James Gleick on How Our Cultural

Fascination with Time Travel Illuminates

Memory, the Nature of Time, and the
Central Mystery of Human
Consciousness
Every moment alters what came before. We reach
across layers of time for the memories of our
memories.
By Maria Popova
James Gleick on How Our Cultural Fascination with Time Travel Illuminates Memory,
the Nature of Time, and the Central Mystery of Human Consciousness
Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of
time is the gate of wisdom, Bertrand Russell in 1931 as he made his beautiful case for
a largeness of contemplation in contemplating the nature of time. Shard by shard we
are released from the tyranny of so-called time, Patti Smith wrote nearly a century later
in her magnificent meditation on time and transformation.
As a child in Bulgaria, never having heard of either Russell or Smith, one aspect of time
perplexed me to the point of obsession: In my history textbooks, dates relating to
significant events or historical figures of Slavic origin were listed in pairs each had a
new style date and an old style date, always thirteen days apart. So, for instance,
Hristo Botev the great revolutionary who led Bulgarias liberation from a fivecentury Ottoman slavery was born on January 6 of 1848 according to the new style
and on Christmas Day of 1847 according to the old style.
I would later learn that this was the product of the League of Nations, formed after
WWI. Its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, headed by Henri Bergson the great
French philosopher who famously opposed Einstein in a debate that changed our
modern conception of time was tasked with eradicating the Julian calendar that many
countries, including Bulgaria and Russia, still used and replacing it with the Gregorian
calendar as the new global standard.
This is my earliest memory of confronting the nature of time as both an abstraction
humans could make with a committee and a concrete anchor of existence mooring our
births, our deaths, and our entire sense of history. But most perplexing of all was the
question of what happened to the people who lived through the transition what
happened to the thirteen very real days between the two fictions of the calendars. If
reading history wasnt time-travelish enough, reading about real people forced to timetravel in their real lives by an international decree was both utterly fascinating and

utterly confusing. Did the person actually exist between their old-style date of birth and
the new-style one were they alive or not-yet-born? (Even today, the Wikipedia
biographies of a Slavic persons from that era list both old-style and new-style dates of
birth and death.) The person, of course, most definitely did exist between the day they
were born and the day they died, whatever dates posterity our living present, their
unlived future may impose on those days, now far in the past.
That thirteen-day lacuna between being and non-being was, apparently, the price of
globalization. But it was also a suddenly shrill echo of an eternal question: If time
bookends our existence, and if it is so easily perturbed by a calendarical convention, is it
a mere abstraction?
Discus chronologicus, a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, from
Cartographies of Time
Time is the two-headed Baskerville hound chasing us as we run for our lives and
from our lives driven by the twain terrors of tedium and urgency. Toward what, we
dare not think. Meanwhile, our information-input timelines are called feeds. We feast
on time as time feasts on us. Time and information, if they are to be disentwined at all,
dictate our lives. Is it any wonder, then, that we would rebel by trying to subjugate them
in return, whether by formalizing them with our calendars or by fleeing from them with
our time travel fantasies?
How those time travel fantasies originated, what technological and cultural
developments fomented this distinctly modern impulse of the collective imagination,
and how it illuminates our greatest anxieties is what science historian and writer
extraordinaire James Gleick explores in Time Travel: A History (public library) a
grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and
literature as the catalyst. Embedded in the book is a bibliography for the Babel of time
a most exquisitely annotated compendium of the body of time literature. What
emerges is an inquiry, the most elegant since Borges, into why we think about time, why
its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions at all reveals about the
deepest mysteries of human consciousness and about what Gleick so beguilingly calls
the fast-expanding tapestry of interwoven ideas and facts that we call our culture.
Gleick, who examined the origin of our modern anxiety about time with remarkable
prescience nearly two decades ago, traces the invention of the notion of time travel to
H.G. Wellss 1895 masterpiece The Time Machine. Although Wells like Gleick, like
any reputable physicist knew that time travel was a scientific impossibility, he
created an aesthetic of thought which never previously existed and which has since
shaped the modern consciousness. Gleick argues that the art this aesthetic produced
an entire canon of time travel literature and film not only permeated popular culture
but even influenced some of the greatest scientific minds of the past century, including
Stephen Hawking, who once cleverly hosted a party for time travelers and when no one
showed up considered the impossibility of time travel proven, and John Archibald
Wheeler, who popularized the term black hole and coined wormhole, both key
tropes of time travel literature.
Illustration by Matthew Houston for a graphic interpretation of Wellss The Time
Machine

