Much for being here and i hope you have taken advantage of all of the perks available to you and those who are not book fair members as yet i know you are considering becoming members so thank you very much. Acknowledges miamidade college, the convener of this outstanding book fair and many thanks to our students, faculty and staff are giving up their time to make sure this book fair is the caliber that it is today and has been for the past three decades so thank you to miamidade college. [applause] lets get right on with the show. I would like to bring on Mister Eldridge Birmingham for questions, he is the chief science officer, thank you. [applause] good afternoon, everyone. It is a great pleasure. I have lived in miami several years, this is my second presentation. The first was with Richard Dawkins and im equally fortunate to introduce james glieck who is one of the great science or historians of science ever. I thought what i would do was read a brief statement, some of you know corey, a writer of Science Fiction, a blogger, i thought what he had to say about james was incredibly insightful for those who have read some of jamess work. I was also given strict instructions to keep my introduction to a minute and this will just about perfectly do it. James glieck is one of the great Science Writers of all time and that is in part because he is a science biographer. Not a biographer of scientists, sciences, mathematicians, writers and thinkers, a biographer of the idea itself. It ricochets off disciplines, institutions and people, knocking them into new hire orbits and setting them on collision courses. I would like to present james glieck, winner of many awards, prizes, etc. He will give an absolutely wonderful lecture. Thank you. Thank you for coming. This did not come from me. I would be happy to have him go on and on. Welcome, people of the future. Time travel is our great modern myth. I am going to just start by reading a little bit on my end, going to talk a little bit about this and that and i hope some of you have questions. To start right at the beginning, a man stands at the end of a drafty cores or, a. K. A. The 19th century. In the flickering light, examines a machine made of nickel and ivory with brass rails and course rods, and ugly contraption, somehow out of focus. Not easy for the poor reader to visualize despite the listing of parts and materials. Our hero fiddles with some screws, adds a drop of oil and plants himself on it, 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. We are talking about hd wells and the time machine of course. The year is 1895, hg wells is a young man struggling to write his first book and this is how he sets the scene. I am going to continue reading a little bit. The turn of the 20th century looms, the calendar date, with apocalyptic residents. Albert einstein was a boy at gymnasium in munich, not until 1908, the polish german mathematician announcing his radical idea, henceforth states by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. Hg wells was there first but wells was not trying to explain the universe which he was just trying to have a plausible sounding plot device for a piece of fantastic storytelling. Nowadays, we voyage through time so easily and so well in our dreams, in our art, time travel feels like an ancient tradition rooted in bold mythologies, oldest gods and dragons but it isnt. Though the ancients imagined immortality, rebirth and lands of the dead, time machines were beyond their can, time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When wells in his lamp lit room imagined a time machine he also invented a new mode of thought. Why not before, and why now . Those are the questions my book starts with, basically because i found it, i personally was astonished and didnt believe time travel could be a new idea. It just seems so inevitable, havent people always been fantasizing, nevermind the machine, couldnt i walk through the door and be 200 years in the future . They didnt do that age you can go through ancient legends and find precursors, people went to fortunetellers, wanted to find out about their own future but if you appeared in your time machine and asked a farmer of the 15th century, what do you think life will be like for your grandchildren, the farmer would say what do you mean . It would be the same because life is always the same. When you think about it even shakespeare who never did any kind of time travel, he had limitless imagination and magical islands and magical forests, but people stayed where they belonged in their time, and shakespeare scholars famously discover and acronyms in his work. He has clocks in ancient rome where they didnt have mechanical clocks striking the hour. That is because that is not just a mistake, nobody and shakespeares time had the kind of complete sense that we have of a progression of technology. All of this was new. And hg wells time, with railroad steam across the landscape and the electric telegraph sending instant messages, he suddenly, and many others as the turnofthecentury approach, was fascinated by the future. The time machine is a bicycle, by the way. I dont know if you could tell from that description. It was all he had. That he only personal transportation device available to him. Wells himself was a big bicycle a fiction auto. I wonder how many of you have read the time machine and if you havent read it you probably still have a picture in your head of what the time machine might have looked like. If i can get this to move forward i will show you one. Does that look familiar . That is ridiculous. That is this red, plush sled with blinking lights, it is from the 1960 movie by george powell, the time machine. The time traveler in this movie come in the book the time traveler never has a name, just call the time traveler. In the movie they call him george, which is hg wellss middle name, here is george. I will get the hang of this. I have it upside down. There is george. Rod taylor, you might have recognized him, here he is