![]() Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. I thought I would conclude that the main thing to understand is: Enjoy the present. To answer the last question of the evening, about how his views about time changed during the course of writing Time Travel, Gleick said: “Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” ![]() In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction. ![]() Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. “We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said. ![]() Gleick invited audience members to query themselves: If you could travel in time, would you go to the future or to the past? When exactly, and where exactly? And why? And what is your second choice? (Try it, reader.) ![]()
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