Gleick considers how a scientific impossibility can become such fertile ground for the
artistic imagination:
Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For
history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our
memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension,
beginning to end.
Wellss Time Machine revealed a turning in the road, an alteration in the human
relationship with time. New technologies and ideas reinforced one another: the electric
telegraph, the steam railroad, the earth science of Lyell and the life science of Darwin,
the rise of archeology out of antiquarianism, and the perfection of clocks. When the
nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, scientists and philosophers were primed to
understand time in a new way. And so were we all. Time travel bloomed in the culture,
its loops and twists and paradoxes.
Wells imagined time travel in an era where so much of what we take for granted was
either a disorienting novelty or yet to be invented bicycles, elevators, and balloons
were new, and even the earliest visions of anything resembling the internet were half a
century away. Gleick considers the direction of Wellss imagination:
The object of Wellss 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 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 wrote his masterpiece shortly before the rise of relativity remodeled our notions
of time. There was Einstein, of course. And Kurt Gdel. And Hermann Minkowski,
Einsteins teacher, whose model used four numbers (x, y, z, and t) to denote a world
point what we now call spacetime. Gleick writes of his legacy:
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
Platos 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.
But if we were able to conceive of this timeless totality to integrate it into our
conscious experience the fantasy of time travel wouldnt scintillate us so. A
centerpiece of our temporal dissonance is one particular phenomenon of consciousness,
a very palpable human experience: memory. Perhaps memory is the time travelers
subject, Gleick observes. With an eye to Virginia Woolfs memorable mediation on
memory in Orlando, that supreme masterwork of time travel, he writes:

What is memory, for a time traveler? A conundrum. We say that memory takes us
back. Virginia Woolf called memory a seamstress and a capricious one at that. I
cant remember things before they happen, says Alice, and the Queen retorts, Its a
poor sort of memory that only works backwards. Memory both is and is not our past. It
is not recorded, as we sometimes imagine; it is made, and continually remade. If the
time traveler meets herself, who remembers what, and when?
Illustration by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice in Wonderland
The question of memory, of course, is inseparable from the question of identity, for if
we live in permanent present tense, we are incapable of stringing together the
narrative out of which our sense of self arises. This continuity of selfhood, after all, is
what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of
physical and psychological change. Time travel presents some serious paradoxes for
memory and therefore for the self. A persons identity, Amin Maalouf wrote of the
genes of the soul, is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just
one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will
sound. If we could travel back to our own past and alter even a tiny speck of the
pattern, wed be changing the entire drum our identity would have a wholly different
sound. Gleick writes:
What is the self? A question for the twentieth century to ponder, from Freud to
Hofstadter and Dennett with detours through Lacan, and time travel provides some of
the more profound variations on the theme. We have split personalities and alter egos
galore. We have learned to doubt whether we are our younger selves, whether we will
be the same person when we next look. The literature of time travel begins to offer a
way into questions that might otherwise belong to philosophers. It looks at them
viscerally and navely as it were, nakedly.
And so we arrive, at page 99 and no sooner, at the problem of free will. Gleick writes:
Free will cannot be easily dismissed, because we experience it directly. We make
choices. No philosopher has yet sat down in a restaurant and told the waiter, Just bring
me whatever the universe has preordained. Then again, Einstein said that he could
will himself to light his pipe without feeling particularly free. He liked to quote
Schopenhauer Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.
The free will problem was a sleeping giant and, without particularly meaning to,
Einstein and Minkowski had prodded it awake. How literally were their followers to
take the space-time continuum the block universe, fixed for eternity, with our
blinkered three-dimensional consciousnesses moving through it?
A century later, the question has hardly budged. And yet we live our lives with such
urgency and pointedness of intent perhaps precisely because we are unwilling to
relinquish the illusion of free will. Gleick observes:
Everywhere we look, people are pressing elevator buttons, turning doorknobs, hailing
taxicabs, lifting sustenance to their lips, and begging their lovers favor. We act as
though the future is, if not in our control, not yet settled We would suffer illusions of

