Copyright

4th Estate

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016

First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2016

Text © James Gleick 2016

James Gleick asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is also made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to reprint excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. © The Estate of T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by kind permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Cover photograph © Bob Mawby/Shutterstock

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008207670

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007544448

Version: 2017-08-25

Dedication

To Beth, Donen, and Harry

Epigraph

Your now is not my now; and again, your then is not my then; but my now may be your then, and vice versa. Whose head is competent to these things?

—Charles Lamb (1817)

The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in Time is something that everybody feels.

—Marcel Proust (1927?)

And tomorrow

Comes. It’s a world. It’s a way.

—W. H. Auden (1936)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1 Machine

2 Fin de Siècle

3 Philosophers and Pulps

4 Ancient Light

5 By Your Bootstraps

6 Arrow of Time

7 A River, a Path, a Maze

8 Eternity

9 Buried Time

10 Backward

11 The Paradoxes

12 What Is Time?

13 Our Only Boat

14 Presently

Footnotes

Sources and Further Reading

Index

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by James Gleick

About the Publisher

ONE
Machine

Being young, I was skeptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would.

—John Banville (2012)

A MAN STANDS AT the end of a drafty corridor, a.k.a. the nineteenth century, and in the flickering light of an oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory, with brass rails and quartz rods—a squat, ugly contraption, somehow out of focus, not easy for the poor reader to visualize, despite the listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, adds a drop of oil, and plants himself on the saddle. He grasps a lever with both hands. He is going on a journey. And by the way so are we. When he throws that lever, time breaks from its moorings.

The man is nondescript, almost devoid of features—“grey eyes” and a “pale face” and not much else. He lacks even a name. He is just the Time Traveller: “for so it will be convenient to speak of him.” Time and travel: no one had thought to join those words before now. And that machine? With its saddle and bars, it’s a fantasticated bicycle. The whole thing is the invention of a young enthusiast named Wells, who goes by his initials, H. G., because he thinks that sounds more serious than Herbert. His family calls him Bertie. He is trying to be a writer. He is a thoroughly modern man, a believer in socialism, free love, and bicycles.fn1 A proud member of the Cyclists’ Touring Club, he rides up and down the Thames valley on a forty-pounder with tubular frame and pneumatic tires, savoring the thrill of riding his machine: “A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go.” At some point he sees a printed advertisement for a contraption called Hacker’s Home Bicycle: a stationary stand with rubber wheels to let a person pedal for exercise without going anywhere. Anywhere through space, that is. The wheels go round and time goes by.

The turn of the twentieth century loomed—a calendar date with apocalyptic resonance. Albert Einstein was a boy at gymnasium in Munich. Not till 1908 would the Polish-German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his radical idea: “Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” H. G. Wells was there first, but unlike Minkowski, Wells was not trying to explain the universe. He was just trying to gin up a plausible-sounding plot device for a piece of fantastic storytelling.

Nowadays we voyage through time so easily and so well, in our dreams and in our art. Time travel feels like an ancient tradition, rooted in old mythologies, old as gods and dragons. It isn’t. Though the ancients imagined immortality and rebirth and lands of the dead time machines were beyond their ken. Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.

Why not before? And why now?

THE TIME TRAVELLER BEGINS with a science lesson. Or is it just flummery? He gathers his friends around the drawing-room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. They are stock characters from central casting: the Medical Man, the Psychologist, the Editor, the Journalist, the Silent Man, the Very Young Man, and the Provincial Mayor, plus everyone’s favorite straight man, “an argumentative person with red hair” named Filby.

“You must follow me carefully,” the Time Traveller instructs these stick figures. “I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, that they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.” School geometry—Euclid’s geometry—had three dimensions, the ones we can see: length, width, and height.

Naturally they are dubious. The Time Traveller proceeds Socratically. He batters them with logic. They put up feeble resistance.

“You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”

“That is all right,” said the Psychologist.

“Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real existence.”

“There I object,” said Filby. “Of course a solid body may exist. All real things—”

“So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

“Don’t follow you,” said Filby [the poor sap].

“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?”

Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and—Duration.”

Aha! The fourth dimension. A few clever Continental mathematicians were already talking as though Euclid’s three dimensions were not the be-all and end-all. There was August Möbius, whose famous “strip” was a two-dimensional surface making a twist through the third dimension, and Felix Klein, whose loopy “bottle” implied a fourth; there were Gauss and Riemann and Lobachevsky, all thinking, as it were, outside the box. For geometers the fourth dimension was an unknown direction at right angles to all our known directions. Can anyone visualize that? What direction is it? Even in the seventeenth century, the English mathematician John Wallis, recognizing the algebraic possibility of higher dimensions, called them “a Monster in Nature, less possible than a Chimaera or Centaure.” More and more, though, mathematics found use for concepts that lacked physical meaning. They could play their parts in an abstract world without necessarily describing features of reality.

Under the influence of these geometers, a schoolmaster named Edwin Abbott Abbott published his whimsical little novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in 1884, in which two-dimensional creatures try to wrap their minds around the possibility of a third; and in 1888 Charles Howard Hinton, a son-in-law of the logician George Boole, invented the word tesseract for the four-dimensional analogue of the cube. The four-dimensional space this object encloses he called hypervolume. He populated it with hypercones, hyperpyramids, and hyperspheres. Hinton titled his book, not very modestly, A New Era of Thought. He suggested that this mysterious, not-quite-visible fourth dimension might provide an answer to the mystery of consciousness. “We must be really four-dimensional creatures, or we could not think about four dimensions,” he reasoned. To make mental models of the world and of ourselves, we must have special brain molecules: “It may be that these brain molecules have the power of four-dimensional movement, and that they can go through four-dimensional movements and form four-dimensional structures.”

For a while in Victorian England the fourth dimension served as a catchall, a hideaway for the mysterious, the unseen, the spiritual—anything that seemed to be lurking just out of sight. Heaven might be in the fourth dimension; after all, astronomers with their telescopes were not finding it overhead. The fourth dimension was a secret compartment for fantasists and occultists. “We are on the eve of the Fourth Dimension; that is what it is!” declared William T. Stead, a muckraking journalist who had been editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, in 1893. He explained that this could be expressed by mathematical formulas and could be imagined (“if you have a vivid imagination”) but could not actually be seen—anyway not “by mortal man.” It was a place “of which we catch glimpses now and then in those phenomena which are entirely unaccountable for by any law of three-dimensional space.” For example, clairvoyance. Also telepathy. He submitted his report to the Psychical Research Society for their further investigation. Nineteen years later he embarked on the Titanic and drowned at sea.

By comparison Wells is so sober, so simple. No mysticism for him—the fourth dimension is not a ghost world. It is not heaven, nor is it hell. It is time.

What is time? Time is nothing but one more direction, orthogonal to the rest. As simple as that. It’s just that no one has been able to see it till now—till the Time Traveller. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh … we incline to overlook this fact,” he coolly explains. “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”

In surprisingly short order this notion would become part of the orthodoxy of theoretical physics.

WHERE DID THE IDEA come from? There was something in the air. Much later Wells tried to remember:

In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879, there was no nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft and right and left, and I never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 or thereabout. Then I thought it was a witticism.

Very witty. People of the nineteenth century sometimes asked, as people will, “What is time?” The question arises in many different contexts. Say you want to explain the Bible to children. The Educational Magazine, 1835:

Ver. 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

What do you mean by the beginning? The beginning of time.—What is time? A measured portion of eternity.

But everyone knows what time is. It was true then and it’s true now. Also no one knows what time is. Augustine stated this pseudoparadox in the fourth century and people have been quoting him, wittingly and unwittingly, ever since:

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.fn2

Isaac Newton said at the outset of the Principia that everyone knew what time was, but he proceeded to alter what everyone knew. Sean Carroll, a modern physicist, says (tongue in cheek), “Everybody knows what time is. It’s what you find out by looking at a clock.” He also says, “Time is the label we stick on different moments in the life of the world.” Physicists like this bumper-sticker game. John Archibald Wheeler is supposed to have said, “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once,” but Woody Allen said that, too, and Wheeler admitted having found it scrawled in a Texas men’s room.fn3

Richard Feynman said, “Time is what happens when nothing else happens,” which he knew was a wisecrack. “Maybe it is just as well if we face the fact that time is one of the things we probably cannot define (in the dictionary sense), and just say that it is what we already know it to be: it is how long we wait.”

