Transcripts For CSPAN2 Time Travel 20161029

This is awesome. I wish you put us in a time machine and take us back to 1895. A man stands at the end of a drafty core door, the 19th century, and in the flickering light 7 oil lamp examines a machine made of nickel and ivory with brass rails, a squat, ugly contraption somehow out of focus, not easy for the core reader to visualize despite a listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, add a drop of oil and plants himself in the saddle. He grasps a lever with both hands. He is going on a journey. By the way, so are we. When he throws that lever, time breaks from its moorings. The man is nondescript, almost devoid of features, gray eyes and a paleface and not much else. He lacks even a name. He is just the time traveler, for so it will be convenient to speak of him. Time and travel, no one had thought to join those words before now. And that machine with its saddle, it is a fantastic bicycle. The whole thing is the invention of a young enthusiast named wells, who goes by his initials, hg, because he thinks that sounds more serious than herbert. His family calls him berty. He is trying to be a writer. He is a thoroughly modern man, a believer in socialism, freelove and bicycles. Thank you. [applause] in the beginning of time travel and very quickly we are on to this. Nowadays you go through time so easily and well in our dreams and our art, it seems like an ancient tradition as old as gods dragons know the agents imagined immortality in reverse, lands of the dead, time machines, is a fantasy of the modern era which wells imagined, a time machine, also invented a new mode of thought. Really . What about scrooge . A connecticut yankee in King Arthurs Court . For moving around. That was really, this is the starting point for me, thinking there was history to be written of time travel. The idea that it isnt that ancient. It is such an obvious idea. Just seems like time travel is should be no more obscure than breakfast. Why shouldnt it have always been there . Charles dickens had, if you want to look for counterexamples, christmas past and christmas future but no one is traveling through time. He is, as the 19th century goes on, he wasnt long before wells, was starting to think about the past, the future, people had always thought about ways, consult fortunetellers and soothsayers, read tea leaves and when they were doing that, they were mostly thinking about their own future. Will i meet a tall, dark stranger, sort of thing. You also mentioned connecticut yankee in King Arthurs Court which is a great example, five years before wells. It is a kind of time travel. You can make the case, his hero, the connecticut yankee, i am sure you remember. Probably have a number in the audience right now. Of connecticut yankees. This yankee hangs with a factory engineer, a real can do guy. He was up to date with all the latest technology as mark twain was. Mark twain was the first guy on the block to have a typewriter and a telephone, he left all this stuff. Not a Group Building technology in those days we change what is the mechanism of time travel five years before hg wells invents a machine . He gets whacked on the head in a fight and wakes up and is in a field and there is a town in the distance and there is a horse, fancy blankets, on the horse is a guy wearing armor, and he says hartford, and the night says camelot. And we are off. The engine of twains story is kind of part of the argument im trying to make about wells. Suddenly people were aware of the difference between the technology that they had and the technology of the past. They didnt have time traveling technology but they had trains and telegraphs. Exactly. They were synchronized clocks using telegraphs, they were thinking about time and also thinking for the first time, what will the future be like . How will the future be different for my children and grandchildren, what sort of wonders and marbles will the year 2000 bring . It was five years before 1900. In 1900 everybody was very excited, it was the turn of the century. There were celebrations was looking back, there werent a lot of celebrations. It wasnt a big deal when the 18thcentury endeded and the 19th century began. The forward thrust of technology. People were futurists, they were thinking about the future and that was hg wells. He was a future guy. With the science oriented . Time travel proceeded, anybody must have extension in four directions, length, breadth and duration and you write the Fourth Dimension. Was this wells being a scientist . For people who dont know, this is the way the time machine begins, the time traveler giving a lecture to his friends to set up the story and has to justify this impossible idea of a machine that would travel through time. The way he does this is to give to modern ears it sounds pompous and pedantic, a little lecture to his friends. And he tells them everything you learned about time is wrong. Time is just another dimension like space. You can imagine it as a direction. Every object has four to mention that the Fourth Dimension is duration. If you didnt have any duration you would only exist for an instant so we have to imagine it extending into the past and into the future and so i have made a machine that can zoom along on that track. On that impossible to imagine track. There is Something Different about the reality of this, in victorian england, this time preceding him. The Fourth Dimension idea was out there but as a catchall hideaway, the spiritual. Anything lurking out of sight might be in the Fourth Dimension was wells takes us where . Into the future. He is thinking about time as the Fourth Dimension. The Fourth Dimension as a thing in geometry is something mathematicians have speculated about, it was obscure but in the air. Wells wasnt inventing it. Magically. It was sweet and years later that einstein published his first, at that point obscure, paper in a physics journal on special relativity in which he is imagining time as exactly that, a Fourth Dimension. For us, we know time is the Fourth Dimension, right . No one was surprised by that idea. Wellss time traveler had to explain it to his powells and they didnt believe it and he had to argue about it. Writing the story now we dont have to bother with that stuff because we already know it. In short order this notion is part of the orthodoxy of theoretical physics, he wrote about time travel, he wanted to sell books, get a good story, throughout this book, wonderful book, tension about the scientific