By James Gleick.
REVIEWED BY CHRIS EDWARDS
In his new book Time Travel: A History, James Gleick presents a valuable literary history of the idea of time travel while also highlighting the various paradoxes associated with the topic. Time travel too often can be considered an unserious aspect of physics and the subject only of speculative fiction. By writing this book, Gleick indicates that the paradoxes inherent in the concept should be taken seriously because solving those problems could lead to amore consistent scaffold of understanding for the role of time in theoretical physics. Gleick’s book creates an important history for the concept of time travel and makes the paradoxes clear. The author seems to have written the book in part to bring attention to the topic of time travel in the hopes that other thinkers will take the subject seriously and look for solutions to the paradoxes.