When Augustine contemplated time, one thing he knew was that it was not space—“and yet, Lord, we perceive intervals of times, and compare them, and say some are shorter, and others longer.” We measure time, he said, though he had no clocks. “We measure times as they are passing, by perceiving them; but past, which now are not, or the future, which are not yet, who can measure?” You cannot measure what does not yet exist, Augustine felt, nor what has passed away.

In many cultures—but not all—people speak of the past as being behind them, while the future lies ahead. They visualize it that way, too. “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on,” says Paul. To imagine the future or the past as a “place” is already to engage in analogy. Are there “places” in time, as there are in space? To say so is to assert that time is like space. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The future, too. If time is a fourth dimension, that is because it is like the first three: visualizable as a line; measurable in extent. Still, in other ways time is unlike space. The fourth dimension differs from the other three. They do things differently there.

It seems natural to sense time as a spacelike thing. Accidents of language encourage that. We have only so many words; before and after have to do double duty as prepositions of space as well as time. “Time is a phantasm of motion,” said Thomas Hobbes in 1655. To count time, to compute time, “we make use of some motion or other, as of the sun, of a clock, of the sand in an hourglass.” Newton considered time to be absolutely different from space—after all, space remains always immovable, whereas time flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration—but his mathematics created an inevitable analogy between time and space. You could plot them as axes on a graph. By the nineteenth century German philosophers in particular were groping toward some amalgam of time and space. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in 1813, “In mere Time, all things follow one another, and in mere Space all things are side by side; it is accordingly only by the combination of Time and Space that the representation of coexistence arises.” Time as a dimension begins to emerge from the mists. Mathematicians could see it. Technology helped in another way. Time became vivid, concrete, and spatial to anyone who saw the railroad smashing across distances on a coordinated schedule—coordinated by the electric telegraph, which was pinning time to the mat. “It may seem strange to ‘fuse’ time and space,” explained the Dublin Review, but look—here is a “quite ordinary” space-time diagram:

So Wells’s Time Traveller can speak with conviction: “Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the barometer … Surely the mercury did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space … but certainly it traced such a line, and that line, therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension.”

In the new century everything felt new; physicists and philosophers gazed upon Time, so often capitalized, with new eyes. Twenty-five years after The Time Machine the “new realist” philosopher Samuel Alexander put it this way:

If I were asked to name the most characteristic feature of the thought of the last twenty-five years I should answer: the discovery of Time. I do not mean that we have waited till to-day to become familiar with Time. I mean that we have only just begun in our speculation to take Time seriously and to realize that in some way or other Time is an essential ingredient in the constitution of things.

What is time? Time machines may help us understand.

WELLS WAS NOT READING Schopenhauer, and philosophical introspection was not his style. His ideas about time were informed by Lyell and Darwin, who read the buried strata that frame the ages of the earth and the ages of life. He studied zoology and geology as a scholarship student at the Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines, and these subjects encouraged him to view the world’s history as if from a great height—its lost epochs, a panorama unfolding, “the small-scale horse-foot, hand-industry civilizations that culminated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the change of pace and scale due to mechanical invention.” Geological time, so vastly extended, disrupted the earlier sense of historical time, in which the world was plausibly considered to be six thousand years old. The scales were so different; human history was dwarfed.

“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.

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.fn4

“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.

TWO
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, doorways, 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.”

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 1914fn1—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.” 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:

Writers don’t talk to nonwriters about being hit by lightning, being conduits, being vulnerable. Sometimes they talk that way to each other, though. The work’s way of getting itself written. I think that’s an amazing concept that not only gives words (the work) a mind and a body but gives them the power to stalk a person (the writer). Stories do that.

Stories are like parasites finding a host. In other words, memes. Arrows of the Zeitgeist.

“Literature is revelation,” said Wells. “Modern literature is indecorous revelation.”

THE OBJECT OF Wells’s interest, bordering on obsession, was the future—that shadowy, inaccessible place. “So with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity,” says the Time Traveller. Most people, Wells wrote—“the predominant type, the type of the majority of living people”—never think about the future. Or, if they do, they regard it “as a sort of blank non-existence upon which the advancing present will presently write events.” (The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on.) The more modern sort of person—“the creative, organizing, or masterful type”—sees the future as our very reason for being: “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.” Wells, of course, hoped to personify that creative, forward-looking type. He had more and more company.

In bygone times, people had no more than the barest glimmerings of visiting either the future or the past. It seldom occurred to anyone. It wasn’t in the repertoire. Even travel through space was rare, by modern standards, and slow, before the railroads came.

If we stretch, we can find arguable cases of precocious time travel. Time travel avant la lettre. In the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic, Kakudmi ascends to the heavens to meet Brahma and finds upon his return that epochs have passed and everyone he knew is dead. A similar fate befalls an ancient Japanese fisherman, Urashima Tarō—an inadvertent leap into the future by journeying far from home. Likewise Rip Van Winkle could be said to have accomplished time travel by sleeping. There was also time travel by dreaming, time travel by hallucinogen, or time travel by mesmerism. The nineteenth-century literature includes one instance of time travel by message in a bottle: by none other than Poe, who described “an odd-looking MS.” that he found “corked up in a jug” floating in an imaginary sea and bearing the dateline “ON BOARD BALLOON ‘SKYLARK’ April 1, 2848.”

Aficionados have scoured the attics and basements of literary history for other examples—time-travelish precursors. In 1733, an Irish clergyman, Samuel Madden, published a book called Memoirs of the Twentieth Century: an anti-Catholic diatribe in the form of letters from British officials living two hundred years hence. The twentieth century as imagined by Madden resembles his own time in every respect except that Jesuits have taken over the world. The book was unreadable even in 1733. Madden destroyed almost all of the thousand copies himself. A handful remain. By contrast, a utopian vision titled L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante: rêve s’il en fût jamais (The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One) became a sensational bestseller in prerevolutionary France. It was a utopian fantasy published in 1771 by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, heavily influenced by the philosopher of the hour, Rousseau. (The historian Robert Darnton puts Mercier in the category of Rousseaus du ruisseau, or “gutter Rousseaus.”) His narrator dreams that he has awakened from a long sleep to find he has acquired wrinkles and a large nose. He is seven hundred years old and about to discover the Paris of the future. What’s new? Fashion has changed—people wear loose clothes, comfortable shoes, and odd caps. Societal mores have changed, too. Prisons and taxes have been abolished. Society abhors prostitutes and monks. Equality and reason prevail. Above all, as Darnton points out, a “community of citizens” has eradicated despotism. “In imagining the future,” he says, “the reader could also see what the present would look like when it had become the past.” But Mercier, who believed that the earth was a flat plain under an orbiting sun, was not looking toward the year 2440 so much as the year 1789. When the Revolution came, he declared himself to have been its prophet.

Another vision of the future, also utopian in its way, appeared in 1892: a book titled Golf in the Year 2000; or, What Are We Coming To, by a Scottish golfer named J. McCullough (given name lost in the mists). When the story begins, its narrator, having endured a day of bad golf and hot whiskies, falls into a trance. He awakens wearing a heavy beard. A man solemnly tells him the date. “‘It is’ (and he referred to a pocket almanac as he spoke) ‘the twenty-fifth of March, 2000.’” Yes, the year 2000 has advanced to pocket almanacs. Also electric lights. In some respects, though, the golfer from 1892 discovers that the world evolved while he slept. In the year 2000 women dress like men and do all the work, while men are freed to play golf every day.

