Time Travel: A History - James Gleick

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Résumé :
A time-jumping, head-tripping odyssey. -The Millions
A bracing swim in the waters of science, technology and fiction. -Washington Post
A thrilling journey of ideas. -Boston Globe

From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.

The story begins at the turn of the previous century, with the young H. G. Wells writing and rewriting the fantastic tale that became his first book and an international sensation: The Time Machine. It was an era when a host of forces was converging to transmute the human understanding of time, some philosophical and some technological: the electric telegraph, the steam railroad, the discovery of buried civilizations, and the perfection of clocks. James Gleick tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea that becomes part of contemporary culture-from Marcel Proust to Doctor Who, from Jorge Luis Borges to Woody Allen. He investigates the inevitable looping paradoxes and examines the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Finally, he delves into a temporal shift that is unsettling our own moment: the instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.

(With a color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations throughout)

Biographie:
JAMES GLEICK (around.com) is our leading chronicler of science and technology, the best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. His books have been translated into thirty languages.

Sommaire:
1 Machine 1
2 Fin de Si?cle 19
3 Philosophers and Pulps 45
4 Ancient Light 73
5 By Your Bootstraps 91
6 Arrow of Time 109
7 A River, a Path, a Maze 123
8 Eternity 145
9 Buried Time 165
10 Backward 189
11 The Paradoxes 219
12 What Is Time? 245
13 Our Only Boat 271
14 Presently 293

Acknowledgments 315
Sources and Further Reading 317
Index 323