“Time Travel” by James Gleick

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  • Concepts of time travel started in 1914
  • 1876 was the first record of a centennial celebration
  • No one pondered the future or the past until the 20th century
  • New (remote) lands filled the roles of time travel in fiction
  • We should not think about time as the same as space
    • We cannot freely move through time like we can through space
  • “What the balloon does for space, the time machine does for time”
  • Prior to clocks, time was relative based on the setting
  • Newton has to define time so acceleration could happen
  • “If the speed of light is fixed then time cannot be.”
  • The Olympics replace starting pistols with speakers to ensure everyone can hear the signal at the same time
  • “Souls cannot move that fast so one needs to wait”
  • We are always looking into the past
  • All time was local until the train
  • Is the arrow of time because of entropy?
  • “You cannot stir things apart”
  • In many Latinx cultures, you look forward to the past and back for the future
    • (This makes a lot of sense because you observe the past, in front of you, and cannot see the future coming behind you)
  • Eternity is “outside of time”
  • Nostalgia originally meant “homesick”, not wanting a different time
  • In 1955, we redefined “a second” from a fraction of a day to an independent time frame
  • A nano second is about the length light travels a foot
  • Mental Time Travel let’s us project forward and back over time
  • “Now” is generally 2-3 seconds lumped together by the brain
  • We need at least 1/10th a second to accurately differentiate the order of two events

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