Time travel by hibernation—the long sleep—worked for Washington Irving in “Rip Van Winkle,” and for Woody Allen in his 1973 remake, Sleeper. Woody Allen’s hero is Rip Van Winkle with a modern set of neuroses: “I haven’t seen my analyst in two hundred years. He was a strict Freudian. If I’d been going all this time, I’d probably almost be cured by now.” Is it a dream or a nightmare, if you open your eyes to find your contemporaries all dead?

Wells himself dispensed with the machinery in a 1910 novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which was also the first time-travel fantasy to discover the benefits of compound interest. Anyway, sleeping into the future is what we do every night. For Marcel Proust, five years younger than Wells and two hundred miles away, no place heightened the awareness of time more than the bedchamber. The sleeper frees himself from time, floats outside of time, and drifts between insight and perplexity:

A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed before his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken … In the first minute of his waking, he will no longer know what time it is, he will think he has only just gone to bed … Then the confusion among the disordered worlds will be complete, the magic armchair will send him traveling at top speed through time and space.

Traveling, that is, metaphorically. In the end, the sleeper rubs his eyes and returns to the present.

Machines improved upon magic armchairs. By the last years of the nineteenth century, novel technology was impressing itself upon the culture. New industries stirred curiosity about the past as well as the future. So Mark Twain created his own version of time travel in 1889, when he transported a Connecticut Yankee into the medieval past. Twain didn’t worry about scientific rationalization, but he did frame the story with some highfalutin verbiage: “You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs—and bodies?” For A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court the means of time travel is a bang on the head: Hank Morgan, the Yankee, gets beaned with a crowbar and awakens in a verdant field. Before him sits an armor-clad fellow on a horse, wearing (the horse, that is) festive red and green silk trappings like a bed quilt. Just how far the Connecticut Yankee has traveled he discovers in this classic exchange:

“Bridgeport?” said I, pointing.

“Camelot,” said he.

Hank is a factory engineer. This is important. He is a can-do guy and a technophile, up-to-date on the latest inventions: blasting powder and speaking-tubes, the telegraph and the telephone. So was the author. Samuel Clemens installed Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in his home in 1876, the year it was patented, and two years before that he acquired an extraordinary writing machine, the Remington typewriter. “I was the first person in the world to apply the typemachine to literature,” he boasted. The nineteenth century saw wonders.

The steam age and the machine age were in full swing, the railroad was shrinking the globe, the electric light turning night into never-ending day, the electric telegraph annihilating time and space (so the newspapers said). This was the true subject of Twain’s Yankee: the contrast of modern technology with the agrarian life that came before. The mismatch is both comic and tragic. Foreknowledge of astronomy makes the Yankee a wizard. (The nominal wizard, Merlin, is exposed as a humbug.) Mirrors, soap, and matches inspire awe. “Unsuspected by this dark land,” Hank says, “I had the civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose!” The invention that seals his triumph is gunpowder.

What magic might the twentieth century bring? How medieval might we seem to the proud citizens of that future? A century earlier, the year 1800 had passed with no special fanfare; no one imagined how different the year 1900 might be.fn2 Time awareness in general was dim, by our sophisticated standards. There is no record of a “centennial” celebration of anything until 1876. (The Daily News, London, reported, “America has been of late very much centennialised—that is the word in use now since the great celebration of this year. Centennials have been got up all over the States.”) The expression “turn of the century” didn’t exist until the twentieth. Now, finally, the Future was becoming an object of interest.

The New York industrialist John Jacob Astor IV published a “romance of the future” six years before the turn of the century, titled A Journey in Other Worlds. In it he forecast myriad technological developments for the year 2000. Electricity, he predicted, would replace animal power for the movement of all vehicles. Bicycles would be fitted with powerful batteries. Enormous high-speed electric “phaetons” would roam the globe, attaining speeds as great as thirty-five to forty miles an hour on country roads and “over forty” on city streets. To support these carriages, pavement would be made of half-inch sheets of steel laid over asphalt (“though this might be slippery for horses’ feet, it never seriously affects our wheels”). Photography would be wonderfully advanced, no longer limited to black and white: “There is now no difficulty in reproducing exactly the colours of the object taken.”

In Astor’s year 2000, telephone wires girdle the earth, kept underground to avoid interference, and telephones can show the face of the speaker. Rainmaking has become “an absolute science”: clouds are manufactured by means of explosions in the upper atmosphere. People can soar through space to visit the planets Jupiter and Saturn, thanks to a newly discovered antigravitational force called “apergy”—“whose existence the ancients suspected, but of which they knew so little.” Does that sound exciting? It all seemed “terribly monotonous” to the reviewer for the New York Times: “It is a romance of the future, and it is as dull as a romance of the Middle Ages.” It was Astor’s fate, too, to go down with the Titanic.

As a vision of an idealized world, a sort of utopia, Astor’s book owed a debt to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, the American bestseller of 1887, likewise set in the year 2000. (Time travel by sleep again: our hero enters a trance of 113 years.) Bellamy expressed the frustration of not being able to know the future. In his story “The Blindman’s World” he imagined that we earthlings are alone among the universe’s intelligent creatures in lacking “the faculty of foresight,” as if we had eyes only at the backs of our heads. “Your ignorance of the time of your death impresses us as one of the saddest features of your condition,” says a mysterious visitor. Looking Backward inspired a wave of utopias, to be followed by dystopias, and these are so invariably futuristic that we sometimes forget that the original Utopia, by Thomas More, was not set in the future at all. Utopia was just a faraway island.

No one bothered with the future in 1516. It was indistinguishable from the present. However, sailors were discovering remote places and strange peoples, so remote places served well for speculative authors spinning fantasies. Lemuel Gulliver does not voyage in time. It is enough for him to visit “Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.” William Shakespeare, whose imagination seemed limitless, who traveled freely to magical isles and enchanted forests, did not—could not—imagine different times. The past and present are all the same to Shakespeare: mechanical clocks strike the hour in Caesar’s Rome, and Cleopatra plays billiards. He would have been amazed by the theatrical time travel that Tom Stoppard creates in Arcadia and Indian Ink: placing together on stage stories that unfold in different eras, decades apart.

“Something needs to be said about this,” Stoppard writes in a stage direction in Arcadia. “The action of the play shuttles back and forth between the early nineteenth century and the present day, always in this same room.” Props move about—books, flowers, a tea mug, an oil lamp—as if crossing the centuries through an invisible portal. By the end of the play they have gathered on a table: the geometrical solids, the computer, decanter, glasses, tea mug, Hannah’s research books, Septimus’s books, the two portfolios, Thomasina’s candlestick, the oil lamp, the dahlia, the Sunday papers … On Stoppard’s stage these objects are the time travelers.

We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked. It was long in coming. The year 1900 brought a blaze of self-consciousness about times and dates. The twentieth century was rising like a new sun. “No century has ever issued from the womb of time whose advent has aroused the high expectation, the universal hope, as that which the midnight litanies and the secular festivals but eight days hence will usher in,” wrote the editorialist of the Philadelphia Press. The Hearst-owned New York Morning Journal declared itself “The Twentieth Century Newspaper” and organized an electrical publicity stunt: “The Journal Asks All Citizens of New York to Illuminate Their Homes Monday Midnight as a Welcome to the Twentieth Century.” New York festooned City Hall with two thousand lightbulbs in red, white, and blue, and the president of the city council addressed a throng: “Tonight when the clock strikes twelve the present century will have come to an end. We look back upon it as a cycle of time within which the achievements in science and in civilization are not less than marvelous.” In London the Fortnightly Review invited its now famous futurist, the thirty-three-year-old H. G. Wells, to write a series of prophetic essays: “Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought.” In Paris they were already calling it fin de siècle, emphasis on fin: decadence and ennui were all the rage. But when the time came, the French, too, looked forward.