encountering a woman of the future his name is weena. They have a bit of dialogue that goes Something Like this. George says dont your people ever speak of the past . She says there is no past. Do they wonder about the future . There is no future. Then after he invented it time travel had to leave all. My book splits onto a bunch of different tracks, trying to tell a story, make a story sound fairly any or that is somewhat fragmented and one of the tracks is science because 10 years after wells there was einstein turning upside down everybodys ideas of what time is in science and einstein revealed to us what everybody in the room knows very well which is time is nicely treated as a Fourth Dimension and that was wellss gimmick too. The beginning of the time machine, the time traveler talking to his friends and explaining to them that everything they know about geometry is wrong and time is in fact a Fourth Dimension which was a new idea and wells was if not exactly inventing it, pulling it out of the air and then he forgot about it. It wasnt a serious thing for him but it was serious for einstein. In literature, i dont mean the literature of Science Fiction because it didnt exist yet but in real literature time also was turning upside down and great modernist authors, proust and joyce were all playing with time, they were aware of new ideas of time that were coming from science, they were telling stories in complicated new ways, prousts great work in search of lost time. It was about memory, it was about visiting the past mentally. He wrote the fact that we occupy an ever larger place in time is something that everybody feels, and expression of what the zeitgeist was at the time. People were in turmoil about time. Psychologists are worrying about time, philosophers were trying to come to grips with einstein because he was uprooting their work. And using hg wells as an example for how they could track time and then there finally starts to be what we now know of as Science Fiction, which was a creation of pulp magazines, mostly in new york city, at the beginning, in the 1920s, some of these magazines were the business of a man whose name might be familiar to some of you of your sciencefiction people, the annual Science Fiction award is called the hugo award, he is the man the hugo awards are named after and he invented the concept of Science Fiction and the word sciencefiction. This is what he looked like. I should say this is how he presented himself. This is one of his wacky ideas. His wacky ideas took form in magazines like Amazing Stories and astounding stories and amazing wonder stories, the names kept changing because they kept going bankrupt and he would run from his creditors and he would pay what we call pulp Science Fiction writers tiny amounts of money to investigate stories and most of them were not time travel stories but he reproduced the entire hg wells time machine in a series of issues without paying hg wells or penny or asking for permission. What is fun about looking at these magazines and reading the stories that came out of them is watching the troops develop, watching the rules get written. Most of the readers of these magazines were teenagers, wrote a letter to the editor and said i have an idea. What if somebody could go back in time and shoot his grandfather and then he would never be born so he never would have gone back in time to shoot his grandfather so we have a paradox which you know this day is called the grandfather paradox age why grandfather . That is why, because some teenager chose it. I would like to ask you, i will ask for a show of hands, the question is whether you would rather go to the future or the past, the rules are you get a ride on a time machine, one ride only, guaranteed safe return so how ma would prefer to go to the past . Many to the future. That is interesting. For those a lot more wanted to go to the future, 3 to one, two to one, and it turns out just as many people want to go to the past, hg wells himself, you would think because he was a historian and has this machine at his disposal he would go back and visit shakespeare or Queen Elizabeth or somebody, but he never did. Very soon people did start imagining going back to the future. One of the first with a Childrens Book author, a friend of wells, a fellow socialist and she wrote some wonderful books in which her children, the heroes are a group of children and one of them is called the magic amulet and they go back and visit more or less fictional people in the past, the queen of egypt, they run into Julius Caesar and immediately invent another time travel paradox, they tried to talk Julius Caesar out of invading england and they think wait, maybe we shouldnt do that, maybe he needs to invade england for us to exist in the future. This immediately puts me in mind of woody allens version of the same paradox in the movie midnight in paris, his hero has been transported back to the 1920s and meets the director and says i have a fantastic idea for a movie and tries to sell him on the plot of his own movie. Here is joyce carol oatess answer to the question whether you want to go to the past or the future. This is on twitter naturally because she says time travel to the future is preferred to pass so you cant step on a butterfly, that is in quotes, or be tempted to murder hitler and fail ignominiously. We all know these tropes now, stepping on the butterfly is one of them, that is from a ray bradbury story. Called the sound of thunder, not to give everything away somebody carelessly stepped on a butterfly and changes history and many people try to go back to the past and kill hitler, they start trying to kill hitler as early as 1941. They always fail because i you cant change history or if you do change history things dont. The problem of going back to the past, you can watch the sciencefiction writers work these out logically. One of my favorite stories to this day, maybe because i am pretty sure i read it when i was a teenager is a story by Robert Heinlein called by his