 My name is Seth Nukin. I am the Director of the Communications Forum, and I wanted to thank you all for coming here tonight. This is a wonderful event to launch this year's Forum Series. I know that after watching this tonight, you all will want to make sure you are up to date on everything the Communication Forum is doing. So please, if you have not already, add your name to the email signup list, which is by the door. We will only send you announcements when they are formed, which is six times a year. So you will not be flooded with emails. I have the easiest role tonight, which is to introduce the speakers. We are here tonight to celebrate and to learn about a new book by James Glick. I remember very clearly the first time I first read one of his books. It was when I read Genius a couple of years ago, a while ago. And if you haven't read that, it's a biography of Richard Feynman, and it's such a magisterial and incredible book. It really opened me up to the possibilities of science writing, of science writing as literature. But international best-selling author James Glick is a science historian and former head of the room reporter for the New York Times. He's written seven books, three of which Chaos, Genius and Isaac Newton were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His books have been translated into 30 languages, which is, I think, more languages than I could name. His latest book, Time Travel, the history delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and that thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. There will also be a book signing at 7.30 right outside this room, so if for some reason you do not already own time travel, you can rectify that. Our moderator tonight is Alan Leitman, a novelist, essayist, physicist, and professor of the practice of the humanities here at MIT. He is one of the people who teaches in the excellent graduate program in science writing. Dr. Leitman is the first professor to receive a joint appointment in the sciences of the humanities at this institution and has written 15 books, including The Diagnosis, which was the finalist for the National Book Award, and the international bestselling novel, Einstein's Dreams. So without further ado, please welcome Alan. Welcome everybody. Thank you, Seth, for the introductions you did part of my work for me. I just wanted to say a few more words from myself about Jim Glick. He's one of the great science writers of our time. And I wanted to say a couple of words about some of his books. His book Chaos, published in 1987, I think was probably the first book that brought chaos theory, the mathematics and the physics to the general public. It had enormous impact. For example, the playwright Tom Stoppert was influenced by this book in writing Arcadia. His book Newton was reviewed by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books. And just saying that much alone should let you know how highly regarded that book was in the intellectual and literary world. Freeman Dyson is a great physicist, and the New York Review of Books is one of our leading intellectual and literary publications. Seth mentioned the biography of Feynman, which I think is the definitive biography of Richard Feynman. Of course, he wrote quite a few books by himself, but not the way that Jim handled it. When I think of Jim's writing, I think of meticulous research, masterful writing, and great storytelling. And when you bring those things together, you get Jim Glick. So we're going to talk tonight a little bit about his new book and maybe a little bit about the landscape of science writing. And our format will be that Jim and I will talk for about an hour or so. We can keep it going that long. Then we'll have about half an hour of questions from you guys, which you can ask Jim. And then we'll have a book signing at 7.30 out there. So we'll start, I wanted to start with a question. You say in your book, and I should just mention that time travel is a marvelous synthesis of physics, philosophy, literature, history, and imaginative thought. I see Tom Levinson there who reviewed it for the Boston Globe. And I'm also very happy to see a number of graduates from our science writing program here. Let me just say one more thing before we get to your book. MIT has a commitment to the public engagement with science. And our graduate program in science writing has been going for 13 years. We have about 90 graduates, a few of whom are here tonight. It's a one-year master's degree program. And part of our program is to bring people like you here to MIT. MIT also has a Knights Fellows program, which brings mid-career science journalists to MIT for a year. We have recently started an online science magazine called Undark. We have a collaboration with Central Square Theater called the Catalyst Collaborative at MIT to commission new plays about science. So all of that is going on, and you are near the top of that great effort in public engagement with science. So in your book, somewhere near the beginning, and you use H.G. Wells' The Time Machine as one of your central motifs, that book was written in 1895, published. And you say that that was really the moment when time travel entered public discourse. I may be not saying it exactly the way that you say it. I agree with that. And so the question is, why is it that it was not until the late 19th century that people began thinking about and talking about time travel? Why couldn't it have happened a couple hundred years earlier, or 500 years earlier, or 1,000 years earlier? Right. That's exactly the question. That's half of the question, and then the other half of the question is, why then, why did it happen then? Why couldn't it have happened before, and why did it happen then? And I think, first of all, I should say this odd fact is, in a way, the initial motivation for the book. The fact that I imagine some of you are thinking can't possibly be true, that time travel wasn't a thing that people could talk about or think about or existed in the culture until effectively 1895. I mean, I found that astonishing, because time travel is such a vivid part of our mental toolkits. I mean, it sort of feels as though, I'm just going to guess that nobody here can remember the first time they heard of time travel. Why do these things grow up with time travel? It's so obvious. Why would you have to invent it? Isn't it just a natural thing to think about? That is, what if I could step, if not into a machine, through a door or a hole in the air, and find myself at a certain date 100 years in the future or 100 years in the past? Is it possible that nobody had that fantasy or asked that question? Well, part of the answer, the answer is complicated, and this is sort of the project of the first part of my book. But part of the answer is, and I think this becomes obvious when you think about it, that the world had to be changing at a certain rate before people, before it was sensible to say, what's the future going to be like? How is the future going to be different for my grandchildren? If you appeared in one of these time machines on a farm in the 15th century and asked the person you ran into, tell me, how do you imagine life will be for your grandchildren? The question wouldn't make sense. They would say, what do you mean? Life is going to be the same for my grandchildren. It's the same for me as it was for my grandparents. It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and then the accelerating sequence of technologies that were a vivid part of HG Wells's experience, the railroad trains dashing across England and the telegraph, and the advent of all of these new electrical things that were arriving at the end of the 