An English writer could not hope to have an international literary reputation until he had been published in France, and Wells did not have to wait long. The Time Machine was translated by Henry Davray, who recognized an heir to the visionary Jules Verne, and the venerable Mercure de France printed it in 1898 with a title that lost something in translation: La machine à explorer le temps.fn3 Naturally the avant-garde loved the idea of time travel: Avant! Alfred Jarry, a symbolist playwright and prankster—also an enthusiastic bicyclist—using the pseudonym “Dr. Faustroll,” immediately produced a mock-serious construction manual, “Commentaire pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.” Jarry’s time machine is a bicycle with an ebony frame and three “gyrostats” with rapidly rotating flywheels, chain drives, and ratchet boxes. A lever with an ivory handle controls the speed. Mumbo-jumbo ensues. “It is worth noting that the Machine has two Pasts: the past anterior to our own present, what we might call the real past; and the past created by the Machine when it returns to our Present and which is in effect the reversibility of the Future.” Time is the fourth dimension, of course.fn4 Jarry later said he admired Wells’s “admirable sang-froid” in managing to make his mumbo-jumbo so scientific.

The fin de siècle was at hand. Preparing for Year 1900 festivities in Lyon, Armand Gervais, a toy manufacturer who liked novelties and automata, commissioned a set of fifty color engravings from a freelance artist named Jean-Marc Côté. These images conjure a world of marvels that might exist en l’an 2000: people sporting in their tiny personal aircraft, warring in dirigibles, playing underwater croquet at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the best is the schoolroom, where children in knee breeches sit with hands clasped at wooden desks while their teacher feeds books into a grinding machine, powered by a hand crank. Evidently the books are pulverized into a residue of pure information, which is then conveyed by wires up the wall and across the ceiling and down into headsets that cover the pupils’ ears.

These prescient images have a story of their own. They never saw the light of their own time. A few sets were run off on the press in the basement of the Gervais factory in 1899, when Gervais died. The factory was shuttered, and the contents of that basement remained hidden for the next twenty-five years. A Parisian antiques dealer stumbled upon the Gervais inventory in the twenties and bought the lot, including a single proof set of Côté’s cards in pristine condition. He had them for fifty years, finally selling them in 1978 to Christopher Hyde, a Canadian writer who came across his shop on rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. Hyde, in turn, showed them to Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born scientist and science-fiction writer, the author or editor of, by then, 343 books. Asimov made the En l’an 2000 cards into his 344th: Futuredays. He saw something remarkable in them—something genuinely new in the annals of prophecy.

Prophecy is old. The business of “telling” the future has existed through all recorded history. Foretelling and soothsaying, augury and divination, are among the most venerable of professions, if not always the most trusted. Ancient China had 易經, I Ching, the Book of Changes; sibyls and oracles plied their trade in Greece; aeromancers and palmists and scryers saw the future in clouds, hands, and crystals, respectively. “That grim old Roman Cato the Censor said it well: ‘I wonder how one augur can keep from laughing when he passes another,’” wrote Asimov.

But the future, as divined by the diviners, remained a personal matter. Fortune-tellers cast their hexagrams and turned their tarot cards to see the futures of individuals: sickness and health, happiness and misery, tall dark strangers. As for the world at large—that did not change. Through most of history, the world people imagined their children living in was the world they inherited from their parents. One generation was like the next. No one asked the oracle to forecast the character of daily life in years to come.

“Suppose we dismiss fortune-telling,” says Asimov. “Suppose we also dismiss divinely inspired apocalyptic forecasts. What, then, is left?”

Futurism. As redefined by Asimov himself. H. G. Wells talked about “futurity” at the turn of the century, and then the word futurism was hijacked by a group of Italian artists and protofascists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Futurist Manifesto” in the winter of 1909 in La Gazzetta dell’Emilia and Le Figaro, declaring himself and his friends to be free at last—free of the past.

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars … “Andiamo,” I said. “Andiamo, amici!” … And like young lions we ran after death, [etc.]

The manifesto included eleven numbered items. Number one: “We intend to sing the love of danger …” Number four was about fast cars: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath.” The futuristi created just one of the many twentieth-century movements that proudly defined themselves as avant-garde—eyes fixed forward, escaping the past, striding into the future.

When Asimov used the word, he meant something more basic: a sense of the future as a notional place, different, and perhaps profoundly different, from what has come before. Through most of history, people could not see the future that way. Religions had no particular thought for the future; they looked toward rebirth, or eternity—a new life after death, an existence outside of time. Then, finally, humanity crossed a threshold of awareness. People began to sense that there was something new under the sun. Asimov explains:

Before we can have futurism, we must first recognize the existence of the future in a state that is significantly different from the present and the past. It may seem to us that the potential existence of such a future is self-evident, but that was most definitely not so until comparatively recent times.

And when did that happen? It began in earnest with the Gutenberg printing press, saving our cultural memory in something visible, tangible, and shareable. It reached critical velocity with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the machine—looms and mills and furnaces, coal and iron and steam—creating, along with so much else, a sudden nostalgia for the apparently vanishing agrarian way of life. Poets led the way. “Hear the voice of the Bard!” William Blake implored, “Who Present, Past, and Future sees.” Some people liked progress more than did Mr. Dark Satanic Mills, but either way, before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress. Technological change had not always seemed like a one-way street. Now it did. The children of the Industrial Revolution witnessed vast transformations within their lifetimes. To the past there was no return.

Surrounded by advancing machinery, Blake blamed, more than anyone else, Isaac Newton—the blinkered rationalist imposing his new orderfn5—but Newton himself had not believed in progress. He studied a great deal of history, mostly biblical, and if anything he supposed that his own era represented a fall from grace, a tattered remnant of past glories. When he invented vast swaths of new mathematics, he thought he was rediscovering secrets known to the ancients and later forgotten. His idea of absolute time did not subvert his belief in eternal Christian time. Historians studying our modern notion of progress have observed that it began to develop in the eighteenth century, along with our modern notion of history itself. We take our sense of history for granted—our sense of “historical time.” The historian Dorothy Ross defines it as “the doctrine that all historical phenomena can be understood historically, that all events in historical time can be explained by prior events in historical time.” (She calls this “a late and complex achievement of the modern West.”) It seems so obvious now: we build upon the past.

So, as the Renaissance receded, a few writers began trying to imagine the future. Besides Madden with his Memoirs of the Twentieth Century and Mercier with his dream of the year 2440, others attempted imaginative fiction about societies to come, which can, in hindsight, be called “futuristic,” though that word did not register in English until 1915. They were all defying Aristotle, who wrote, “Nobody can narrate what has not yet happened. If there is narration at all, it will be of past events, the recollection of which is to help the hearers to make better plans for the future.”

The first true futurist in Asimov’s sense of the word was Jules Verne. In the 1860s, as railroad trains chugged across the countryside and sailing ships gave way to steam, he imagined vessels traveling under the sea, across the skies, to the center of the earth, and to the moon. We would say he was a man ahead of his time—he had an awareness, a sensibility, suited to a later era. Edgar Allan Poe was ahead of his time. The Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage and his protégé Ada Lovelace, forerunners of modern computing, were ahead of their time. Jules Verne was so far ahead of his time that he could never even find a publisher for his most futuristic book, Paris au XXe siècle, a dystopia featuring gas-powered cars, “boulevards lit as brightly as by the sun,” and machine warfare. The manuscript, handwritten in a yellow notebook, turned up in 1989, when a locksmith cracked open a long-sealed family safe.

The next great futurist was Wells himself.

We are all futurists now.

THREE
Philosophers and Pulps

“Time travel?! You expect me to believe such nonsense?”

“Yes, it is a difficult concept, isn’t it.”

—Douglas Adams (“The Pirate Planet,” Doctor Who, 1978)

TIME TRAVEL AS DESCRIBED by Wells and his many heirs is everywhere now, but it does not exist. It cannot. In saying so, it occurs to me that I’m Filby

“But the thing’s a mere paradox,” says the Editor.

“It’s against reason,” says Filby.

Critics of the 1890s took the same view. Wells knew they would. When his book was finally published in the spring of 1895—The Time Machine: An Invention, sold in New York by Henry Holt (75¢) and in London by William Heinemann (2/6)—reviewers admired it for a good tale: a “fantastic story”; “shocker of no ordinary kind”; “tour de force of ghastly imaginings”; “distinctly above the average of such fanciful works”; and “worth reading if you like to read impossible yarns” (that last from the New York Times). They noted the apparent influence of the Dark Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. One sniffed, “We have some difficulty in discerning the exact utility of such excursions into futurity.”