view of this and the literary view of time travel. Take us through time travel. Were there scientific propositions on a table about whether this could happen and how it might happen . I could say as you know it is not really a book about the science of time travel. Sort of sucked us in. The time travelers a fleshly billboard in front. Anyone hoping there will be an instruction manual you are bound to be disappointed because there isnt that much science but there is some. There are people now, physicists who love to talk about time travel, wormholes, interstellar, i am sure a lot of you saw, producer and scientific advisor, very serious the best, kempthorne of caltech kip foreign. I would say impossible. My story is really about how the idea develops on parallel tracks and not just the idea of time travel but a whole assortment, a whole assortment of ways of thinking about time that suddenly became unsettled and thrown up for grabs. So philosophers were worrying about time as they always have but now they were worrying in new ways because they were reading albert einstein. A schoolboy in munich when hg wells wrote this. Soon after, philosophers had to deal with ideas of relativity coming at them from left field and there were philosophers who said lets examine this. Lets look at this fantasy by hg wells and analyze that philosophically. What about standing philosophy . Philosophy before einstein took over had a view of time. William james thought a lot about time. Henry baird thought about time. They were talking about the psychology of time and interested in questions that interest all of us still. How do we perceive time . Why is our perception of time so malleable . Why does a month to stretch on into eternity when we are 6 years old and goes by in an eyeblink when we are my age . Scientists were not interested so much in the perception of time. They needed time to be a very real thing. Einstein on the one hand was throwing open the doors and forcing us to reevaluate the way we think about time. On the other hand he was following in the tradition of newton in making sure time was mathematical. It is a very real thing, not just to be thought of with the falsely which philosophers use. I feel you coming down heavily on the side of philosophers and poets. Maybe not on the side. I like the scientists which i have been writing about physicists all my life. But they dont own time. Any more than the philosophers do, any more than the psychologists do. Our conception of time, i have come to feel, is an assortment of things and it is influenced by Science Fiction writers and influenced by literary writers who also are doing something very new. In the same era we are talking about. Practically a contemporary of wells, his great work he spent his whole life writing in search of lost time is about time and is about memory and about how narrative reconstructs reality, twists it around. He creates a theory of memory that has tremendous psychological validity and psychologists today about voluntary versus involuntary memory, whether they know it are not, involved in troost. Then there was james joyce and virginia woolf, they were focusing on time in new ways again. And twisting it. Talk about memory and time. When you think about it, what is memory . Time travel. We have a naive view because we are used to computers these days. This may have predated computers that memory is storage. You get the sensory input, you put it in and need it and recall it but that is not how our minds work. Psychologists know that now. Proust knew it very well. Philosophers have noted too. I shouldnt pretend im about to explain the secret of memory but one thing that is clear is it is an active process. We know that we cannot simply call up at will any memory in their. We also know that memories come involuntarily. Proust we also know or we should know, if we think about it, memory is an active process. Anytime we remember something we are recreating a car telling a story again. When we remember it the next time it might be a little different. We all know it is possible at least we should know it is possible to have vivid memories that turn out to be false. Why . Because our minds are just what they are. We dont have perfect control over them because we are our minds. Traveling through time, creating a sense of time without the narrative of memories and you love jorge, 1946. Time is a river that sweeps me along but i am the river. It is a tiger that mangles me but i am the tiger. It is a fire that consumed me but i am the fire. That, talking about our narrative manipulation. I think it is. He thought a lot about time and as you can see he loved to speak in riddles and paradoxes. I believe as a person who loves fiction, can be a very effective way of dealing with reality. It is a way that competes with the way physicists get at reality but physicists dont have any better luck saying what time is. Time is a river, time is a tiger, time is a fire that consumes you, we use these metaphors all the time and i am also the river. And in a lot of his writing he was concerned with the problem of perception, and can ask yourself how do i know, what is my sense, what is creating my sense of Something Different between the past and the future. Why cant i remember the future, why do i have such a strong sensation it is now and what is now is real, and is gone, floating off somewhere. Where is it. A physicist might want to say it is just somewhere else in the four dimensional spacetime continuum and my sense that it is gone is an illusion. A lot of physicists talk that way and my sense that the past is not accessible because it is open, hasnt happened yet, that might be an illusion. Not according to not according to Science Fiction writers, not according to warheads. We go deeper with them. The great literary mind struggled, why is it so difficult, so degrading to bring the notion of time into focus for inspection, what an effort, what irritating fatigue, talking about the difficulty of defining the present, this whole project, the texture of time and why it is so hard to grasp . Both. Talking about here is the thing we are familiar with, why dont we understand it, when we focus on it why doesnt it come into focus . He is in a way echoing augustine in the fourth century, the fifth century, who has been quoted many times consciously and unconsciously, augustine said what, then, is time . If no one asks me i know perfectly well but as soon as someone makes me explain it i dont know. We all feel that way and that