![]() “Time Travel’’ next limns the 20th century scientific revolutions that allowed researchers to ask seriously whether expeditions to the past or future might be possible, beginning in 1905, with Albert Einstein and his discovery that every observer measures his own time, that no two of us share the same moment. That grasp of the future as an undiscovered country gained power, he writes, during the Industrial Revolution, to be expressed by “the first true futurist” - Jules Verne - and then, more powerfully by Wells, until, Gleick argues, “e are all futurists now.” That, in his hands, is a history that begins with Gutenberg’s press, an invention that allowed us to preserve “our cultural memory in something visible, tangible, and shareable.” The creation of a record of experience, Gleick argues, enabled people to see the past as different from the present - and imagine that the future might be more than just a repeat of current experience. ![]() Wells published “The Time Machine’’ in which a traveler, equipped with a device that could carry him through what was just beginning to be called the fourth dimension, explored vast reaches of time.įrom there Gleick examines what he terms the discovery of the future. The book follows a loosely chronological approach, beginning at the moment when, Gleick argues, the concept of time travel first entered the popular imagination. ![]()
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