19th century that suddenly people, and not just Wells, but lots of people were starting to speculate about the future as a different thing. You know, Jules Verne in France was writing futuristic novels before Wells. And there are other examples of sort of time-travelish things building up to Wells, and there was a kind of then the light bulb went off in 1895, or a little before, because it took Wells a long time to write this book. And so I think it was a combination of those things. That is, your question was why not before, and I think the essential answer to that is, you have to be able to start thinking of futurity. You have to be thinking in a futuristic way before you're motivated to send your time-travel into the future to see what it's going to be like. And I should say, so now I'll make the answer a little more complicated, besides new technologies, there was also in the 19th century for a whole bunch of related reasons, a new awareness of, well, that the Earth wasn't only 6,000 years old, right? I mean, you had Lyle just creating geology in a sophisticated way, and it was possible to look at layers of the Earth and see the history of the Earth buried in it. And archeologists were doing the same thing. They were digging up history of previous humans buried in the Earth. And Darwin was creating a new natural history that, and all of these histories were extending, were suddenly changing the age of the Earth from 6,000 years to something much larger. So that also opened a door that H. G. Wells was ready to walk through. Well, now that we've all been steeped in time-travel, and we are thinking more about the future, and of course, the pace of change is far greater now than it was in 1895. How do you think that the thinking of the future changes our conception of who we are? Yeah, that's a huge question. And it's also a question that, in a way, we're jumping ahead to the end of my book in part, because the way we think about the future now feels very different from the way people were thinking about the future in H. G. Wells's time. I spent a lot of time looking at, you know, part of the cute thing about 1895 is that it's just five years before 1900, which is a big deal, you know, round number calendar date, turn of the century, and there were a lot of celebrations. And it's possible to, you know, look back and see how people thought of the future in those days, because they suddenly were talking a lot about it. They made it an occasion and they made predictions, and there were lots of people who were in 1900 imagining what the year 2000 was going to be like, another round number. And mostly, those who were very optimistic views of the future, you know, they were going to have flying cars and all kinds of marvels, lots of problems were going to be solved by electricity. And now all of that's come true. We more or less have our flying cars and most of those other marvels, and we're not as thrilled about the future, are we, as they were 120 years ago? And if you look at the way the turn of the millennium was celebrated, so it was a lot less fun, right? I mean, there was the Y2K problem, remember? And we have all sorts of other fairly dire feelings about the future for some very good reasons. I mean, we may be completely destroying the planet, and people who write futuristic fiction now tend to be much more dystopian than they did at the beginning of all this business. Although H.G. Wells' view of the future, which I don't describe very much in my time travel book, is pretty dark. It turns out that he isn't interested, after all, in writing about the technological wonders that are going to be found. So how does it change our view of us? How does it change our view of ourselves is what you asked, and it's not a question I have an easy answer to. I mean, we think about we ourselves are people who are much more aware of our collective future than we used to be. That's my basic argument. If we project into the future, like 100 years from now, which is nothing compared to what H.G. Wells is doing, I mean, we might have implants in our brains that connect us directly to the internet. Yeah, in 10 years, probably. You first. I'm not volunteering, but I'm already a little bit cyborg myself. Well, don't we all feel this that it was easy for H.G. Wells to talk about going 1,000 years into the future? I find it almost inconceivable. What does it mean to talk about 1,000 years into the future? Everything is changing so fast now. We only have to go 10 years into the future to really be puzzled and a little bit scared about what the future is going to bring. That's how I feel about it. I don't even, I mean, I always thought I would want to go into the future in my time machine, but I'm a little scared about going too far. Curious, though. That is, well, it's interesting that you say that they're more dystopias written now. You quote a lot from literature in your book. Of course, after H.G. Wells or Edith Nespid and Borges and probably 50 or even 100 different writers that you quote from and the way that they talked about time. And how do you think that the literary imagination shapes our view of the possible? And how does that compare to the scientific imagination? That's definitely part of the subject of my book, and it's not just that I'm quoting from literature. It's that I'm trying to investigate what is happening to our view of time as witnessed through literature. I mean, I should say, I think I should say at this point that a book that I never mentioned but that was never far from my mind when I was working on time travel was your book, Einstein's Dreams. And I assume since we're in Alan Lightman country that you all know that book. I see people nodding their heads, but just in case, it is a beautiful collection of fantasies, it's a kind of theme in variations that Borges would be proud to have written or Calvino. And it's, I would say, now I'm on dangerous ground sort of expressing your purpose, but it felt to me that what you're capturing in that book is, which is sort of framed as dreams that Einstein had in 1905. And it's many different variations on what time might be. If you completely bust open the notion of time, you allow yourself to go in any direction with it. Time could run backwards, time could go in loops, time could be bottled. What is time? If you imagine that Einstein was suddenly completely liberated in his imagination to think about time in every possible way and not just the very specific yet revolutionary way that he was thinking about time. Well, I think what you're capturing is, in fact, what was happening to the world in that era. And I start my story just a few years before that in 1895, but the story I'm trying to tell is that story. I feel that our culture, our collective culture, was suddenly breaking open its sense of what time was. I didn't realize when I started working on the time travel book that that was going to be my, that I was going to feel that way. But I felt it very quickly became clear to me that that was going on because here's H.G. Wells doing this thing that's very imaginative in one way. That's the literary imagination. In the scientific imagination of Einstein ten years later and Minkowski, both expressing in a completely rigorous way the notion of time as a fourth dimension that Wells had expressed in a flippant way as the framing device for the time machine. And that's weird. That kind of coincidence is weird. And you have to, I feel you have to take it as evidence that something is going on throughout the culture. And so that is to say, now I don't want to get too tangled up here. I don't want to say that I don't say that in order to undermine or question Einstein's work the way a