Only a few paid Wells the compliment of analyzing his fantastic notion logically. They found it illogical. “There is no getting into the Future, except by waiting,” wrote Israel Zangwill in the Pall Mall Magazine, wagging a stern finger. “You can only sit down and see it come by.” Zangwill, himself an occasional novelist and humorist, soon also to be a famous Zionist, thought he understood time quite well. He admonished the author:

In verity there is no Time Traveller, Mr. Wells, save Old Father Time himself. Instead of being a Fourth Dimension of Space, Time is perpetually travelling through Space, repeating itself in vibrations farther and farther from the original point of incidence; a vocal panorama moving through the universe across the infinities, a succession of sounds and visions that, having once been, can never pass away …

(Zangwill had clearly been reading Poe: vibrations indefinitely extending through the atmosphere—“no thought can perish”—and this sentence, too, sails indefinitely onward.)

… but only on and on from point to point, permanently enregistered in the sum of things, preserved from annihilation by the endlessness of Space, and ever visible and audible to eye or ear that should travel in a parallel movement.

Despite his objections Zangwill couldn’t help but admire Wells’s “brilliant little romance.” He shrewdly noticed that The Arabian Nights had employed a sort of time-machine precursor: a magic carpet that traverses space. Meanwhile, even in 1895, Zangwill seemed to understand certain peculiar implications of time travel—the paradoxes, we will soon say—better than Wells himself.

The Time Machine looks one way: forward. Ostensibly Wells’s time machine could travel to the past with a reverse throw of the lever, but the Time Traveller had no interest in going there. And a good thing too, says Zangwill. Just think what difficulties would be entailed. Our past had no Time Traveller barging through. A past that included a Time Traveller would be a different past, a new past. None of this was easy to put into words:

Had he travelled backwards, he would have reproduced a Past which, in so far as his own appearance in it with his newly invented machine was concerned, would have been ex hypothesi unveracious.

Then there’s the problem of meeting oneself. Zangwill becomes the first to notice this, and he will not be the last:

Had he recurred to his own earlier life, he would have had to exist in two forms simultaneously, of varying ages—a feat which even Sir Boyle Roche would have found difficult.

(His readers would recognize Roche as the Irish politician who said, “Mr. Speaker, it is impossible I could have been in two places at once, unless I were a bird.”)fn1

The book reviewers came and went, and before long philosophers got into the game. When they first took notice of time travel it was with a certain embarrassment, like a symphony conductor unable to look away from an organ grinder. “A frivolous example drawn from contemporary fiction,” said Professor Walter Pitkin at Columbia University, writing in the Journal of Philosophy in 1914. Something was stirring in science—the realm in which time was a measurable and absolute quantity known familiarly as t—and philosophers were uneasy. In the first years of the new century, when they turned to the subject of time, they had one thinker above all to contend with: the young Frenchman Henri Bergson. In the United States, William James, who might otherwise have been resting on his laurels as the “father of psychology,” found new vitality in Bergson. “Reading his works is what has made me bold,” James said in 1909. “If I had not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet.” (He added, “I have to confess that Bergson’s originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely.”)

Bergson asks us to remember how artificial is the notion of space as an empty homogenous medium—the absolute space announced by Newton. It is a creation of human intellect, he notes: “We may as well say that men have a special faculty of perceiving or conceiving a space without quality.” Scientists may find this abstract empty space to be useful for calculating, but let’s not make the mistake of confusing it with reality. Even more so with time. When we measure time with mechanical clocks, when we draw diagrams where time is an axis on a graph, we may fall into the trap of imagining time to be merely another version of space. To Bergson, time t, the time of the physicists, sliced into hours, minutes, and seconds, turned philosophy into a prison. He rejected the immutable, the absolute, the eternal. He embraced flux, process, becoming. For Bergson, the philosophical analysis of time could not be divorced from our human experience of it: the overlapping of mental states, the segue from one to the next that we experience as duration—la durée.

He held time apart from space rather than commingling the two: “Time and space begin to interweave only when both become fictional.” He saw time, not space, as the essence of consciousness; duration, the heterogeneous tide of moments, as the key to freedom. Philosophers were about to follow physics down a new path, and Bergson would be left behind, but for now he was hugely popular. Crowds thronged his lectures at the Collège de France, Proust attended his wedding, and James called him a magician. “Dive back into the flux then,” cried James. “Turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse.” Here he parted company with physics.

What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead … Philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality, not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results.

Pitkin seems to have felt that he needed to rescue the poor scientists from Bergson’s onslaught. Described by Time magazine in a brief moment of fame as “a man of many ideas, some of them large,” he was a founding member of a short-lived movement that called itself new realism. In his 1914 essay he declared that he liked some of Bergson’s “conclusions” but despised his “entire method,” particularly the rejection of scientific process in favor of psychological introspection. Pitkin proposed to clear up the space-time conundrum by means of logical proof. He would embrace the physicists’ t and t′ and t′′ and yet he would prove once and for all that time is different from space. To wit: we can move hither and yon in space, but not in time. Or rather, we do move in time, but not freely: “a thing moves in time only by moving with all other things.” And how would he prove this? In a most unexpected way:

To make the proof as simple as possible, I shall present it in the form of a sober criticism of one of the wildest flights of literary fancy which that specialist in wild flights, H. G. Wells, has indulged in. I refer, of course, to his amusing skit, The Time Machine.

It was the first but not the last time that Mr. Wells’s amusing skit would impose itself upon the attention of this august journal.

“You cannot leap back into the thirteenth century, nor can a man of that period hop into our own,” wrote Pitkin. “Mr. Wells would have us imagine a man at rest in the space dimensions, but moving with respect to the time of that space field. Very well! Let us do our noblest to play the game. What do we find? Something very disconcerting indeed. Something which, I fear, will make time-touring very unpopular among sedate people.”

The traveler flies, not through abstract time (like the “pure space” of the geometer). He flies through real time. But real time is history: and history is the course of physical events. It is the sequence of activities, physical, physiological, political, and otherwise.

Do we really want to go down this road? Must we look for errors of logic in a piece of fantastic fiction?

Yes, we must. The practitioners of time travel, even in “pulp” magazines, were soon to work out rules and justifications that would make a Talmudist proud. What is allowed, what is possible, what is plausible—the rules evolved and varied, but logic must be honored. We may as well begin with Professor Pitkin, man of many ideas, some of them large, in the Journal of Philosophy.

His argument would not seem very sophisticated to a typical teenage sci-fi aficionado circa 1970. In fairness, he recognizes that common human intuition about the world often fails to comprehend the strangeness of reality. Science keeps surprising us. Which way is up, for example? “It was held impossible ‘by the very nature of things,’” he notes, “that the earth should be a sphere, with people on the other side walking, heads downward.” (He might have added that Aristotle’s common sense revealed three and no more than three spatial dimensions: “the line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.”) Could it be, he asks, that time travel merely strikes us as impossible “because of certain prejudices we entertain or certain facts and tricks of which we are still hopelessly ignorant?” Let us be open-minded. “[The] answer, whatever that may be, carries immeasurable consequences for metaphysics.”

So Pitkin applies the tools of logic. These are his chief points:

• As the time machine rushes through the years, everything ages rapidly, so the man in the machine should, too. “Nations rise and fall, tempests leap up, destroy, and subside, houses are built with toil and burned in the frenzy of sudden war, and so on.” As for the tourist, his clothes are unruffled and he scarcely ages a day. “How is this possible? If he has passed through a hundred thousand generations, why isn’t he a hundred thousand generations old?” Here is an obvious contradiction: “the first contradiction in the whole proceeding.”

• Time goes at a certain rate, and this rate must be the same for everyone, everywhere. “Two objects or systems” cannot have “different rates of displacement or change in time”—obviously. Pitkin scarcely knew what devilishness Albert Einstein was conjuring in Berlin.