free will, because, by happenstance, we tend to know less about the future than about
the past.
Happenstance? Memory, self, free will this Venn diagram of consciousness is indeed
encircled by the lines we draw, often artificially, between causality and chance. (No
ones fated or doomed to love anyone The accidents happen, wrote Adrienne Rich.)
Gleick writes:
All the paradoxes are time loops. They all force us to think about causality. Can an
effect precede its cause? Of course not. Obviously. By definition.
[]
But were not very good at understanding causes. The first person on record as trying to
analyze cause and effect by power of ratiocination was Aristotle, who created layers of
complexity that have caused confusion ever after. He distinguished four distinct types of
causes, which can be named (making allowances for the impossibility of transmillennial
translation) the efficient, the formal, the material, and the final. Some of these are hard
for us to recognize as causes. The efficient cause of a sculpture is the sculptor, but the
material cause is the marble. Both are needed before the sculpture can exist. The final
cause is the purpose for which it is made its beauty, lets say We do well to
remember that nothing, when we look closely, has a single unambiguous
incontrovertible cause.
Gleick reality-checks the logicians causal models of reality:
If X, then Y means one thing in logic. In the physical world, it means something trickier
and always (we should know by now) subject to doubt. In logic, it is rigid. In physics,
there is slippage. Chance has a part to play. Accidents can happen. Uncertainty is a
principle. The world is more complex than any model.
[]
The physical laws are a construct, a convenience. They are not coextensive with the
universe.
One of Antoine de Saint-Exuprys original watercolors for The Little Prince
Mistaking the model for what Virginia Woolf called the thing itself seems to be a
perennial problem of science, and one particularly integral to the perplexity of time:
William Faulkner said, The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by
artificial means and hold it fixed. Scientists do that, too, and sometimes they forget
they are using artificial means.
[]
You can say the equations of physics make no distinction between past and future,
between forward and backward in time. But if you do, you are averting your gaze from
the phenomena dearest to our hearts. You leave for another day or another department

the puzzles of evolution, memory, consciousness, life itself. Elementary processes may
be reversible; complex processes are not. In the world of things, times arrow is always
flying.
Illustration from a vintage childrens adaptation of Micromgas, Voltaires trailblazing
scifi homage to Newton
With an eye to Borgess ideas about time, Gleick returns to the puzzlement of memory,
equally not coextensive with the physics of time:
We create memories or our memories create themselves. Consulting a memory converts
it into a memory of a memory. The memories of memories, the thoughts of thoughts,
blend into one another until we cannot tease them apart. Memory is recursive and selfreferential. Mirrors. Mazes.
The formation of memory as a function of consciousness invites the chief religious
opposition to science a theological avoidance of the free will problem, the
intellectually fragile contradictions of which Gleick captures elegantly in discussing the
ideas in Isaac Asimovs novel The End of Eternity:
Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it.
Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant
complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass;
events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thingafter-another, but all-at-once. His now encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or
an Einsteinian block universe. Either way, one might believe that God sees it entire. For
Him, the story does not have a beginning, middle, and end.
But if you believe in an interventionist god, what does that leave for him to do? A
changeless being is hard for us mortals to imagine. Does he act? Does he even think?
Without sequential time, thought a process is hard to imagine. Consciousness
requires time, it seems. It requires being in time. When we think, we seem to think
consecutively, one thought leading to another, in timely fashion, forming memories all
the while. A god outside of time would not have memories. Omniscience doesnt require
them.
But whatever pitfalls, paradoxes, and perplexities might bedevil our individual memory,
they are rendered into even sharper relief in our collective memory nowhere more so
than in the curious human obsession with time capsules, the grandest of which is the
Golden Record that sailed into space aboard the Voyager in 1977, a civilizational labor
of love dreamt up and rendered real by Carl Sagan and Annie Druyan that was also the
record of their own love story.
The Golden RecordThe Golden Record
Gleick considers what this strange millennia-old practice, this prosthetic memory,
reveals about human nature:
When people make time capsules, they disregard a vital fact of human history. Over the
millennia slowly at first and then with gathering speed we have evolved a