sociologist might who says, well, you know, scientists, what they do is just completely, you know, they think it's about mathematics, but it's actually just culturally determined. I'm not saying that. What I'm trying to explore in my book is the ways in which, let's say, the literary imagination and the scientific imagination are running along, not on parallel tracks, they're participating in the same world. So the reason I quote all these books, the reason I make reference to all of these books is that something is happening throughout the culture. So I'm talking about Marcel Proust, who's practically a contemporary of Wells and is in his own way obsessed with time. His book is In Search of Lost Time, and he is, of course, all about memory, and he is inventing a new kind of narrative complexity for exploring time as no writer had been able to do before. And then immediately after, there's James Joyce and Virginia Woolf all throwing their notions of time up in the air in ways that are not too far from removed from what you're doing in Einstein's dreams. Well, let's get back to Einstein for a moment, since we're at MIT. I want to make a comment about what Einstein was doing in his 1905 paper on time and ask you to comment on it. Unlike the writers that you mentioned, Einstein did not set out to revise our understanding of time. He set out and not work, and I'll see you nodding so you know very well. No, don't assume I know. Just assume I'm agreeing so far. Well, he set out in that work to find a consistent understanding of electricity and magnetism for observers in motion relative to each other. So you had a theory of electromagnetism for a set of observers, but then if you have another group of observers, an observer is just someone with a clock and a ruler to make measurements. You have another set of observers who are moving by the first set of observers, both the theory of electromagnetism at the time and the experiments show that there was a conflict, that something was wrong somewhere. And he found that to make things right, he had to revise time so that the duration between two events as seen by you is different than the duration between two events as seen by me if I'm running past you when he found that he needed to do that to make everything right with the theory of electricity and magnetism. So time came in as a consequence of another observation. So my question to you, since you're talking about that something was in the culture at thinking about time that was expressed in these literary works, do you think that that somehow allowed Einstein or gave him in some way in his mind the permission to question the nature of time? I mean, after all, it takes a tremendous amount of Hutzpah, and remember Einstein was only 26 years old or 25 or something, to question the nature of time, which is so fundamental. I mean, it's like consciousness time. I mean, it's something that hadn't been questioned for recorded history. Do you think that it wasn't just the science, but it was the culture that gave him permission to do that? I know it's a very difficult question to answer. I'm interested in that question, and I think I have a two-part answer, but first I just was brought up short by you're saying we hadn't questioned the nature of time since the beginning of recorded history. There is, of course, Newton. Well, time is absolute. I mean, I should say time was absolute up until Einstein that a second is a second is a second. Up until Einstein, but kind of starting with Newton, no? You're not going to agree with that? Well, here's what I'm going to say, and we can argue if necessary. I think sort of, I feel that Newton, everybody always knew some things about time. Yes, a second is a second. And although, no, they didn't know that because they didn't have clocks that could measure seconds until pretty late in the game. Newton didn't have that, right? He had most of the clocks in Newton's world didn't even have minute hands. Newton kind of out of the blue, Newton did this radical thing of saying you all know about psychological time. You all talk about time in a certain way. I'm going to talk about time in a different way as something that is absolute and flows equibly everywhere the same and is universal. And that was a huge change. I mean, that was a watershed moment for humanity, right? You wouldn't argue with that, I hope. I mean, that's what I think. And then that was kind of taken for granted by scientists that worked really well up until Einstein's time. And Einstein made this revision for the reason you just expressed. And I was starting to feel when you were explaining it that you were describing it as not a particularly radical revision, that in a way he just did the minimum necessary, made the minimum necessary adjustment. Well, I think it was pretty radical, but it was led through a number of logical steps. Yeah. And when he was done, he was still treating time as a very rigid, clear, well-defined mathematical thing. That's essential to all of the equations. I mean, it's built in and there's no room for psychological fuzziness, right? So in that sense, he was still with Newton and not with the psychologists who were more interested in our perception of time and how time is connected with our memories and our minds and how we're inventing time in our heads. That's not for Newton and it's not for Einstein. But anyway, so my answer to your question, I think, is yes, I kind of, I feel on the one hand that as I said, things were more in flux about time than they had been for a while, in part because of the many ways in which we were being brought, we people were being brought face to face with some of the puzzles of time. Because there were railroad trains zooming across the landscape, for the first time it became necessary to establish time zones and because there was the electric telegraph, it became possible to establish time zones and it became possible to synchronize clocks electrically using signals traveling at light speed. And Einstein was very much aware of that. I mean, you know, that's something that Peter Gallison up the road has written about. And H.E. Wills was in that same world. He was also paying attention to clocks and time zones and railroad trains and in his case bicycles, he was more interested in bicycles than Einstein was, I think, maybe less interested in railroad trains. Because the time machine, if you read his book carefully, is really just a bicycle. Really, you'll see what I mean. Yeah, where was I? Oh, but all of the psychological issues around time, I think, were also up in the air too when things were changing and Berkson was thinking about time in new ways and William James had been and they also influenced Proust directly and Joyce was influenced by Einstein and as soon as all that stuff started getting into the newspapers, people like Joyce were reading them and so there's all kinds of fun language in Ulysses about spacetime. And then you can tell that he's been reading, if not Einstein, he's been reading newspaper articles about Einstein and conversely, were the scientists reading science fiction? Well, that's a different question. I'm not claiming that Einstein was reading H.E. Wills. I don't actually think he did. I did look to see if I could find any evidence of that. But nowadays, if we can jump into the future, and of course we can, there's no question that physicists grow up reading all of these time travel stories. And so it may not have been true of Einstein, but it's true of everybody these days that people, and I don't know if there are any in this room who are serious theoretical physicists who like to flirt with ideas of wormholes, but I think those people like to talk about