• Traveling through time must obey rules of arithmetic, just like traveling through space. Do the math: “To traverse a million years in a few days is exactly like traveling a thousand miles in one inch.” A thousand miles does not equal one inch; ergo, a million years cannot equal a few days. “Now is not this a pure self-contradiction, on a par with the proposition that you or I can go from New York to Pekin without moving farther than our own front door?”

• The time traveler would surely bump into things. Example: Let’s say he leaves his workshop for a future date, January 1, 1920. While he’s gone, his abandoned wife sells the house. It is torn down. Bricks are heaped where the workshop stood. “But where, oh where, is the traveler? If he remains in the same place, he is surely beneath the ton of bricks and so is his precious machine … This, we aver, is most uncomfortable for the tourist. He is fairly interpenetrated with bricks.”

• Looked at from an astronomical point of view, celestial motion must be considered as well. “The traveler who moves only in time and not at all in space would suddenly find himself strangling in the empty ether, while the earth went hurtling away from beneath him.”

Impossible, concludes the philosopher. No one can travel into the future or the past on Mr. Wells’s time machine. We must find other ways of dealing with past and future, every day of our lives.

WE NEED NOT DEFEND Mr. Wells, because he never meant to promulgate a new theory of physics. He didn’t believe in time travel. The time machine was the handwaving—the pixie dust that helps the willing reader suspend disbelief and get through the story. (See handwavium, n.) It was sheer coincidence that the Time Traveller’s mumbo-jumbo tracked so well with a revolutionary view of spacetime that emerged in physics a decade later. Except, of course, that it was no coincidence at all.

Wells worked hard to make the handwaving plausible. This first technology of time travel ended up being fairly robust. In fact, he anticipated Pitkin’s semiscientific objections and some others as well. For example, it is the Medical Man who says that space differs from time in that we move freely through one but not the other.

“Are you so sure we can move freely in space?” the Time Traveller retorts. “Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough … But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.” That was more true, of course, in the nineteenth century than in the twenty-first. Now we’re used to whizzing about in all three of our dimensions, but space travel (as we might call it) used to be more constrained. Railroads and bicycles were new. So were elevators and balloons. “Before the balloon,” says the Time Traveller, “save for spasmodic jumping and the inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement.” What the balloon does for the third dimension, the time machine might do for the fourth.

Our hero presents his miniature prototype time machine as an amalgam of science and magic: “You will notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.” A turn of the tiny lever sends the gizmo into the void with a puff of wind. Now Wells anticipates the next objection from the realists. If the time machine has gone back to the past, why had they not seen it en route (as it were) when they were in the room last Thursday? And if into the future, why is it not still visible, passing through each successive moment? The explanation comes in ersatz psychological jargon. “It’s presentation below the threshold,” says the Time Traveller, nodding to the Psychologist. “You know, diluted presentation.” The same reason you can’t see the spokes of a spinning bicycle wheel or a bullet whizzing through the air. (“Of course,” the Psychologist replies. “I should have thought of it.”)

Wells likewise foresaw the objection of the Philosopher that the traveler risked crashing through piles of bricks and other unexpected alterations in the landscape. “So long as I travelled at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to speak, attenuated—was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!” Simple, when you put it that way. Halting in the wrong place, however, would still be dangerous. And exciting.

To come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction—possibly a far-reaching explosion—would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions—into the Unknown.

Wells laid down the rules, and from then on all the world’s time travelers would have to obey. Or if not obey, at least explain. Jack Finney put it this way in a time-travel story in the Saturday Evening Post, 1962: “There’s a danger a man might appear in a time and place already occupied … He’d be all mixed in with the other molecules, which would be unpleasant and confining.” Explosions are ever popular. Philip K. Dick in 1974: “… the hazard in re-entry of being out of phase spatially and colliding right down to the molecular level with two tangent objects … You know, ‘No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time.’” At last, the perfect corollary of “Nobody can be in two places at once.”

Wells never did justify treating the earth as a fixed point of the cosmos. Nor for that matter did he worry about where the Time Machine gets the energy to power its voyages. Here, too, he established a tradition. Even a bicycle needs someone to pedal, but time machines have unlimited free fuel, by the universe’s grace.

WE’VE HAD A CENTURY to think about it, and we still need to remind ourselves every so often that time travel is not real. It’s an impossibility, just as William Gibson suspected—a magic on the order of kissing one’s own elbow. But when I say that to a certain well-known theoretical physicist, he gives me a pitying look. Time travel is no problem, he says. At least if you want to travel to the future.

Oh, well, sure—you mean we’re all traveling forward in time anyway?

No, says the physicist, not just that. Time travel is easy! Einstein showed us how to do it. All we have to do is approach a black hole and accelerate to near the speed of light. Then, welcome to the future.

His point is that acceleration and gravitation both slow the clocks, relativistically, so you could age a year or two on a spaceship and return home a century hence to marry your great-grandniece (as Tom Bartlett does in Robert Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars). This is proven. GPS satellites have to compensate for relativistic effects in their very exact calculations. It’s hardly time travel, though. It is time dilation (per Einstein, Zeitdilatation). It’s an antiaging device.fn2 And it’s a one-way street. There’s no going back to the past. Unless you can find a wormhole.

“Wormhole” is John Archibald Wheeler’s word for a shortcut through the warped fabric of spacetime—a “handle” of multiply connected space. Every few years someone makes headlines by hailing the possibility of time travel through a wormhole—a traversable wormhole, or maybe even a “macroscopic ultrastatic spherically-symmetric long-throated traversable wormhole.” I believe that these physicists have been unwittingly conditioned by a century of science fiction. They’ve read the same stories, grown up in the same culture as the rest of us. Time travel is in their bones.

We have arrived at a moment of cultural history when the doubters and naysayers are the real practitioners of time travel, the science-fiction writers themselves. “Totally impossible on theoretical grounds,” declared Isaac Asimov in 1986. He didn’t even bother to hedge his bets.

It can’t and won’t be done. (If you’re one of those romantics who thinks nothing is impossible, I won’t argue the case, but I trust you won’t decide to hold your breath until such a machine is built.)

Kingsley Amis, assessing the literary culture of science fiction in 1960, felt he was stating the obvious when he said, “Time travel, for instance, is inconceivable.” Thus practitioners of the genre resort to some version of Wells’s hand-waving explanation—“an apparatus of pseudo-logic”—or, as time goes on, simply trust their readers to suspend disbelief. And so it’s the science-fiction writers who remain willing to treat the future as open, while all around them physicists and philosophers surrender to determinism. “One is grateful that we have a form of writing which is interested in the future,” said Amis, “which is ready to treat as variables what are usually taken to be constants.”

As for Wells himself, he continued to disappoint his believers.fn3 “The reader got a fine confused sense of immense and different things,” he said in 1938. “The effect of reality is easily produced. One jerks in one or two little unexpected gadgets or so, and the trick is done. It is a trick.” (He was just back in London after a seven-city American lecture tour titled “Organization of the World Brain,” and he felt a need to deny special futuristic powers. “It is not a bit of good pretending I am a prophet. I have no crystal into which I gaze, and no clairvoyance.”)

LET’S LOOK one more time at how the trick was done:

… the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.

“Look here,” said the Medical Man, “are you perfectly serious? Or is this a trick …?”

For Wells’s first readers, technology had a special persuasive power. This vague machine put a claim on the readers’ belief in a way that magic never could. Magic might include clouts on the head, as in Connecticut Yankee, as well as the talismanic act of turning back the hands on a clock. The cartoon “Felix the Cat Trifles with Time” employs both devices: Old Father Time unwinds his clock past “Year of 1” and “Stone Age” and whacks poor Felix with a club.