collective methodology for saving information about our lives and times and
transmitting that information into the future. We call it, for short, culture.
First came songs, clay pots, drawings on cave walls. Then tablets and scrolls, paintings
and books. Knots in alpaca threads, recording Incan calendar data and tax receipts.
These are external memory, extensions of our biological selves. Mental prostheses.
Then came repositories for the preservation of these items: libraries, monasteries,
museums; also theater troupes and orchestras. They may consider their mission to be
entertainment or spiritual practice or the celebration of beauty, but meanwhile they
transmit our symbolic memory across the generations. We can recognize these
institutions of culture as distributed storage and retrieval systems. The machinery is
unreliable disorganized and discontinuous, prone to failures and omissions. They use
code. They require deciphering. Then again, whether made of stone, paper, or silicon,
the technology of culture has a durability that the biological originals can only dream of.
This is how we tell our descendants who we were. By contrast, the recent smattering of
time capsules is an oddball sideshow.
Building on the ideas he examined in his indispensable biography of information,
Gleick adds:
As for knowledge itself, that is our stock in trade. When the Library of Alexandria
burned, it was one of a kind. Now there are hundreds of thousands, and they are
crammed to overflowing. We have developed a species memory. We leave our marks
everywhere.
[]
When people fill time capsules they are trying to stop the clock take stock, freeze the
now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future. The past appears
fixed, but memory, the fact of it, or the process, is always in motion. That applies to our
prosthetic global memory as well as the biological version. When the Library of
Congress promises to archive every tweet, does it create a Borgesian paradox in real
time or a giant burial chamber in progress?
Because time has this unsilenceable undertone reminding us of our morality, we grasp
onto it onto this intangible abstraction the way we grasp onto material
possessions, commodities, and all the other tangibilia by which we sustain our illusions
of permanence in a universe dominated by impermanence and constant flux. From this
angle, Gleick revisits the tenet that all paradoxes are time-loops:
Once we conceive of time as a quantity, we can store it up, apparently. We save it, spend
it, accumulate it, and bank it. We do all this quite obsessively nowadays, but the notion
is at least four hundred years old. Francis Bacon, 1612: To choose Time, is to save
Time. The corollary of saving time is wasting it.
[]
We go back and forth between being times master and its victim. Time is ours to use,
and then we are at its mercy. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, says Richard
II; For now hath time made me his numbering clock. If you say that an activity wastes

time, implying a substance in finite supply, and then you say that it fills time, implying a
sort of container, have you contradicted yourself? Are you confused? Are you
committing a failure of logic? None of those. On the contrary, you are a clever creature,
when it comes to time, and you can keep more than one idea in your head. Language is
imperfect; poetry, perfectly imperfect. We can occupy the time and pass the time in the
same breath. We can devour time or languish in its slow-chappd power.
Still, memory remains. The key to understanding time, Gleick suggests, lies in
understanding memory understanding the dialogue, often dissonant, between the
experiencing self and the remembering self. He writes:
The universe does what it does. We perceive change, perceive motion, and try to make
sense of the teeming, blooming confusion. The hard problem, in other words, is
consciousness. Were back where we started, with Wellss Time Traveller, insisting that
the only difference between time and space is that our consciousness moves along it,
just before Einstein and Minkowski said the same. Physicists have developed a lovehate relationship with the problem of the self. On the one hand its none of their
business leave it to the (mere) psychologists. On the other hand, trying to extricate
the observer the measurer, the accumulator of information from the cool
description of nature has turned out to be impossible. Our consciousness is not some
magical onlooker; it is a part of the universe it tries to contemplate.
The mind is what we experience most immediately and what does the experiencing. It is
subject to the arrow of time. It creates memories as it goes. It models the world and
continually compares these models with their predecessors. Whatever consciousness
will turn out to be, its not a moving flashlight illuminating successive slices of the fourdimensional space-time continuum. It is a dynamical system, occurring in time,
evolving in time, able to absorb bits of information from the past and process them, and
able as well to create anticipation for the future.
[]
What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.
This act of keeping track, which is largely a matter of telling the present from the past,
is what Gleick considers the key question of consciousness and the pillar of our very
sense of self:
How do we construct the self? Can there be memory without consciousness? Obviously
not. Or obviously. It depends what you mean by memory. A rat learns to run a maze
does it remember the maze? If memory is the perpetuation of information, then the least
conscious of organisms possess it. So do computers, whose memory we measure in
bytes. So does a gravestone. But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of
remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one
representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one
against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience? When
something misfires and we experience the present as if it were a memory, we call that
dj vu. Considering dj vu an illusion or pathology we might marvel at the
ordinary business of remembering.