wormholes because it's so much fun because they read science fiction books when they were time travel books when they were a kid. And again, I don't say that to question the science, which I still believe in. There's a place in the book early on where you say, where you're talking about space and you say that empty space, forgive me if I'm paraphrasing you, empty space is not space at all that space is a secondary quantity, that it's the relation between things. Would you say that about time too? That if there's absolutely nothing changing, and if you don't want to, if you want to stay from your own authority, you can talk about how other people have spoken of this. But if you have nothing changing, then does time exist? It's sort of nice that you're asking me as though I know. But what do you think? You're the physicist. Well, I think if you can't build a clock, if there's nothing analogous to a clock, then time doesn't exist. And we're getting back to Einstein when you were talking about the psychological understanding of time, which is reflected in many of the writers that you mentioned, Proust and so on, that Einstein seems to go out of his way to distinguish himself from the experience of time by saying we're going to just ask, what does the clock measure? Yeah. And makes it very clear that what he's talking about, he doesn't claim to be talking about reality. And I think that most scientists or many scientists would not be claimed in me making statements about reality. What Einstein does is he says, I'm going to talk about what different clocks measure and how you would go about synchronizing clocks so that clocks can be in different places and still have a framework of time. And he distances himself from the psychological or the literary. In fact, he wants to distance himself from the human being totally because you can build a clock that's outside of your body and go look at it every once in a while or not look at it. Well, so I think we can really go down the rabbit hole here. And why not? Because we're at MIT. And one thing I did, well, there's a chapter in my book titled, What is Time? Which is pretty arrogant. And I'm not claiming that I answered the question. But in the course of investigating the question, I consulted dictionaries. But I also looked at what physicists, how physicists answer that question. And so one physicist to answer is Feynman liked to say time is what happens when nothing else does. So what about that? Now, that's a... Well, I would rule out my answer to the question. Well, it would, right? I mean, it's kind of... That's one of those things that sounds really good. And Feynman, who knows whether he meant that seriously. But I would say, isn't he expressing Newton's view of time? That is, Newton's view of time is time is there. It's in the background. It's a framework. Space is there, too. Space and time. And you don't need stuff to fill it. The stuff that fills it, then you can start measuring it. And the source of the time and space was the body of God? If necessary, yeah. The sensorium. Yeah, the sensorium. Leibniz, at the same time, never accepted that. And Leibniz's view is what you just expressed at the very beginning of that question that I started to avoid. It was a relational view. Leibniz took the view that space and time both depended on stuff. And we can only talk about them sensibly in terms of the relation between things. And so there are physicists who say, well, Lee Smolin, who wrote a very interesting book about time just a couple of years ago, says time is what a clock measures, which is what you just said. And that's kind of an interesting definition, but sort of obviously wrong, because isn't a clock what measures time? Isn't that a loop? Isn't that a very short, circular loop? So you have to think about it more deeply. And think about it more deeply is kind of what you just expressed, that that's a way of separating it from the human. Also, I do think it's reasonable to say philosophically, and I think this has now passed a scientific question, at least in my mind, that if the universe were completely empty, how could there be such a thing as time? Because if nothing is there, nothing to change, what would time be? How would you define it? How would you measure it? All right. So another thing that physicists say, this is Wheeler. Wheeler says time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once. And then Wheeler admits, either admits or claims that he found that scrawled on the wall of a men's room at a bar in Texas. And it's also something that Woody Allen said. And now that we have the internet, you can actually search for that and find out that almost that exact sentence appears in a science fiction novel of the 1920s, an American pretty pulp science fiction novel. But it's not, again, you know, it makes a kind of sense, right? And by the way, Susan Sontag said, just to complete the circle, she said time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, and space is nature's way of keeping it from happening to us. Your book is very wide ranging. And besides the science and the literature and the technology, there's a fair amount of what I would call philosophy in the book. And one of the philosophical questions you raise is the question of free will, which of course is the old Chestnut philosophy, free will versus determinism. And you say in the book that the work of Einstein and Minkowski had an impact on the free will question. Can you talk about that a little bit? Okay. Well, this is, yes, this is a thing. I mean, this is a thing that everybody in this room knows already. That if you think of the universe as being a four-dimensional space-time continuum in which everything of interest is described by these equations, which are essentially deterministic, then there's no place for free will. And you can, if you Google free will and physics or free will and something, very quickly turn up videos of certain physicists explaining that there is no place, there's no room for free will in the fundamental laws of physics. That free will is a human illusion and so on. And I don't know how you feel about that or how most people in this room feel about it. I don't particularly like it. I like to be a believer in free will, but that's not a scientific statement. And I also think that, I also believe just sort of observing physicists from a sociological standpoint that there is a lot of, that this is an open question and that the physicists who say there is no room for free will in the fundamental laws of physics are not telling us the whole, are not really giving us the whole story. The question arises in my time travel framework because inevitably the science fiction writers who started exploring time travel as if it were real because they're writing their stories immediately ran into problems of free will. And so here's a kind of, here's a way in which that happens. Robert Heinlein is writing a story in, I forget the date now, 1940s or 1950s. This story is called By His Bootstraps. And I'll just describe it very quickly. It starts with Bob sitting at his desk working on his dissertation. Maybe he's at MIT. And it's got a very pompous philosophical sounding title that has something to do with time. And behind him, a hole opens in the air and a man walks through and taps him on the shoulder and says, you know, don't bother with that. It's all bullshit. And this man looks suspiciously like Bob. But he calls himself Joe. And he, you know, conversation ensues and then the phone rings and it's a third person who says, don't listen to Joe. You know, he's only going to get you into trouble. And already we know that this is all just Bob. These are all different versions of Bob