Before that, in 1881, a newspaperman, Edward Page Mitchell, published “The Clock That Went Backward” anonymously in the New York Sun. Old Aunt Gertrude, spectral in her white nightgown and white nightcap, has a mysterious bond with her eight-foot-tall Dutch clock. It seems defunct—until one night, when she winds it up in the flickering light of a candle, the hands begin to turn backward, and she falls dead. This becomes the occasion for a philosophical disquisition by one Professor Van Stopp:

Well, and why should not a clock go backward? Why should not Time itself turn and retrace its course? … Viewed from the Absolute, the sequence by which future follows present and present follows past is purely arbitrary. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; there is no reason in the nature of things why the order should not be tomorrow, today, yesterday.

If the future is different from the past, what if we reverse the mirror or rewind the clock? Can destiny carry us toward our beginnings? Can effect influence cause?

The device of the backward-running clock reappeared in a 1919 story, “The Runaway Skyscraper,” by the pseudonymous Murray Leinster. “The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward” is its opening sentence. The tower trembles, the office workers hear ominous creaking and groaning, the sky darkens, night falls, the telephones produce only static, and all too soon the sun rises again, at high speed, and in the west.

“Great bombs and little cannon-balls,” shouts Arthur, a young engineer who has been worrying about his debts. “It looks awfully queer,” agrees Estelle, his twenty-one-year-old secretary, who has been worrying that she will become “an old maid.” The landscape transforms at a rapid pace, wristwatches are seen spinning backward, and finally Arthur puts two and two together. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he explains. “Have you ever read anything by Wells? The Time Machine, for instance?”

Estelle shakes her head no. “I don’t know how I’m going to say it so you’ll understand,” explains Arthur manfully, “but time is just as much a dimension as length and breadth.” The building has “settled back in the Fourth Dimension,” he decides. “We’re going back in time.”

These stories were multiplying. Another way to do the trick: bring in the devil. “A tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelean man whom I had seen from time to time in the domino-room” makes his appearance in Max Beerbohm’s “Enoch Soames,” published in the Century illustrated magazine in 1916. Enoch Soames is a “dim” man, stooping and shambling, an unsuccessful striver in 1890s literary London. He is, like some other writers, concerned about how posterity will remember him. “A hundred years hence!” he cries. “Think of it! If I could come back to life then—just for a few hours …”

That is the devil’s cue, of course. He offers a bargain—the Faustian kind, updated.

“Parfaitement,” he says Frenchily. “Time—an illusion. Past and future—they are as ever present as the present, or at any rate only what you call ‘just round the corner.’ I switch you on to any date. I project you—pouf!”

The devil is au courant: like everyone else, he has been reading The Time Machine. “But it is one thing to write about an impossible machine,” he says. “It is a quite other thing to be a supernatural power.” The devil says pouf and poor Enoch gets his wish. Transported to 1997, he materializes in the Reading Room of the British Museum and heads straight for the S volumes of the card catalogue. (How better to gauge one’s literary reputation?) There he learns his fate: “Enoch Soames,” he reads, was an imaginary character in a 1916 story by a mordant writer and caricaturist named Max Beerbohm.

IN THE TWENTIES the future seemed to be arriving daily. News had never traveled so fast, and there had never been so much of it, with the advent of wireless transmission, and by 1927 Wells himself had already had enough. The technology of communications had reached maturity, he felt, with wireless telegraphy, the wireless telephone, “and all the broadcasting business.” Radio had begun as a glorious dream—the finest fruits of the culture, the wisest thoughts and best music, transmitted into homes across the land. “Chaliapin and Melba would sing to us, President Coolidge and Mr. Baldwin would talk to us simply, earnestly, directly; the most august in the world would wish us good evening and pass a friendly word; should a fire or shipwreck happen, we were to get the roar of the flames and the cries for help.” A. A. Milne would tell stories to children and Albert Einstein would bring science to the masses. “All sporting results before we went to bed would be included, the weather forecast, advice about our gardens, the treatment of influenza, and the exact time.”

Yet for Wells the dream had turned sour. Asked by the New York Times to assess the state of radio for its readers, he ranted bitterly, disillusioned as a child finding lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking. “Instead of first-rate came tenth-rate music, played by the Little Winkle-Beach Pier Band,” he wrote. Instead of the wisest voices, “Uncle Bray and Aunt Twaddle.” Even the static irritated him. “Across it all dear old Mother Nature cast her net of ‘atmospherics’ with a humor all her own.” He did enjoy hearing a bit of dance music after a long day—“but dance music only goes on for a small part of the evening, and at any moment it may give way to Doctor Flatulent being thoughtful and kindly in a non-sectarian way.”

His assessment was so harsh that the Times editors were clearly taken aback. They emphasized that Wells could speak of radio broadcasting only “as He Encounters It Abroad.” Wells was not only disappointed in the present state of radio. His crystal ball showed him that the whole enterprise was doomed to fade away. “The future of broadcasting is like the future of crossword puzzles and Oxford trousers, a very trivial future indeed.” Why would anyone listen to music by radio when they could have gramophone records? Radio news vanishes like smoke: “Broadcasting shouts out its information once and cannot be recalled.” For serious thought, he said, nothing can replace books.

His Majesty’s Government had created a “salaried official body to preside over broadcasting programs,” Wells noted—the new British Broadcasting Company. “In the end that admirable committee may find itself arranging schemes of entertainment for a phantom army of expiring listeners.” If any audience remained at all, it would comprise “the blind, lonely and suffering people”—or “probably very sedentary persons living in badly lighted houses or otherwise unable to read, who have never realized the possibilities of the gramophone and the pianola and who have no capacity for thought or conversation.” The BBC’s first experimental television broadcasts were just five years away.

Others could play the futurism game, though. David Sarnoff of RCA retorted by calling Wells a snob; the inventor Lee de Forest told him he needed a better radio—and perhaps the most unusual rebuttal came from the publisher of Radio News and manager of station WRNY, an émigré from Luxembourg named Hugo Gernsback. After arriving in New York at the age of nineteen, Gernsback had started the Electro Importing Company, a mail-order business selling radio parts to eager hobbyists in 1905, with tantalizing advertisements in Scientific American and elsewhere. Within three years he was printing his own magazine, Modern Electrics. By the twenties he was well known to legions of radio amateurs. “I refuse to believe in such a drab and dreary demise of radio,” he wrote in a letter to the Times. “What surprises me most is that the prophetic Mr. Wells has not looked into the near future when every radio set will be equipped with its television attachment—a device, by the way, now being perfected by one of his own countrymen.” (This was not the only thing that surprised him most. “What surprises me most in Mr. Wells’s remarks,” he said in the same letter, “is that he evidently hankers to listen constantly to the great, when a simple mathematical calculation would show that this would not be possible. There are not enough great people in the world.”)

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.”

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 124Cfn4 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”).fn5 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.”fn6 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.”fn7 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.

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.fn1 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.fn2

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.fn3 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”:

Her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

We know that the light of the stars is ancient light, that distant galaxies reveal themselves to us only as they once were, not as they now are. As John Banville reminds us in his novel of that name, ancient light is all we have: “Even here, at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time, a tiny time, infinitesimal, yet time, to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past.”fn4 (Can we peer into the future as well? That clever time traveler Joyce Carol Oates says via Twitter, “As minutes are required for the sun’s light to reach us, we are living always in a sunlit past. Just the reverse, reading bound galleys.”)

When everything reaching our senses comes from the past, when no observer lives in the now of any other observer, the distinction between past and future begins to decay. Events in our universe can be connected, such that one is the cause of the other, but, alternatively, they can be close enough in time and far enough apart that they cannot be connected and no one can even say which came first. (Outside the light cone, says the physicist.) We are more isolated, then, than we may have imagined, alone in our corners of spacetime. You know how fortune-tellers pretend to know the future? It turns out, said Richard Feynman, that no fortune-teller can even know the present.