This dizzying tour of science, philosophy, and their interaction with literature is leading
me to wonder: When a machine hums, does it hear or notice the hum? Could it be that
time is the hum of consciousness?
clocktower
Perhaps time is so troublesome because it foists upon us our perennial fear of missing
out. Time travel, Gleick argues, is such an alluring fantasy precisely because it bridges
the infinite possibility of life with the realm of the probable by traveling in time, we
get to live the myriad unlived lives which we are doomed to never experience under the
physical laws of this one and only life weve been allotted. He captures this with
uncompromising precision:
If we have only the one universe if the universe is all there is then time murders
possibility. It erases the lives we might have had.
Time travel, then, is a thought experiment performed in the petri dish of existence itself,
catalyzing its most elemental and disquieting questions. In a reframing of the central
idea of the Butterfly Effect a term Gleick himself wrested from the esoteric lexicon
of meteorology and embedded in the popular imagination in 1987 with his
groundbreaking first book, Chaos, which created an aesthetic for the history of science
much like Wells created an aesthetic for time travel literature he considers the logical
loops of changing any one element of history, which ripples across all of being:
We have to ask these questions, dont we? Is the world we have the only world
possible? Could everything have turned out differently? What if you could not only kill
Hitler and see what happens, but you could go back again and again, making
improvements, tweaking the timeline, like the weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) in one of
the greatest of all time-travel movies, reliving Groundhog Day until finally he gets it
right.
Is this the best of all possible worlds? If you had a time machine, would you kill Hitler?
And so we arrive at the answer to the central question:
Why do we need time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.
Time is a killer. Everyone knows that. Time will bury us. I wasted time, and now doth
time waste me. Time makes dust of all things. Times winged chariot isnt taking us
anywhere good.
How aptly named, the time beyond death: the Hereafter.
malmo_cathedral
But even death is strewn with the temporal asymmetry of our anxieties, which
Montaigne articulated brilliantly half a millennium ago as he contemplated death and
the art of living: To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the
same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago. And yet we do dread
death with infinitely greater intensity than we dread, if thats even the appropriate term,

not having lived before our birth. If the arrow of time is one-directional, so is the arrow
of time-anxiety. But Gleick subverts Montaigne and delivers a sublime summation of
the paradoxical impulse at the heart of our time travel yearnings:
You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere
punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining
intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in
amber.
For me the price of denying death in this way is denying life.
Barring denial, our only recourse is to surrender our memory, our consciousness, our
very selves to the flow of time. To borrow Sarah Mangusos piercing observation, time
punishes us by taking everything, but it also saves us by taking everything. Gleick
writes:
When the future vanishes into the past so quickly, what remains is a kind of
atemporality, a present tense in which temporal order feels as arbitrary as alphabetical
order. We say that the present is realyet it flows through our fingers like quicksilver.
[]
It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change that any sense of stasis is a
constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of
time for the memories of our memories.
Complement Time Travel the kind of book that lodges itself in the imagination,
planting seeds of ideas, insights, and revelations bound to go on blossoming for the
remainder of this lifetime with Bertrand Russell on the nature of time and Virginia
Woolf on its astonishing elasticity, then revisit Gleick on the story behind Newtons
famous standing on the shoulders of giants metaphor, the source of Richard
Feynmans genius, and the origin of Type A.

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