Time cannot be absolutely defined,” said Einstein—it can be defined, but not absolutely—“and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.”

  The signal carries information. Suppose six sprinters line up at the start line for the hundred-meter run, with their hands and one knee touching the ground and their feet in the starting blocks, awaiting the sound of the gun. The signal velocity in this case will be about a few hundred meters per second, the speed of sound through air. That’s slow nowadays, so Olympic events have scrapped starting pistols in favor of signals wired (at light speed) into loudspeakers. To think about simultaneity more carefully, it becomes necessary also to consider the signal velocity of light traveling to the eyes of the runners, the judges, and the spectators. In the end, there is no one instant, no “point in time,” that can be the same for everyone.

  Suppose lightning strikes a railway embankment (trains are more usual than horses in these stories) at two different points, distant from each other. Can you—a physicist, with the most excellent modern equipment—establish whether the two flashes were simultaneous? You cannot. It turns out that a physicist riding the train will disagree with a physicist standing at the station. Every observer owns a reference frame, and each reference frame has its own clock. There is no one cosmic clock, no clock of God or Newton.

  The revelation is that we can share no now—no universal present moment. But was that altogether a surprise? Before Einstein was born, John Henry Newman, poet and priest, wrote that
“time is not a common property; / But what is long is short, and swift is slow/And near is distant, as received and grasped / By this mind and by that, / And every one is standard of his own chronology.” For him it was intuitive.

  “Your now is not my now,” wrote Charles Lamb in England to his friend Barron Field in Australia, the far side of the earth, in 1817, “your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?”

  Nowadays we are all competent to these things. We have time zones. We can contemplate the International Date Line, where an imaginary boundary divides Tuesday from Wednesday.*3 Even when we suffer from jet lag—the quintessential disease of time travel—we are shrewd in our suffering and can nod wisely at William Gibson’s account of “soul delay”: