On The Nation: Patrick Gower interviews James Gleick
Patrick Gower: James Gleick, the author of Chaos and The Information has now written Time Travel: A History. He joins me now from New York. Now, James, if I can begin by getting this out of the way, is time travel real or not?
James Gleick: Well, yes, it’s real, but unfortunately it’s mostly real just in our heads. I mean, I’m speaking to you from yesterday. It’s Friday where I am. You’re my future, and I know that’s just a trick of the clock. I mean, that’s not time travel.
I mean, is that as good as it gets, though? Is that as good as time travel gets — just some international time zones?
It’s as good as we’re going to get in the next few minutes, let’s put it that way. No, time travel isn’t real if you mean, ‘Can you step into a machine the way HG Wells’ time traveller did and throw a lever and choose a year in the past or in the future and hurtle off and get out and meet your descendants or meet yourself in a tricky loop?’ No, I’m afraid that’s never going to happen.
Okay, so no Marty McFly, no Doctor Who and no Quantum Leap is what you’re saying here, isn’t it?
Not if you’re going to be completely literal about it. But still here I am in Friday, and I have to admit, even though it’s just a gimmick — time zones and the International Date Line and all of that — a little part of me is tempted to ask you what’s going to happen. Is my country at war with North Korea? Can you tell me?
Not yet, not yet, not yet.
Thank you.
Now, what I wanted to pick up on from your book was the grandfather paradox, which is what you basically use to prove that time travel can’t happen, i.e. I could not go back in time and kill my grandfather, because, therefore, I wouldn’t be alive today. Is that the grandfather paradox?
Yes, that’s the classic paradox of time travel. And almost as soon as people started doing time travel… The grandfather paradox goes back to the ‘20s and ‘30s, and I think it was some kid writing a fan letter to one of the early pulp fiction science magazines who said, ‘Look, how do you solve this problem?’ And now we have a million variations of the same paradox. You know, every time travel story — at least time travel to the past, if you can change the past — causes some paradox like it. You have to deal with it in some way. And so if you’re a physicist or a logician, more to the point, you might say, ‘Well, that proves that time travel’s impossible.’ But that hasn’t stopped generations of filmmakers and fiction writers from creating stories where one way or another they get around the paradox.
Yeah, but here’s why, and this is what struck me when reading your book. Well, of course if people eventually invent time travel, James, no one is going to go backwards because of the grandfather paradox. Everyone is going to use their brains and go forwards in time. So we don’t know whether time travel is invented or not, i.e. it could still happen, surely.
Well, okay. A lot of people are very hopeful, and when I tell you it’s impossible…
Myself included. Myself included.
Sure. And myself too. I wouldn’t have written the book if I wasn’t kind of a fan. And in fairness to you and to the many people who don’t want to give up hope, I’m speaking for the science fiction writers. It’s a weird fact that the worst sceptics of time travel are science fiction writers who tell the stories. And if you ask physicists, there are plenty of physicists who will be happy to tell you, ‘Well, first of all, we can’t rule it out. Second of all, there is a kind of time travel that Einstein proved is possible. We know that if you travel near the speed of light or if you travel near a black hole in an intense gravitational field and then you return home, you will have aged less than the people you left behind and you could meet your grandchildren.’ So that kind of time travel is at least physically possible. And then we haven’t even talked about wormholes.
We haven’t talked about wormholes, but I wanted to ask you this. We’ll come to those quickly, actually, after this, but first, what would you do? Having written the book on it, if you could, would you go backward or forward if you had the choice in time?
You know, I ask everybody that question myself. I started asking it, and the answer— I won’t avoid the question. I want to go to the future. And when I started working on the book, I assumed that everybody wanted to go to the future, but it turns out that’s not true. And my informal surveying of people has led me to think that more and more of these days we’re scared of going to the future. I mean, HG Wells, who invented time travel, only sent his guy to the future, and he had— there was some good news and bad news there. Nowadays, I think we’re scared of what we’re going to find, and we’re worried, you know… we’re worried that we’re ruining things for our children, and maybe we don’t want to know about it.
What you’re saying here is that the human race is more pessimistic now than they were when we first started thinking about time travel.
Definitely. No question. We first started thinking about time travel around the end of the 19th century, and one reason people like HG Wells were thinking about it was they were so excited about the future, and the 19th century was coming to an end, and there was a big round number in the calendar, and people had electricity and electric lights and electric clocks, and they had telegraphs sending messages at light speed around the globe, and everybody was very excited about what the future would hold. There was a lot of optimism and celebrations at the turn of the century. I don’t remember a lot of big celebrations at the turn of our century, do you?
No, no. And we have to wrap up quickly here, but as someone who brought the term ‘the butterfly effect’ into mainstream use, what about wormholes, just quickly for the viewers at home. What about a quick layman’s definition in a few seconds of what a time travel wormhole is?
Well, a wormhole is a completely hypothetical speculative path through space-time that could loop around on itself, and it’s been used as a gimmick, as a device in some of our favourite time travel stories. I don’t know if you saw Interstellar a few years ago.
Yes, I did.
But Interstellar, yeah, the popular movie, had a wormhole in it, and as I say, there are plenty of physicists who, if you believe in time travel, are willing to tell you, ‘Don’t give up. It could be possible.’
Yeah, thank you very much, and I think the public service announcement for today is to watch out for those time travel wormholes. Thank you very much James Gleick, and I look forward to you coming out to New Zealand.
Don’t fall into one.
Yeah, and coming forward in time when you come out here, by the way.

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