Name: Time Travel
Rating: 4 (79 reviews)
Author: James Gleick

What’s in it for me? Journey through the history of time travel.

We are obsessed with the passage of time. Whether it’s a fascination with the past through retro fashions or historical fiction, or excitement about the future and whether or not we’ll be colonizing other planets, we think about the past and future more than we do about today.

And of course, our preoccupation with the past and future has led to our desire for time travel. How fantastic would it be to take a trip back to ancient Rome or fast forward to an age of flying cars and interstellar travel?

But is time travel possible and where did the concept come from? These blinks show you how the dream of journeying back and forth through time captured our imaginations.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why cyberspace allows for time travel;
why going back in time is theoretically possible; and
why you time travel when you open a book.

The idea of time travel is only about a century old.

Nowadays, time travel is just about everywhere you look, from films to TV shows and even literature. And that’s no accident: society has become obsessed with the idea of traveling through time.

However, that wasn’t true just 150 years ago. The portal was opened by H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, which was published in 1895.

In The Time Machine, Wells describes a man, called simply the Time Traveler, who builds a machine that enables him to move throughout the course of history and into the future. The story is important because it approaches time as something flowing, that, with the appropriate vessel, could be sailed.

Before this book came out, time was basically viewed as a one-way street. You could only go forward, and only at one speed. In this way, Wells’ fictional account transformed the way people viewed time and time travel.

But why was it so successful?

Largely because it came out at the end of the nineteenth century when tremendous change was in the air. As the twentieth century dawned, people were becoming incredibly excited for the future. It was a period of huge technological as well as scientific growth and, for the first time ever, people were living in a way that was dramatically different from the generation before them.

In other words, it was the first time that the past, future and present would be entirely different. This simple historical moment is what made time travel so riveting.

It’s important to remember that before this, the future was considered to be similar to the present. Stories regarding future events would often be based on prophecy, as in Oedipus Rex or Macbeth. Such tales of prophecy center on a personal journey that will happen to a particular character in the future. But they fail to envision a major change in how people generally live. The twentieth century, and H. G. Wells, changed all of that.

As the idea of time travel progressed, rules for it were agreed upon.

So, when time travel emerged as a concept, it was all the rage. But as the topic underwent further discussion, ever greater theoretical problems came to light.

For instance, can you travel forward in time to meet your future self? What if you went back in time and altered the course of events that led to your life?

Scientists like Albert Einstein changed the way we think about time.

By now you know how fiction helped build the idea of time travel, but some real scientific thinkers also shaped the concept. Albert Einstein was one who transformed the way other scientists approached time itself.

His theory of special relativity proposed that the speed of light is a constant, no matter how quickly or in which direction you travel. This had incredible effects on the idea of time. Now, rather than moving at a constant, universal rate, time could be considered relative.

Time travel is full of paradoxes.

If you traveled back through time and murdered your own grandfather, would you disappear? Then again, if you never existed, how could you have killed your grandfather in the first place?

Therein lies the most common paradox of time travel. But it certainly isn’t the only one.

We time travel every day thanks to literature, memory and the internet.

Now you know how time travel has thrown esteemed thinkers and academics throughout history for a loop. But if you stop and consider what exactly time travel could be, you’ll quickly see that humankind has actually been doing it since the beginning of history.

That’s because time travel is possible through literature and memory. Each and every time you read something, you travel through time by reaching into the past and seeing what someone thought of the world back then.

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