And be sometimes several screens simultaneously. And were getting messages sometimes from the same person in different channels, and then tough figure out you have to figure out did this text message come first or did this email saying, no, im going to meet you at the movie theater, and then you have to look at the time stamps, and the past is mixed up with the future. Meanwhile, we have tremendous is access to the past. We know more about the lives of bach and beethoven and mozart and mahler and have zinn sky than any of them knew about their predecessors. We have instant access to all of their music. The music from our personal pasts, the music that we loved when we were kids, its as available to us as music from ancient times and music thats just being recorded yesterday. And it all gets mixed up together. So were in a kind of eternal present. You say that theres a philosophy in our society that we should live in the present. Thats exactly where we should be. But that doesnt really make sense to you. No. Ive developed doubts about that. Be here now and yeah. Be here now. Youve spent a lot of time trying to do that. Live in the now. Were told dont waste brain cells agonizing over what might have been or whats coming. Dont waste brain cells wishing for something you can never have or fearing a future that might happen. Live in the now. Immerse yourself in sensation. Ive decided that thats not how i want to live. Thats not thats how plants live. Plants live in the now. [laughter] how do you know that . Im pretty sure. Okay. What makes us human is that we know a lot about the past now. We are able the to imagine the future. I keep using these same hands. We think the future might be there or there or there. Anyway, we can imagine it. And we can mix memory with anticipation and still enjoy the present, and i think that thats good. Were going to take your questions in just a few minutes here. Theres a microphone right here if youve got a question for james gleick on time, time travel. Do you have a wish list, if you could have three time trips, where youd take off for . Ive always thought i wanted to go to the future. And then with a little surprise when it turns out that so many people just have no interest in that and would rather go to the past. I mean, i can imagine going to the past and meeting isaac newton. You know, i have some questions for him. But i really would like to see do you want to be there at the moment when he put the knife into his eye . That wouldnt necessarily be my favorite moment. Why did he do that again . Now were digressing. [laughter] yes, we were talking about that before. Its true that isaac newton, believer in experimentation, wanting to figure out whether light was different from pressure or the same as pressure actually poked a bodkin, as he called it, into his eye and wrote down the funny stuff that he saw. Anyway is it an equivalent experiment about time . What would you do . I dont know, throw a knife forward and try and beat it. [laughter] i dont know. We dont want anybody here going home and starting to play with knives. No, no, no, right. A rubber ball. You didnt let me answer your question. I do want to go to the future. I dont know when. Im not as thrilled about it as i was a few years ago because the future is, in so many ways, starting to look a little bleak. But i really do wonder what is, you know, i want to go to wherever it is that we turn into the proverbial hive mind, the world brain. You want youre ready for that. Collective im not saying i want it i mean, you want to see it. I want to see what thats like. What interests you about it . Just plug you in and make you a cipher. Im thats exactly what im curious about. Im wondering whether thats a good thing or a bad thing. Im wondering whether because i do think its happening now. We are partly made of sill silicone. Most everybody in this room has a device in his or her pocket by which they access all the worlds knowledge, and in a few years its going to be contact lens or implants. I hope im not bringing bad news here. [laughter] but we estimate that. The thing im genuinely curious about is the extent to which we will be able to retain our individuality. And yet these story thes of travel, i mean, its appropriate, were at a book festival, whats more effective than a book in the kind of time travel that youre including, letting our minds roam. Yeah. I think its fair to say that the best time machines we have are books. You say we need these stories for history, for mystery, for nostalgia, for hope. Still hopeful . From time travel . Lets say yes. Well say yes. Look, there are people lined up. Awesome. Lets take your questions. Yes, please. Thank you. I wonder how much timerelated management techniques are synchronized with this fictional investigation of time travel because i think of, you know, looking back at some of the management techniques that are, you know, a little over a hundred years old, but i also look at the now where were using data and analytics to understand the past and use that to understand the future do you mean like for an assembly line, henry ford with his stopwatch . Exactly, yes. And i just sort of see the fiction of time travel sort of going along with the use of that in the industrial world. Yeah. Thats an interesting question. Its not something i go into in this book, but it is true that a hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago not at the beginning of the industrial revolution, but closer to our time people started to get very obsessed with measuring time very precisely in factories. And making their workers more efficient. And that is a nightmare, may i say, that continues to this day because were all too good at clocking one another. And now we have all of this machine power dedicated to the what ifs and the whats coming next. Yeah. We start seeing time a measured portion of eternity, and pretty soon youve got a clock on your work on the assembly line. Yes, please. Thank you very much. So i wondered if you could address the idea of ideas and creativity as a time travel. I mean, the idea, that spark in ones imagination that can help to create new technologies, new ways of doing things. Is that time travel, when you create something thats going to be used in the future . I wouldnt go so far as to say that i think every spark of creativity is a form of time travel. I certainly am saying it the other way around, that to think about time, to imagine the past, to