Time Travel: 8 key ideas
The core ideas of Time Travel, each in under a minute, written in our own words. Want the full depth? Get the book.
- IDEA 1 OF 8
Time travel was invented in fiction
Gleick argues that the idea of travelling through time became popular with H.
G. Wells's novel The Time Machine. Before then, people rarely imagined moving freely through time. Wells gave readers a machine and a new way of thinking.
- IDEA 2 OF 8
Einstein changed how we see time
Gleick describes how Einstein's theories challenged the idea of a single universal time.
Physicists began to imagine time as a dimension, like space. Time could stretch and shrink depending on speed.
- IDEA 3 OF 8
The block universe raises questions
Gleick explains the idea that past, present and future may all exist together.
If so, the flow of time might be a feature of our perception. Gleick finds this idea both strange and unsettling.
- IDEA 4 OF 8
Paradoxes test our logic
Gleick discusses puzzles such as going back to change the past.
Stories and scientists have tried different ways to resolve these contradictions. Writers invented clever loops and branching worlds to escape these puzzles.
- IDEA 5 OF 8
Time capsules speak to the future
Gleick describes the human urge to send messages to the future through time capsules.
They reveal our hopes and assumptions about what will last. Many capsules end up forgotten or lost.
- IDEA 6 OF 8
Writers played with time
Gleick explores how authors such as Borges and Proust experimented with time in their work.
Literature helped people imagine many ways of experiencing time. Their stories changed how readers think about memory.
- IDEA 7 OF 8
Entropy points time forward
Gleick explains that the increase of disorder, or entropy, gives time a direction.
This arrow of time helps explain why we remember the past but not the future. Physics still debates why this arrow exists.
- IDEA 8 OF 8
Time travel reflects our desires
Gleick suggests that our fascination with time travel reflects wishes to revisit, fix or escape our lives.
The idea tells us as much about people as about physics. Our dreams of time say much about us.
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