If Time Doesn't Exist, Why Am I Always Late For Dinner?

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 83
James Gleick, Time Travel: a History

When H.G. Wells first floated the idea of a time machine (a term he invented) in 1895, it received fierce opposition from philosophers, scientists, and book critics. For an idea so well-fixed in popular consciousness that TV networks use it for everything from high drama to low comedy, the idea of critics rejecting time travel seems weird today. Yet highbrow scholars vehemently refused the idea, even as the novel flew off British bookstore shelves.

With this title, you’d possibly expect science historian James Gleick to write about time travel in popular culture. I certainly did. Instead, we have a gripping overview of how the human relationship with time has evolved across the last 120 or so years. Theologians, physicists, novelists, and ordinary people have struggled to understand what time means, and come to grips with whether it’s malleable. We accept the idea that time is travelable now… sort of.

Our metaphors for understanding time, the most popular being time as river or arrow, always disintegrate when pushed. If time flows like water, why can we not watch from the shore? Why does time’s arrow never hit its target? Despite our best efforts, the ways we understand time always imply its absence. Given the implications of time as reversible and optional, the idea of time travel isn’t illogical; one wonders why nobody invented it sooner.

Problems with understanding time are hardly new. Gleick quotes sources as venerable as Saint Augustine insisting they understood time’s existence, but couldn’t conceive a working definition. Wells quoted a then-developing hypothesis that time (“duration”) was the fourth dimension of space, an idea now entrenched in pop-cultural philosophy; but that idea doesn’t withstand scrutiny. We experience time, but unlike space, cannot rearrange it. We cannot escape time, or resequence time as we reorganize our living rooms.

Philosophers have struggled to define time, too. Besides Plato and Augustine, Gleick quotes extensively from Henri Bergson, whose path-breaking postulations on time… um… I didn’t quite follow. What matters, though, is that Bergson’s ideas gained critical acclaim and sparked new ideas in fellow philosophers between world wars, then fell on disfavor almost overnight, because they proved less than useful. This theme, of the gap between structural soundness and actual utility, recurs consistently throughout Gleick’s book.

James Gleick

Religion, philosophy’s close cousin, has a difficult history with time. God or the gods, we’re assured, are eternal—that is, they exist entirely outside time. They aren’t forever, since time implies change and, frequently, decay; rather, God stands outside time looking in. How, though, can a personal and loving God, invested in our ever-changing lives, stand outside change? Theologians have devised several work-arounds, but have most often simply ignored the question. Because time always creates paradoxes.

Most importantly, time has proven fraught for science. Newtonian physics absolutely relies upon time to measure motion… but it uses motion to measure time. The circular nature deprives science of necessary constants. Quantum physics finesses this by denying time’s objective existence. Yet why has time proven remarkably resilient? A growing minority of physicists are starting to rebel, insisting time exists, and their reasoning is so fascinating, I’ll let Gleick have the satisfaction of telling you.

So basically, time remains so close at hand that we cannot understand it objectively. We really only consider its weight when someone suggests escaping its pull. Gleick uses pop culture time travel, a distinctly Twentieth Century phenomenon, to understand the larger zeitgeist about time. For him, Doctor Who and Doc Brown aren’t interesting in themselves; he considers these a bellwether for others’ workaday understanding of time. We refine our understanding, by moving outside the question.

Gleick spends only two chapters (and the odd throwaway digression) on time travel fiction. The stories he explores favor philosophical concepts. Though he makes multiple passing allusions to Doctor Who, the only episode he explores deeply is “Blink,” the story that gave us the catchphrase “Wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey,” to explain time’s behavior when viewed from outside. This encapsulates the idea that somehow, time exists, without being constant or reliable. That’s the stage of understanding we’ve achieved.

Time travel arose, essentially, when Western philosophy grew disillusioned with constants. If nothing is forever, then “forever” doesn’t exist. We step outside time, looking for realities we prefer: some cling to disappearing pasts, while others attempt to hasten longed-for futures. Time travel becomes one more among the metaphors which describe truths we glimpse, but cannot explain. James Gleick does a remarkable job explaining this evolution. Something like time exists; now we have to travel it.