imagine the future, we need to be creative. Thats a creative act either way. And what about premonitions . Do they fit in . Well, premonitions are another kind of time travel fantasy, and there are people who, there are people who started writing books about time in the early part of the 20th century that were based on their experience of waking up after a dream and discovering then or sometime later that their dream was actually true and thinking, oh, i have had access to the future. Which, of course, i dont believe actually happens. I think it does. Okay. [laughter] well thank you. People do. You do merit imagination as a kind of and we imagine the past, we imagine the future. I dont know if maybe, i dont know how close premonition and imagination lie to one another. Yes, sir. Ive heard the story told that when the modern day keyboard was invented, it was designed to actually slow down typers because they would get stuck, the old mechanical typewriter. So today were still stuck with that keyboard qwerty. Right. So we think about time and we go through time during the course of the day, for whatever reason weve divided it into 24 parts per day. So as youve thought about time, im wondering, is there a more effective way to divide up the day instead of just 24 parts, would it be 10 or 100 . Did you think at all about that . Well, im the meaning of an hour . I am loathe to give advice, personal advice to anybody, but i would say the most effective and Creative Things to do would be not to start dividing the day into regular parts, but to let our obsession with time slip away. Be. Why . What is the advantage in that . Because we need a little, we need a little of everything. We need some balance. We dont always need to be multitasking and working at high speed. We dont always need to be acutely aware of the passing seconds. Sometimes we need to let our minds drift. I mean, thats a what we do when we read a book. I mean, does that change reality . You go all the way back to 1814 where they talked about what they called the universe rigid, the effect of its past and the cause of its future. As if all these things in sequence necessitated the next, and everything was in a logical kind of firm chain, unbreakable. Yeah. And there are still physicists who like to think that way, as though everything is determined by the laws of physics. I think we know better. You write the universe rigid is a prison, only the time traveler can call himself free. Sir. Thank you. I dont know if you mention it in the book, but my favorite time travel story is a sound of thunder by ray bradbury, and i wondered if you could comment on it especially because it rubs up against chaos will you tell us the central premise for those who, like me, havent read that one . I can tell you. Oh, good. My basic nightmare, by the way, is people are going to mention their favorite time travel story or movie or tv show, and the odds are that its not described in my book, but in this case, bingo jackpot. [laughter] thank you. So the sound of thunder by ray bradbury is a terrific story. Im sure a lot of people here know it. It involves, it involves a sort of timetraveling safari operation. Safari. Safari, where for money big game hunters who are tired of elephants and lions can go back into the past and shoot dinosaurs. You know, i imagine that, i imagine these are the trumps of their time. [laughter] awesome. And not to spoil the story totally, the twist is that somebody steps on a butterfly, goes off the path, and and just stepping on this butterfly changes the course of history so that some terrible stuff happens in the present. And this is before, this ray bradbury story is before chaos theorists invented the notion of the butterfly effect which is based on the same premise. But it also raises yet another of these issues that come up when youre doing time travel stories, that the Science Fiction writers were the first ones to have to deal with logically. You ask yourself if you go into the past, first of all, would you be able to interact with it, or would you just be a sort of freefloating consciousness . And then if you can interact with it, can you change things . And then if you do change things and this is a more sophisticated question with, but its one that the Science Fiction writers got to first if you bump, you know, if there are [inaudible] in history, would history tend to get back on to its natural track, or would it get into wild divergences so that stepping on the butterfly would mess everything up . Dont expect me to give you the answer. Okay. [laughter] were on the edge of our seats. No, you can take your pick, thats the point. The Science Fiction writers, you know, you can pick isaac as moves the end of eternity which very clearly expresses the former view that, yes, you can mess things up, but mostly history tries to right itself and get back on to a path. Or your now is not my now, and again your then is not my then, whosed head is competent to these things . Im really glad you mentioned eric trump, because as weve been talking oh, i meant to not do that. Im sorry. [laughter] as we keep talking, i keep thinking about this desire that people have, a certain element of the country seems to have to return to the past, this idea of make America Great again, the idea that maybe the trump train is a vehicle for time travel. Have you thought about at all how politics is affected by the idea of time travel in our culture . Could you touch on that . Honestly, i dont think theres any politics in my book. I do, i do think about nostalgia, and you can think about nostalgia without having to discuss its political consequences, you know . Nostalgia is another kind of mental time travel. Its another, its another way in which we imagine the past and sometimes our imagination misleads us. Were overly creative. And nostalgia works both ways. You can remember the past and make it out to be rosycolored, or you can imagine the past and make it out to be more dire than it was. And it could be a matter of personality. Do you feel its happening now . No, im not going to ive said enough about the current election. [laughter] thank you. Its a good question though. Thank you very much. Yes, please. So from the earliest recorded evidence of humans, theres issues of spirituality and religion that are recorded, and it seems like its something that humans have always needed to do to sort of make sense of their present in terms of a larger picture