| Edition |
First edition. |
| Description |
336 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-322) and index. |
| Contents |
Machine -- Fin de siècle -- Philosophers and pulps -- Ancient lights -- By your bootstraps -- Arrow of time -- A river, a path, a maze -- Eternity -- Buried time -- Backward -- The paradoxes -- What is time? -- Our only boat -- Presently. |
| Summary |
Presents an exploration of time travel that details its subversive origins, evolution in literature and science, and enduring influence on the understanding of time itself. |
|
Gleick's story begins at the turn of the twentieth century with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book, an international sensation, The Time Machine. A host of forces were converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological--the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in the culture--from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Woody Allen to Jorge Luis Borges. He explores the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future. |
| Subject |
Space and time -- Popular works.
|
|
Time travel -- Popular works.
|
|
Space and time. (OCoLC)fst01127622
|
|
Time travel. (OCoLC)fst01151176
|
| Genre/Form |
Popular works. (OCoLC)fst01423846
|
| ISBN |
9780307908797 (hard cover ; alkaline paper) |
|
0307908798 (hard cover ; lkaline paper) |
|