having this conversation with themselves. And it's fun. The story plays out like a kind of farce with people, the timing has to be exact and they walk through doors and they get into fights. And one of them is sleeping with the other one's girlfriend. I mean, it's all farce. But also, Heinlein, who's, you know, banging this stuff out for tiny amounts of money, trying to make a living as a pulp science fiction writer, takes the philosophical question seriously. And he starts to ask, if Bob I and Bob II are having this conversation, shouldn't Bob II remember that he already had this conversation and so shouldn't there be a script that he is in effect following? And at some point, one of the Bob's starts to realize this and say, well, wait a second. Why don't I, do I remember having this conversation? And because of the plot, because of necessities of the plot, he needs to not do the thing that he's inevitably going to do. And so he asks himself, well, why do I have to do that? Why can't I just, you know, not say it this time around? So does Bob have free will or not? You have to ask. If you believe in time travel, if you believe that you can go in a time machine to the future or back three days to the past and meet yourself and have a conversation with yourself, what does that say about free will? And for that matter, what does it say about the self? What does it say about who you are as a continuous person? These are things that from my point of view, the science fiction writers are exploring in a more entertaining way and possibly a more profound way than philosophers and the philosophers just had to catch up. Well, let me pivot, we've been hearing that word a lot lately, and ask you a general question about science writing today. I mean, there's been a huge change in communication in general. People can start their own blogs now and build up a following. Would you comment a little bit on the state of science writing today? I'm amazed, I'm just amazed at how good science writing is today. I've started to feel, I've been feeling this way sort of, I don't know, for the last year. I don't feel I do science writing anymore. You know, this book is barely science writing. Have we given the impression that my time travel book is science writing? It's really, it's not so much. So I read things and the stuff I'm reading just blows me away. Science writers in their 20s and 30s, I think it's a lot better than it was when I was starting out. I mean, now I just, I hate this sort of rhetorical stance where I am an elderly man recounting what life was like in the time of the horse and buggy. But when I was a science reporter for the New York Times, there were eight or ten of us on that science staff, and I'm pretty sure that the New York Times was the only newspaper that had more than one science reporter. And most newspapers didn't have any. And when I wrote my first book, Chaos, I just had it with, it was no competition. I had the world to myself, it felt like. I mean, I wasn't worried that anybody else was going to beat me to it. And if I were writing that book now, I would be. There would be ten other people who already knew about it. And I'm not sure how that happened. And I think that part of it is, part of what's happened is that there is this multitude of new channels. We talked a little bit about Nautilus, which is just, you know, terrific online only magazine. And there are a lot of blogs, and people who want to write about science have a lot of outlets for it. And unfortunately, I don't feel that that's necessarily a happy thing because I also worry about how you make a living writing about science. And I think it's harder and harder. Book advances are certainly going down. Books are in trouble. Newspapers are dying. So, you know, I don't know whether to say this is good news or bad news, but I think there is some really great science writing going on. Don't you? I do, I do. I mean, you're creating these people. We've got some fantastic science writers just in this audience here. Yeah. And I also think now I should, I think I'll add this, that in writing for the New York Times, I was constrained to a very, to a certain level of depth. And writing my book, you know, at least in theory, I was freed from that and I could write to any level of depth. A lot of really good science writing, I think, is more sophisticated and more less worrying about having to explain basic concepts to the reader than I had to be. Well, also, the blog is, you can go on at any length with the blog as long as your reader will stay with you. We were just talking about a blog discussion of your book a few minutes ago that went on. You said 4,000 words or something. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Maria Popova's blog. I mean, she's an example of somebody who is, you know, brain picker. Some of you must know her. She's doing a thing. She's carved out a niche in the intellectual universe that just didn't exist before and created something very new. Yeah. And she's really taking advantage of the modern up-to-date methods of communication. She's done a lot of technology, Twitter's. And if there were a young person, say, 22 or 23 years old who wanted to be you, professionally you, now, starting now, 2016, what would you advise them? To be me professionally. To be the kind of writer that you are. Well, my career path felt so undirected and accidental that I really hesitate to ask anybody to try to retrace that set of accidents. One thing about it that I'm always conscious of is that I have no scientific background. So naively, I should say, if you want to be me, don't study science. And that would be ridiculous because there have been a thousand times during my writing career that I've thought what an idiot I was not to at least take a basic physics course I'm spitting when I was at Harvard. You know, I would have been a lot better off. Things would have been a lot easier. So that doesn't work. On the other hand, I am, I think, I still think of myself fundamentally as a journalist even though I'm not practicing journalism and I haven't worked for an organ of journalism for more than 20 years, almost 30 years. My prejudices are a journalist's prejudices. That is, I believe in going out and interviewing people and listening to them and asking stupid questions. That's been a lot of my methodology for at least for my first books where I was writing about things that were initially way over my head. You know, I had to just ask questions. But also part of being a journalist is to think that you're not, a journalist's job is not to explain something that's complicated. That's somebody else's job. I mean, that's a textbook writer's job maybe. A journalist's job is to report the news. And so, when I was writing my first book about chaos, I was very focused on not setting out to explain the concepts of chaos as my primary mission, but only doing that on the way, making my primary mission the recounting of something that I considered newsworthy. That is a new development in science and in our culture that had taken place over the past 10, 5, 20, 15 years and telling the stories of those people and interviewing them the way a reporter would. Well, could I restate that that your primary interest was telling a story? And the pedagogy comes along in the way at the service of the story. Yes. Can I think of it that way? Yes, with a big but. That, yes, this is a technique, narrative is a technique, right? But I also strongly believe that we should be suspicious of stories and that if you describe my methodology that way, I want to say, well, don't trust that guy because the story is what matters to him. And stories have a tendency to be too neat sometimes. So, yes, I