and maybe explain their curve problems and concerns in their current problems and concerns in terms of relief, you know, from this larger system. And as, during the course of the conversation this afternoon, it struck me that time travel sounds like a rational, mechanized response to this ancient human need. I mean, in a way you can modify or get away from your current needs by going to the future, going to the past, making changes or just getting away from what youre in the middle of right now. In your research and writing, did you rub up against ideas like that at all . Is that something that what i would say is many religions, maybe every religion, when they construct a spiritual view of time, when they try to think about time, its common in religion to think about being outside of time. Eternity, whatever it means to you, is not just a length of time, its also a way of being outside of time. When the ancient egyptians, when the pharoahs buried themselves in order to preserve their bodies, they werent so much thinking about the future. I mean, they certainly werent thinking about being dug up by people in the 19 and 20th centuries. They were thinking about another world that was outside of time. And i think a lot of religions when they imagined Something Like heaven are, again, thinking about timelessness. So maybe this is the thrust of your question. Both spirituality and time travel are a way of escaping from something that otherwise is, has us in its grasp. I mean, you say that anyone who thinks about time travel is ultimately thinking about death. Escaping death. I do i did eventually arrive at that unhappy conclusion in a way that thats what time is. I was thinking like a good time, like a party. Yeah, well, its fun to go back in the delorean, but i do feel that lurking in the background of every time travel story and sometimes in the foreground is a desire for immortality. Yeah. Because what does time do . Time buries us. Yes, sir. Thank you. And im, look forward to reading the book even if the answer is no to my question concern. [laughter] because i dont have the index yet. Do you talk about or delve into george cubeler . He wrote a book called the shape of time for kind of alternative trajectories to think through art history and visual art no. Give us the youve got me. Whats his idea . Hes kind of a precolombian art historian expert. And hes thinking it through, you know, alternatives to the western canon and different ways of looking through art history that arent about iconography but, actually, really about form, and he starts off talking about how all tools are works of art and tries to adjust whats on the what the hierarchy is of artistry as well as the record of human production. I love it. Again, alternate ways of looking at time or history. Yeah. Its a Yale University art historian, 1968, i think. Cubeler. Cubeler. Okay. Thank you very much. Yes, and another. Are you from the past, future or present . [laughter] present. All right then. Anyway, its fine. So im a junior in high school, and we were having a conversation in english class about how authors use their writing from the past to communicate with people from the future or to continue sort of to live on through their writing. So i was wondering if you touched upon anything like that in your book. I think thats a really good question. I think people who write books, people who do any kind of creative art that is meant to last must be thinking in some way about the future, about posterity. When you write something down, its a way of sending a message to the future. People might not have expressed it that way hundreds of years ago. It might be that your more immediate impulse is to send a message to people in the present, you know . We do think about posterity, and sending messages to the future is something we are sometimes more conscious of and sometimes less conscious of. Another thing that i write about at some length in the book is the phenomenon of people burying time capsules. Which became very popular about 50 years ago, maybe a little more. And theres a way of sending a message to the future and saying heres what we were like, heres what our culture was like. Im going to assemble a bunch of objects and books and magazines and artifacts and bury them in a capsule so that somebody whos curious 100 years from now will dig them up and say, aha. Youre a junior in high school, we love that you brought your question. Thank you. I wonder if theres a different perception of time by age. You quote saying being young, i was skeptical of the future and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would. Have you found yourself or observed other more or less interested in time, time travel, texture of time with different portion to or stage of life . Maybe the young just dont need to care. No, i think, i think certainly the interest in time travel starts earlier and earlier. I dont have any sense that either the young or the old h. G. Was into it. Are more obsessed with time. Sir . So planet of the apes. Yeah. Shootout, come back, approaching the speed of light, sort of sounds like the einsteins way of explaining it, right . I mean, e we spend i dont know how many millions of dollars serving out messages to the universe that they may be receiving 10,000 years from now. Are we not looking at the past and the future at the same time . Were looking at the past, yes. When we look at stars, were looking at the past of those stars. And thats an idea that people recognized even before einstein. As soon as i hope i dont mess up the history too much here, but it was in the middle of the 19th century that people established not only that light has a fixed, has a finite speed, but exactly what that speed was. Maxwell did that in establishing electromagnetism. He actually determined the speed of light. And so immediately a few smart people recognized that that meant that light that was coming to us from very far away in distance was also coming to us from very far away in time, and thats why we measure distance in terms of light years. I dont think we can see into the future. Yes. Just a couple more. Hi. So in the beginning of your talk, you started out mentioning h. G. Wells and 1895 and how he was a futurist thinking about future times. Im wondering about darwin and how by that point evolution, you know, was more or less in the popular consciousness. The age of exploration, and so thinking about the past was definitely kind of