Einstein’s powerful ideas spread in the public press as rapidly as in the physics journals and disrupted the placid course of philosophy. The philosophers were surprised and outgunned. Bergson and Einstein clashed publicly in Paris and privately by post and seemed to be speaking different languages: one scientific, measured, practical; the other psychological, flowing, untrustworthy. “‘The time of the universe’ discovered by Einstein and ‘the time of our lives’ associated with Bergson spiraled down dangerously conflicting paths, splitting the century into two cultures,” notes the science historian Jimena Canales. We are Einsteinian when we search for simplicity and truth, Bergsonian when we embrace uncertainty and flux. Bergson continued to place human consciousness at the center of time, while Einstein saw no place for spirit in a science that relied on clocks and light. “Time is for me that which is most real and necessary,” wrote Bergson; “it is the necessary condition of action. What am I saying? It is action itself.” Before an audience of intellectuals at the Société Française de Philosophie in April 1922, Einstein was adamant: “The time of the philosophers does not exist.” Einstein, it seems, prevailed.

What does his framework mean for our understanding of the true nature of things? His biographer Jürgen Neffe sums up the situation judiciously. “Einstein provided no explanations for these phenomena,” he says. “No one knows what light and time really are. We are not told what something is. The special theory of relativity merely provides a new rule for measuring the world—a perfectly logical construct that surmounts earlier contradictions.”

HERMANN MINKOWSKI READ Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity with special interest. He had been Einstein’s mathematics teacher in Zurich. He was forty-four years old and Einstein was twenty-nine. Minkowski saw that Einstein had knocked the concept of time “from its high seat,” had shown, indeed, that there is no time, but only times. But he thought that his former student had left the big job unfinished—had stopped short of stating the new truth about the nature of all reality. So Minkowski prepared a lecture. He delivered it at a scientific meeting in Cologne on September 21, 1908, and it is famous.

“Raum und Zeit” was his title, “Space and Time,” and his mission was to declare both concepts null and void. “The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength,” he began grandly. “They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

He reminded his listeners that space is denoted by three orthogonal coordinates, x, y, z, for length, breadth, and thickness. Let t denote time. With a piece of chalk, he said, he could draw four axes on the blackboard: “the somewhat greater abstraction associated with the number 4 does not hurt the mathematician.” And so on. He was excited. This was “a new conception of space and time,” he declared; “the first of all laws of nature.” He called this conception the “principle of the absolute world.”

Four numbers, x, y, z, t, define a “world point.” Together, all the world points that trace an object’s existence from birth to death form a “world line.” And what shall we call the whole shebang?

The multiplicity of all thinkable x, y, z, t systems of values we will christen the world.

Die Welt! Good name. But we just call it spacetime now. (The continuum.) If we resist (“Because I know that time is always time/And place is always and only place,” said T. S. Eliot), we do so in vain.

It was a bit of misdirection for Minkowski to begin by saying his lecture was grounded in experimental physics. His true subject was the power of abstract mathematics to reshape our understanding of the universe. He was a geometer above all. The physicist and historian Peter Galison puts it this way: “Where Einstein manipulated clocks, rods, light beams, and trains, Minkowski played with grids, surfaces, curves, and projections.” He thought in terms of the most profound visual abstraction.

“Mere shadows,” Minkowski said. That was not mere poetry. He meant it almost literally. Our perceived reality is a projection, like the shadows projected by the fire in Plato’s cave. If the world—the absolute world—is a four-dimensional continuum, then all that we perceive at any instant is a slice of the whole. Our sense of time: an illusion. Nothing passes; nothing changes. The universe—the real universe, hidden from our blinkered sight—comprises the totality of these timeless, eternal world lines. “I would fain anticipate myself,” said Minkowski in Cologne, “by saying that in my opinion physical laws might find their most perfect expression as reciprocal relations between these world lines.” Three months later he was dead of a ruptured appendix.

Thus the idea of time as a fourth dimension crept forward. It did not happen all at once. In 1908 Scientific American “simply explained” the fourth dimension as a hypothetical space analogous to the first three: “For passing into the fourth dimension, we should pass out of our present world.” The next year the magazine sponsored an essay contest on the topic “The Fourth Dimension,” and not one of the winners or runners-up considered it to be time—notwithstanding the German physicists and the English writer of fantastic fiction. The space-time continuum was radical indeed. Max Wien, an experimental physicist, described his initial reaction as “a slight brain-shiver—now space and time appear conglomerated together in a gray, miserable chaos.”fn5 It offends common sense. “The texture of Space is not that of Time,” cries Vladimir Nabokov, “and the piebald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg.” If these critics sound Filbyish, even Einstein did not immediately embrace Minkowski’s vision: “überflüssige Gelehrsamkeit,” he called it—superfluous learnedness. But Einstein came around. When his friend Besso died in 1955, Einstein consoled his family with words that have been quoted many times:

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Einstein died three weeks later.

FUNNY IRONY, though.

A century after Einstein discovered that perfect simultaneity is a chimera, the technology of our interconnected world relies on simultaneity as never before. When telephone-network switches get out of sync, they drop calls. While no physicist “believes in” absolute time, humanity has established a collective official timescale, preached by a choir of atomic clocks maintained at a temperature near absolute zero in vaults at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures near Paris, and elsewhere. They bounce their networked light-speed signals to one another, make the necessary relativistic corrections, and thus the world sets its myriad clocks. Confusion about past and future cannot be tolerated.

To Newton this would make perfect sense. International atomic time has the effect of codifying the absolute time that he created, and for the same reason: it lets the equations work out and the trains run on time. A century before Einstein, this technical achievement in simultaneity would have been almost impossible to conceive. The very notion of simultaneity scarcely existed. It was a rare philosopher who considered the question of what time it might be in a faraway place. One could hardly even hope to know, said the doctor and philosopher Thomas Browne in 1646,

It being no ordinary or Almanack business, but a probleme Mathematical, to finde out the difference of hours in different places; nor do the wisest exactly satisfy themselves in all. For the hours of several places anticipate each other, according to their Longitudes; which are not exactly discovered of every place.

All time was local. “Standard time” had no use before the railroad came and could not be established before the telegraph. England began synchronizing its clocks (new expression) to railway time in the mid-nineteenth century, when telegraph signals went out from the new electromagnetic clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich and the Electric Time Company in London. Also to the newly coordinated clock towers and electric street clocks of Bern.fn6 These were technologies on which the ideas of Einstein depended, and also the ideas of H. G. Wells.

So now, on a hilltop near the Potomac River, the United States maintains a Directorate of Time, a subdepartment of the navy and by law the country’s official timekeeper. Likewise in Paris is the BIPM, which also owns the international prototype of the kilogram. These are the keepers of temps universel coordonné, or coordinated universal time, or UTC—which I think we can admit is arrogantly named. Let’s just call it Earth time.

All the chronometric paraphernalia of modernity: scientific, and yet arbitrary. Railroads made time zones inevitable, and in hindsight we can see that time zones already entailed a sense of time travel. They were not organized all at once, by fiat. They had many beginnings. For example, on November 18, 1883, a Sunday, known afterward as “the Day of Two Noons,” James Hamblet, general superintendent of the Time Telegraph Company in New York City, reached out his hand and stopped the pendulum of the standard clock in the Western Union Telegraph Building. He waited for a signal and then restarted it. “His clock is adjusted to hundredth parts of a second,” reported the New York Times, “a space of time so infinitesimal as to be almost beyond human perception.” Around the city, tickers announced the new time and jewelers’ shops adjusted their clocks. The newspaper explained the new setup in science-fictional terms:

When the reader of The Times consults his paper at 8 o’clock this morning at his breakfast table it will be 9 o’clock in St. John, New-Brunswick, 7 o’clock in Chicago, or rather in St. Louis—for Chicago authorities have refused to adopt the standard time, perhaps because the Chicago meridian was not selected as the one on which all time must be based—6 o’clock in Denver, Col., and 5 o’clock in San Francisco. That is the whole story in a nut-shell.

Of course, that was nothing like the whole story. Arbitrary as they were, the railroads’ time zones did not please everyone, and a new oddity followed: Daylight Saving Time, as it was known in North America, or, as Europeans called it, Summer Time. Even now, after a century of experience, some people find this twice-yearly time jump disturbing, and even physically uncomfortable. (And philosophically unsettling. Where does the hour go?) Germany was the first to impose Sommerzeit,

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