mean, I'm both, that is what I do. I'm guilty of that, but I'm also wary of it, right? I mean, time travel is a story. It's a story of the development of an idea in our culture. I mean, that was going to be my framework. The beginning of the story was going to be, how did this idea arise, this idea of time travel? How was it passed from one person to another? And how did it then start to vary and evolve? And who talked to whom? And so part of the research involved looking at pulp magazines in New York in the 1920s and the magazines that were invented mostly by this one weird guy, Hugo Gernsback, who really is sort of the inventor of science fiction. And so that's a story, but it's a story that properly gets complicated and the narrative gets twisty and breaks down. And so I do think you have to be comfortable with narratives that fall apart a little bit. Well, a good novelist should never know the complete plot when he or she starts writing. Is that true? Is that good advice? I think it's good advice, because if you know the story ahead of time, then you don't allow your characters the freedom to come alive. And so what you said just now reminds me of that because what you're really saying that I'm hearing is you listen to what the people are saying and what you discover in your research and you let the story develop according to what you find out. Right. I think what you're wary of is deciding ahead of time what the story is going to be. Yes, well, yes, that certainly, and also making things too neat. I mean, I should also say another thing that I believe is that stories are what we all use to make sense of the world. That a story in the broadest sense of the word is what we're creating stories at every moment. I mean, in time travel, sometimes I digress into speculation about the nature of memory and the nature of consciousness, and we are telling stories. Memory, the act of memory, the act of recalling a memory or creating a memory, I think is a kind of story telling, too. So it's not just me as a writer using stories as my vehicle. It's that I believe that's what we humans do, and by humans, in humans, I include scientists. I believe that a scientific theory is arguably a kind of story about the world with everything that's good about that and everything that's bad about it. It's good because we need that to make sense of a complicated and otherwise confused reality, and it's dangerous because every story is limited and should not be final. Well, I'd like that's a good place to let our wonderful audience ask you questions. Is that Bob Cook? Can you repeat the question? The question is, do I deal with entanglement at all? I don't think I do in this book. I dealt with it a little bit in my last book about information. What's your motivation because of the faster-than-light implications? No, this isn't the right book to read for a coherent explanation of entanglement. So, what effect did the historical sciences that came up in the 19th century, such as genealogy and biology, because in the sound of funding, it was the first case that I know of where you really tried to invoke geological function and its time effects such as stepping on a butterfly. It seems to me that that model of time played a big role. That's already different than physical. Can you try to repeat the question? The question is, what are the models, the new models of time coming from the sciences of the 19th century, geology and biology, what effect did they have? And also, I'm invited to discuss the Ray Bradbury story, The Sound of Thunder, in which the time travelers send safari hunters back to the era of the dinosaurs for fun. Africa's getting boring now, so they want to kill dinosaurs. They've got a time machine. What better use could they put it to than to entertain the whims of these rich people with guns? And your point, I think, is that the assumption in that story, the argument of that story depends on a view of the history of life, which is you could interfere with it by doing the wrong thing in the dinosaur era, in this case stepping on a butterfly, and interfering with that butterfly could have cascading consequences a la the butterfly effect, which was named much later than Bradbury, as you all know, by your very own Edward Lorenz. You're being the MIT people again. So the question was, well, that's, I think I've answered enough of the question. I haven't answered all of it. Marsha. When you start with H.G. Wills in 1895, what about the precursors, Washington, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, or Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, in King George's court? How do they, you know, fit into my theory, into my argument that time travel started out of the blue in 1895? I do have to deal with that, because one thing I knew when I started reading up on this was that everybody was going to look for favored examples of time travel before 1895, and there were a lot of precursors. There were things that, with the advantage of hindsight, we can call time travel. So, yes, Rip Van Winkle falls asleep, and he wakes up, and time has moved on. He's in the future, but he hasn't exactly leapt into the future, or traveled into the future. He has slept his way into the future, and there are ancient Asian legends along the lines of Rip Van Winkle that precede that by thousands of years, where there is a sort of time travel into the future of that kind. Yeah, what about Gilgamesh? Yeah, living all of those futures. Okay, and then also, but so you mentioned Mark Twain, and Mark Twain is before H.U. Wells, 1898, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, and the Yankee engineer indisputably travels through time. He goes back to King Arthur's court, and the way he does it is he gets banged on the head in a fight. He's knocked out, he wakes up, and instead of being on the factory floor, he's in a field, and there's a city in the distance and a knight in shining armor in front of him, and he says Bridgeport, and the knight says Camelot. And then he has his adventure, and then at the end, I think he maybe wakes up and maybe the whole thing was a dream. You know, Mark Twain wasn't quite ready to do real-time travel the way H.U. Wells was just five years later, but kind of he's more grist for my mill, Mark Twain was, because the point of the Connecticut Yankee story is to say something about changing technology. Mark Twain is living in a world where suddenly he had all this great equipment and machinery and knowledge, and he's thinking, well, they didn't have that in King Arthur's era. What a contrast. He draws a comic contrast between the technology that existed in medieval times and technology he's familiar with, and so his Connecticut Yankee is suddenly king of the world, brings them gunpowder and is a true wizard. Josh. So there are time travel stories in which avoiding paradox is part of the fun, and there are time travel stories in which in order to have fun, the audience and everyone has to kind of ignore paradox. And wondering if, given that you've read now these texts, in the arc of the time you've been telling stories about time travel, has there been any long-term trend towards ignoring or acknowledging the fact that these stories inevitably don't make any sense at all? I would say, yeah, that's a good question, and I think I would say it slightly differently. I would say the long-term trend has been toward more complexity, more sophistication. There's been a kind of arms race. I mean, the first guy, you've got Bob, and he meets himself and he gets into fistfights. Well, then Heinlein himself thought he couldn't do that story again. So the next time he did it, and this is the story called All You Zombies, which