bootstraps. It is the first story to treat seriously the question of whether you meet your self. The story opens with a guy named bob. Bob is also the name of the author. Bob is sitting at a desk writing a thesis with a pretentious sounding name something to do with time, bind him over his shoulder, a whole opens in the air and demand steps out. The man there is a vague resemblance to bob but has a three day growth of beard and he says forget about that. It is not going to do you any good. Conversation ensues and the phone rings. And another man says pay no attention to man number 2. Whatever he tried to tell you to do dont do it and we the reader know that these people are all bob from different times interfering with each other and by the time the story is done there are five of them and it is complicated and heinlein is feeling on the one hand the story is a farce, the girlfriend is being two times, what a great word, never more appropriate, people are walking through the hole in the air at exactly the right moment or else catastrophe happens. This is the diagram heinlein wrote for himself to keep track of the narrative in this diagram popped into my head when i watched looper a couple years ago, the ryan johnson movie in which the hero named joe is a looper, a time traveler, and he is played in an older version by bruce willis and the young version by Joseph Gordon levitt and there is a scene where they meet for the first time. The older guy, bruce willis, knows the whole story, knows exactly what is going on, the younger guy is in a state of shock and disbelief and once a lot of explanations but old joe is in a hurry and says i dont want to talk about time travel because we will Start Talking about it. If is time travel possible then . If this is a room full of sciencefiction writers and i ask that question i guarantee they would unanimously u no, time travel is not possible. Isaac asimov was constantly disappointing his readers saying i cant prove it but dont hold your breath. Hg wells himself also annoyed readers for 40 or 50 years to come by refusing to believe his own story. On the other hand if this was a room full of physicists a lot of you would raise your hands, physicists like the idea. They like their wormholes. They like their closed time like curves. Stephen hawking likes to say black holes are time machines because they are their intense gravitation flows clocked in the vicinity. That is true, that is one of the things einstein said, if you travel near the speed of light, travel through an intense gravitational field time goes more slowly for you. There are lots of time travel stories the play with this conceit, there were twin brothers, one of them stays on earth and the other travels to the stars and when he gets back home he is able to marry his grandniece. Time for the stars is the name of it in case you want to read that. Hocking, one thing he knows you cant change the past, he tried to give a scientific explanation for that, theres a Chronology Protection Agency which presents very sciencefiction, right . And so makes the universe safe for historians and then hocking famously sent out his invitation to time travelers from the future. I am not sure if that is an actual invitation or an artists reimagining of it. It is an invitation for a party to be held in the past and he said i sat there for a long time and no one came. That, according to hocking proves time travel doesnt exist because we are not being flooded by time travelers from the future. If you want to why do we need time travel in the end . Because time is a battered, time is a killer, time buries us all, time is an insult, somebody says that in the new Doctor Strange movie. Maybe time travel sets us free. Whether it is literally possible or not, it is a way of escaping mortality. It is a way of liberating ourselves and our imaginations. It is a way of allowing us to explore regret, can we get a do over . It is a way of allowing us to anticipate and also to fear the future. Whether it is literally possible or not, we are all in one way or another time lords now, we are all time travelers. I will read one more paragraph from the end and see if anybody has a question. We are sometimes told live in the now. People mean by that focus. Immerse yourself in your sensory experience. Bask in the oncoming sunshine. Without the shadows of regret or expectation. But why should we toss away our hard won insight into times possibility and paradoxes . We lose ourselves that way. Virginia woolf wrote, what more terrifying revelation can there be that it is the present moment, that we survived the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another. Our entry into the past and the future, fitful and fleeting though it may be, makes us human. Thank you. [applause] all right. Apparently there is a microphone in the middle if anyone wants to grab it. Would you comment on the first two sciencefiction writers i came across when i was in high school in the late 1940s, one was mark twain in connecticut yankee in King Arthurs Court, and i read almost everything by jules vern but i dont recall anything about time travel. Great question. Taken in reverse order, jules vern, i read a lot of those books too, 20,000 leagues under the sea, he was, you could say, maybe the first sciencefiction writer. These things are the kind of thing you argue about at the bar, you are right, he didnt do any time travel. He did imagine the future which is a different thing. Hes a different person whose work was shamelessly ripped off by hugo in his magazines. He was another person who was what we would call a futurist. He was like hg wells, dreaming of wondrous things to come. Mark twain, glad you mentioned a connecticut yankee in King Arthurs Court because that was a kind of time travel story and it was five years before the time machine and the connecticut yankee you may remember goes back to King Arthurs Court, the book opens, he is an engineer, yankee engineer named hank, hes a cando guy interested in all the uptodate Technolo