Time travel has formed a lively strand of science fiction, ever since H G Wells published The Time Machine in 1895. Back then, the concept was pure fantasy, but soon after, special relativity made travel forward in time a theoretical possibility, while general relativity made backward time travel open to scientific debate. Author James Gleick’s latest book, Time Travel: a History, looks into the formation and evolution of the concept that is time travel.

Gleick broke the mould of popular-science writing with his 1987 bestseller Chaos: Making a New Science. Rather than being presented with a dry history, the reader was plunged into a novel-like world where the individuals involved in chaos theory came alive. This was character-driven science, and it was a highly effective approach. Ever since, Gleick has proved at his best when writing about the personalities of scientists or mathematicians, such as his biography of Richard Feynman, Genius.

It comes as somewhat of a shock, then, that the opening chapters of Time Travel are dominated by fiction, most notably from Wells’ The Time Machine. Gleick makes the case that, around the time of Wells, humanity underwent a change in the way time itself was perceived – from both a philosophical and a scientific point of view – and he provides both fictional and factual examples to support that premise.

While it is nearly impossible to write a book about time travel without bringing Wells into the discussion, giving such weight to his novel with sweeping statements like “he invented a new mode of thought” seems somewhat excessive. Yet, Gleick does bring out a major shift in attitude to time, taking it from a distant characteristic of nature to something that we interact with far more directly.

Perhaps the strangest decision that Gleick makes in a book with this title is to announce early on that “we still need to remind ourselves that time travel is not real. It’s an impossibility”. The reader may find this a worrying statement in a book that has yet to get out of its introductory chapters and that now appears to be limiting itself to fiction. Many physicists might at this point raise an eyebrow, wondering how Gleick has missed the amply tested time dilation that emerges from Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

He hasn’t, but dismisses it by saying “It is hardly time travel, though. It is time dilation.” As anyone with a grasp of the theory will know, by moving away from the Earth at fast enough speeds and returning, more time would have passed on Earth than for the traveller. What is that, if not time travel? But Gleick refer to this, the so-called “twin paradox”, as merely an “anti-ageing device” and is quick to point out that this form of travel is a “one way street”.

Gleick may be unimpressed by this technique as it doesn’t match the fictional idea of a magic box that disappears from the present and appears at a different date, but it smacks of ignorance to say that time travel isn’t involved. Ironically, the author himself suggests that physicists professing realistic theories of time travel have been influenced by “a century of science fiction”.

Gleick’s thesis becomes apparent as he gets into the paradoxes of time travel, and examines the impressive early stories of Robert A Heinlein, a master of the tangled web of causality and connection that appears to result from travelling backwards in time. Having deemed actual time travel impossible, Gleick instead uses the concept as the vehicle for a philosophical exercise.

It would be fair to say that this book is not popular science, but rather a combination of a history of time travel in science fiction and an examination of time itself in culture and philosophy. For example, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Gleick’s view that creating time capsules is folly. Where science does come into it, Gleick is far more concerned with the nature of time than of time travel, for example exploring the thermodynamic arrow of time and its implications.

The approach taken is best illustrated with an example. A reader’s opinion of the book is likely to reflect how they respond to this prose. For me, this is a triumph of verbal dexterity over communication:

“Having dispensed with simultaneity, [author and poet Jorge Luis] Borges also denies succession. The continuity of time – the whole of time – another illusion. Furthermore, this illusion, or this problem, the never-ending effort to assemble a whole from a succession of instants, is also the problem of identity. Are you the same person you used to be? How would you know? Events stand alone; the totality of all events is an idealization as false as the sum of all the horses: ‘The universe, the sum of all events, is no less ideal than the sum of all the horses – one, many, none? – Shakespeare dreamed between 1592 and 1594.’ Oh, Marquis de Laplace.”

A reader may feel that, not only has Gleick not bothered with science much in this book, but also that he hasn’t always got it right. At one point, he tells us that in quantum mechanics “the wave function is timeless”, which will surprise anyone who put in the effort of learning the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. To enjoy the book, it is necessary to put aside any concern about the scientific aspects of time travel and to focus purely on the cultural. Though Gleick touches on science, and spends a number of pages looking at whether physicists really believe that time doesn’t exist, it is the metaphysics that concerns him here, not the nuts and bolts of practical time travel offered by relativity.

This isn’t a bad book. It’s a thoughtful and interesting exploration of cultural ideas of time and the philosophy behind them. But only if you accept the author’s premise – that actually traversing through time will never be possible – will you find that the book does what it says on the tin.

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