is a movie a couple of years ago that I haven't seen with Ethan Hawke, I think. Somebody's, yeah? And this time, the time traveler is his and her own mother and father by the time the story is done. It's a transgender time travel paradox. Before transgender was even, you know, fun, was even part of, you know, not shocking, I should say. But I think you're getting at something else that's very interesting that I don't want to ignore, which is that I do feel that every time travel story has an inescapable illogic at its core and that part of the game or part of the challenge for all of these writers is either concealing the illogic or playing with it long enough that you don't mind. Because ultimately time travel is impossible. You're nodding. I mean, you've written that it's impossible because it's because of causality violation, as you've said. That's what all of these paradoxes are. They're causality violation. And so as soon as you're going into the past and acting, doing things that might have an effect, you've got an inescapable paradox. And you're right. There's a kind of, maybe people get more skillful at sweeping it under the rug, but I also think they've gotten more skillful at facing up to it at the same time. And that's been the fun of the storytelling. First of all, I'm just going to say that the information was a big part. Your prior book was a big part of my CMS master's thesis. So thanks for writing that. I look forward to reading this. We are going to talk about technology, the old technology, and figuring what time travel is and means. But I also noticed that when you were talking about these early books that you're dating as being foundational to time travel, they're all novels. And I was wondering how you see the technology of the novel or the media form of the novel figuring into the invention of time travel or something that's distinct from these older myths or legends which show other media forms. Well, the novel had been around for a long time before anybody was able to use it for a time travel story. So I don't, I, if I could revise the question a little, maybe I would say that an interesting thing that happens is how the novel form itself starts to change. Proust, Joyce, Wolfe, and everybody else, people start really that the form itself has gotten so much more temporarily interesting than it was 120 years ago. The novelists now are able to rely on the readers increased sophistication about time. You know, just as the people at Nautilus can assume that their readers are more sophisticated than I used to be able to assume my New York Times readers were, every kid today grows up watching cartoons that have a lot of temporal complexity in them. And so you can do flashbacks and flash forwards and reminiscences mixed with flashbacks and everybody gets it. And so it becomes, just as the science fiction writers have a kind of arms race, novelists now to make their storytelling more interesting both can and must do more complicated gymnastics with the storytelling. Now, also in the era that we're talking about we've seen the development of movies and TV shows and other media and that also is part of the story that I'm telling. And movies, the motion picture technology was arriving on the scene right at the beginning and certainly had an influence on people's understanding of time. Just the technology did. I bet their master's thesis being written about it now or already have been. There are things that you can do in movies that you can't do in novels now and I explore some of these in my book too and one that comes to mind is the great movie La Jeté by Chris Marker which is, he does a kind of time travel storytelling that you couldn't do in a book. So things are changing on all of these different tracks. Can we learn more about time from other species? I noticed in the book you just failed and touched on this subject of certain species may experience MMT and may be able to relate the past and the future. But it's not, it is something independent and not related strictly to human consciousness or mechanical devices and this should be great understanding if you're going to look at the relationship of time in other species. Yeah, the question is what can we learn about time from other species? I think that's really interesting. I don't think we're very good at knowing what's in the minds of other species. Now I'm just going to express another of my prejudices and that is that I do tend to think that we are going to be continually surprised by how much is going on in the minds of other species on Earth and so I do not assume that humans have a monopoly on practically anything on language, on consciousness, on a sense of time. But how you would go about investigating how other species understand time is, I'm baffled by that. I don't know how you would do it. That sounds like a real challenge. The sense of thermodynamics affected the way people in the late 19th century thought about time and determinism. I know you mentioned determinism and I was thinking wouldn't the counterintuitive idea of the deterministic future have made people think differently about time travel if you would have a future already written? And I was also wondering, in this sort of related question, were there science popularizers in the HG Levels era to connect scientists and artists and offer them channels of communication? Okay, the first question is so big already that you don't get a second question. No, no, I'm kidding. No, it's a really good question. Oh, science of thermodynamics, what effect did that have on wells or on later science fiction writers? So I would just sort of quickly want to say two things. One, because it hadn't come up, a part of the problem for physics, as I see it, a part of the reason that the deterministic view of physics, this thing that I was saying about free will and the fundamental laws, isn't the whole story, comes, of course, from thermodynamics. And as soon as you start to talk about what Eddington first called the arrow of time, as soon as you start to talk about entropy, then a preferred direction of time comes back into physics, right? Thermodynamics has a preferred direction of time in a way that physicists, when they are speaking in that limited way about the fundamental laws, tend to be disregarding for the moment, even though they are certainly well aware of it. And the problem of connecting the parts of physics that have to face up to entropy, a statistical problem, in which time really does only go one way, and the parts of physics where the laws are reversible with respect to time, that's hard, right? I think physics is struggling with that. Wells was certainly aware of stuff going on in thermodynamics because another thing that happened was the culture was suddenly aware of the idea that this is the universe's destiny, a state of maximum entropy, heat death, everything becoming uniform, coming to a stop. And when you read The Time Machine, I think you have to be struck by the very vivid ending of the story, which I think the sun has gotten bright red and everything is dying, and there's what J. G. Belard later turned into the terminal beach. And he has to have been thinking about the kind of end of the universe scenario that came out of thermodynamics. Well, if I could make one comment here about the thermodynamics, I don't think there's any conflict between the reversibility of the laws of physics at the micro level, where both directions of time are equivalent, and the arrow of time given by thermodynamics, there's no conflict because the arrow of time in thermodynamics is determined by systems going from order to disorder, and the universe is getting more and more disordered. Since we in the 