is more than a quick. There is something profound there. He is not just saying it is an illusion to make us think we know what time is was when i try to explain it id discover i dont know what it is. He is saying the other thing, even though i cant explain it, i do have a lot of knowledge about time. It is important to recognize that. That is where i go when i break down and talk about what time actually is. That is the case i am trying to make even though it is impossible for any of us to say definitively, we know a great deal. You achieve temporal sentience that ancestors lack. What is the shape of that . The shape of it is again not firm and is complicated because our sense of time is built up from all these different things. We learned things from physicists whether we are science students or not. Stephen hawking goes to the party for time travelers, i sat there a long time. He announced he had an invitation, party for time travelers. I didnt notice, couldnt see how many people said they were from the future. Anybody from the future . Know when is even willing to lie. Hawking loves to talk about time travel because it is fun. He doesnt think time travel is possible. One of his proofs that there is no such thing as time travel, if there were such a thing as time travel we would have time travelers from the future in our midst which i met a guy when i was working on the book, first i met a woman at a cocktail coffee, she said you have to meet my boyfriend, he has a whole theory and he came over and said you know how hawking says time travel doesnt exist because there are no time travelers from the future, i know why that is, it is because they are afraid of disease. What i think we need to do, for them, you know the way explorers go to a new continent and catch we have you would think they have good medical care in the future. Must be romantics. I want to go back to King Arthurs Court. By the way, would you like to go back or would you like to go forward . Can i do both . No. I just want to get out of here. My aunt was assessed with legal affairs. She was the presentday reincarnation for constance manifestation of the 16th century belgian tavern wench, she had a lot of fun, is that time travel . Yes, it is. For me, now i see time travel everywhere but we have we are able to imagine ourselves into the past and imagine ourselves into the future in ways that seem natural but people 100 years ago didnt do quite so dexterously, lets say. Our eyes have been opened. We tell these stories, we know what happens when we meet ourselves in the past. Talk about the Science Fiction writers you say they achieved, often the ones who give the most rigorously analyzed approaches to time, back to the future and all that but talk about the alteration, Philip K Dick, the man in the high castle. Those are good. Two wonderful books i am sure you could get somewhere around here and both examples of what we now call alternative history, where you reimagine the past, what might have been. Another great example is philip rosss novel the plot against america where he imagined what america would be like if the fascists had won in 1940. I wont go there. It is valuable to do alternative histories, a great mental exercise and it can be done more for less rigorously. If you are a historian i know historians who enjoy this. What would have happened if. And that has some use and it is a new genre of is a kind of Science Fiction, Philip K Dick imagining what if the japanese and germans had won the war and divided up the us and Kingsley Amos imagining what if the reformation had never happened which might be a little obscure for us but works it all out. Is that an examination of time and time travel . Arrange the dominoes in a different formation they fall in a different direction . It is an example of our mental dexterity, our ability to do that, our ability to place ourselves in the past, alternative pasts. There is another fantastic book called kate atkinson, two books, one after the other, she is not quite a time traveler, her hero whose name is ursula todd, but she lives again and again, sometimes trying to kill hitler. Like groundhog day or different . Groundhog day is another beautiful example of what i would call a time travel movie. He is not really traveling through time, hes more stuck in time. The weather man who has to live the same day over and over again. Until he gets it right. The laurion in back to the future. That was huge. Couldnt have done it in 1894 before the time machine. What about their perception . The way it placed marty and doc and the rest of them. The movie is fun. The delorean is another great device to add to the list of time machines. There are elevators, doors, windows, holes in the air to say about that. It is about every time travel story when you think about them and that is, what is going on in that story emotionally when you think about it . Here is a teenager, he reaches a certain age and that his parents and a lightbulb illuminates and he thinks they were teenagers once. Did they feel, did my dad feel about girls the way i feel . Could i find out . The fantasy takes off from there. When you think about it. A lot of time travel stories involve parents or children meeting children in the future, meeting parents in the past. Changing in that case the course of things. A story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time. That is at the heart of it. A story as much as physics or anything else. What does she tell us . Ursula k le guin is another magnificent writer, could have won the nobel prize but too many people were unhappy about the nobel prize for literature. Hes the only person whos aware of this. And he cant control his dreams. So sometimes terrible things happen. Is that time travel . Kind of. Technology continues to change our relationship with the present. The past is more and more easy to capture and Carry Forward with us. Maybe the algorithms out there are predicting for us what were going to do next, maybe bringing us the future. How do you see technology now . H. G. Welled had his fancy bicycle. What about all the gizmos we have now and how theyre changing our relationship with time . Thats a really good question, and its something i think about a lot. And i think its something we all are, need to keep an eye on and are learning about as we live through it, you know . We live in this instantaneousnetworked world. Information comes to us at light speed from all around the globe. It comes to us on screens, big screens and little screens