20th century have discovered that the universe began in a finite time in the past, it's not infinite in time, we have another language of talking about that, which is to say that our universe began in the quantum era much less than one second old in a state of high order, and that the entire direction of time since then, for all the billions of years since t equals zero, has been well defined because the universe began in such a state of high order. Now, what physicists don't know the answer to is why the universe began in a state of very high order. We don't know the answer to that. There are a number of cosmological theories about whether there was something before t equals zero and the nature of the quantum fluctuation that produced the universe, but we do have an answer to part of the question, which is why is there a well defined direction of time today despite the reversibility of processes at the micro level, and that is because the universe is in a relatively ordered state compared to what it could be, and we know how to calculate order and disorder of things like black holes, things that we didn't know about 50 years ago. So we still have the mystery of why our universe was created at very, very early times in such an orderly state, but if you accept that, then that's the answer to the question why is there a direction of time today. I think you have some of this in your book. Yeah. Some of that. Yeah. I've been talking a lot about the origin of stories about time travel like with H.G. Wells and Connecticut and King Arthur's Court and all of those things, which seem to have a longer term time travel where someone goes into the very far future and then like maybe returns their own time. And that seems sort of different from the sort of stuff we're talking about with Heinlein where you have someone sort of jumping around very near and like that sort of a chance of running into their future or past self. It seems kind of less interested in like what the future or the past is like and more interested in the mechanics of time travel itself. Do you have an idea of sort of when you start to see the first stories of that kind of Heinlein type? Is that like a post-Einstein kind of thing? I was following the question right up to the end. What's the, how's the Heinlein type? Which is the Heinlein type? Sort of near like, not going off into the far future or the far past, but are there stories like that around H.G. Wells' time or the later invention? Can you repeat the question? Yeah. Well, it's hard to repeat the question, but yes, there are different types of times travel stories. There are stories where you can go very far into the future the way H.G. Wells did. His story is really very, it's a very limited kind of story. He doesn't go into the past at all. I mean, I kind of want to broaden the question and point out, I want to answer the question this way. Never mind the question, sorry. In this conversation I've hardly touched on the whole menagerie of time travel stories, the whole range of things that you can do and still call it a time travel story. And the evolution of it is part of the, to the extent that my book is a narrative, which is a limited extent, that's how it starts. What happens next? So the Connecticut Yankee goes back, but it isn't really time travel, and then H.G. Wells actually invents a machine and so suddenly everybody's got something they can use. And one of the first things that happened next was Edith Nesbitt, a children's book writer who was a contemporary of Wells and actually a friend of Wells who immediately started, she started writing books where kids were sent back into the past. And I'm getting to your question, but I will get to your specific question before I'm finished. So that's the first variation. And they go back to the past and their motivation is to learn about history, or Edith Nesbitt's motivation is to tell kind of fractured fairy tales about history in the way that Bill and Ted's excellent adventure did a few years later. And then there are many other variations, the Heinlein variation that you're asking about where he doesn't go very far at all, he's just going a few days at a time. Maybe that's the 1940s, but before that people are doing every weird thing. The famous grandfather paradox, which is in between a long way and a short way, emerges in the 1920s when somebody writes a letter to the editor of one of Gernsback's pulp magazines and says, hey, you're doing all this time travel, has anybody thought about what would happen if you go into the past and you kill your grandfather and then you wouldn't be born? So that's why to this very day it's always the grandfather and never the grandmother. But I want to continue because there are all kinds of other variations that are still sort of time travel-ish in my mind. I think that Groundhog Day is a kind of time travel story. Bill Murray's character has to relive the same day from six o'clock in the morning over and over and over again. Till he gets it right, is a time traveler, isn't it? You can feel free to argue. I love, and I write a little bit about this wonderful novel by Ursula Le Guin, who mostly avoids time travel called The Lath of Heaven, in which the universe keeps being recreated by the dreams of our hapless hero, George Orr. Is that time travel? Well, yes and no. And that in turn is a variation on a theme of alternative history writing where the past is reimagined as something entirely different. Philip K. Dick imagines in the Man in the High Castle what if we hadn't won the war and the war ends with the Germans and the Japanese being in charge here in the United States. Yeah, alternative history, which then quickly becomes the most famous of all time travel tropes. What if you could go back and kill Hitler, which everybody's done. So you're creating alternative history by means of time travel. So that's more than you bargained for with that question. There was an evolution. Everybody wanted to earn their ten dollars from the miserly Hugo Gernsback and they had to come up with a new twist. We'll have one more question and then we'll have a book signing. So you pick thee. I wonder if you planned to have any future works on dealing with the construction of the law. Are you familiar with the engines? I'm not. I'm familiar with that. Well, how about this? I'm sure you're familiar. From MIT? Is it called a constructor law? All right, one more question because we fumbled that one. Talking about time travel is backwards but what about, do you also talk about travel to multiple dimensions? The idea that there are multiple realities is just a time walk that keeps you at one point. I do. The question is, what about multiple universes or multiple dimensions? I do and I'm not sure if this is time travel or not but it's another place where science fiction and literary fiction and real science intersect in an interesting way because we all talk now about multiverses and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as though there could actually be a virtually infinite number of universes created continually by quantum events and as far as I can tell that idea first arrives in the culture by way of Jorge Luis Borges in his story, The Garden of Forking Paths which was the first of his stories to be published in English in the well-known literary journal Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and he expresses perfectly and almost completely the idea of multiple universes as invented not that much later maybe by Hugh Everett and then picked up nowadays by so is it time travel? It doesn't really matter but yes, I must have decided it was. Anyway, thank you. What a great audience. It's been an honor for me to be here.