In Hindu mythology: one king traveled(instant traveling) to realm of gods to fight a war but he was tricked by the king of gods(Indra) as he was not told time runs slow in that realm thus when he came back after a few days of war all was gone, his kingdom, everything he knew has changed, everything except his family who were with him the whole time he dint understand what is going on, and went to realm of Brahma. Brahma took a couple of minutes(in his realm) to explain him what had happened and told in his realm time runs even slower and he reappears on earth hundreds of years have passed, and and his daughter marries the Krishna’s brother. There are various version of this story each essentially similar to time dilation.

It wasn't only time machines, but machines in general that weren't thought of in the same way until the Victorian era, or rather, until the industrial revolution.

first concept of time travel was the first person who was resentful or regretful of something that transpired and wished they could relive and alter a key moment.

@naturalworld4925

Жыл бұрын

How are you i am a time traveler from 2023 2017

Wells was a time traveler. Introduced the idea of time travel as a paradox.

if time travel is possible, where are the tourist from the future? Stephen Hawking

@JellyFlavoredGerman

7 жыл бұрын

Says the cyborg with all-too-convenient knowledge about black holes. #hawkingisatimetraveller #coverup

@myjourney8339

7 жыл бұрын

Hawking also says philosophy is dead.

@gregwhite3810

7 жыл бұрын

They are everywhere but nobody can recognize them. if you accidentally could identify them they go back earlier in time and find your mother, to scare the shit outta her. Hopefully they are not living tissue on metal endoskeleton.

@Coxy002605

7 жыл бұрын

It is, the majority of modern philosophy is useless.

@MutleeIsTheAntiGod

7 жыл бұрын

Your opinion on modern philosophy is literally philosophy. we're going through a vetting of ideas in all academic fields. You may appreciate some shining examples of ancient or "old" philosophy, but you are playing on Survivorship Bias, plus you are seeing all the shit now that will be vetted or refined into serious schools of thought later.

Some ancient texts depict a character skipping forward in time. In Hindu historical texts, the Vishnu Purana mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi, who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed. The Buddhist Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time. The Payasi Sutta tells of one of the Buddha's chief disciples, Kumara Kassapa, who explains to the skeptic Payasi that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth.

Great subject and video.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, 1843. A very popular story about time travel predating the time machine by 52 years. Granted Scrooge was unable to interact with the visions but the way in which this was explained to him in the novel clearly indicates that Dickens considered the idea but likely chose a vision based plot to avoid paradoxes and to keep the plot as plausibly realistic.

Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward (1888), Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Two examples that predate The Time Machine by 7 and 6 years respectively. Not that I believe James Gleick is entirely wrong; the period did lend itself to introspection of society and how it stood from where it came from (traveling backwards) and where it might be going (traveling forwards). H.G. Well's just was not the only one at the time using time Travel in narrative fiction.

Nope, Mark Twain beat HG Wells by six years. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur`s Court: 1889

@MrC0MPUT3R

7 жыл бұрын

I literally opened a new tab to look up the publication date when he said that. lol

@MysticDonBlair

7 жыл бұрын

Charles Dickens

@Juanan89

7 жыл бұрын

Nope again, Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau beat both with his "El Anacronópete", written in 1882 and published in 1887, about a machine that travels back in time thanks to the power of electricity

@JohnVKaravitis

7 жыл бұрын

Juanan HE CHEATED! He built a time machine and went back in time to his earlier self.....

@tubester4567

7 жыл бұрын

His point still stands tho, if its 100 years or 200 years, it is still surprising the idea of time travel is modern.

In the book, the Time Traveller was able to go back in time. He went back from the future he visited in 802701.

This reminds me of another similar idea, the emergence of the concept of space travel and astronomy. That people, for the longest time, did not grasp the context for the Earth co-existing with other planets in the same physical space.

What! The entire story, ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ (Mark Twain), and written prior to H G Wells’ time travel idea, was about time travel.

@ericisprobablyfullofshit7797

2 жыл бұрын

Not only that but it's about the most difficult form which is backwards time travel. Forward time travel is theoretically possible because Einstein's special theory of relativity states that as you approach the speed of light your time slows relative to normal time so in effect you're traveling into the future. But you could never go back again. Backwards time travel is a theoretical absurdity.

Time travel doesn't exist, we are always in the now. We haven't ever been in the past or the future, only thinking about in the now. When you time travel to "the future" you are still in the same moment so from that perspective we cannot ever escape from being in the "now".

Your link for the transcript is not functional. Is there a way to fix this?

This is really cool. Thanks for sharing!

i was just a couple of days ago wondering when this concept was "invented". so this is a most welcome video.

It is most interesting that time travel is a very new concept. I had not consciously thought about that before seeing this video but indeed, I believe he is correct about the beginning of the idea in human thought. Dang, I'm a history buff and must cogitate upon this. While it has been pointed out that Wells was not the very first person to have thought about such things, it was he, Wells, that helped made the idea common in modern thinking. He had the good fortune of having written The Time Machine at a time when people could understand and deal with the idea partly because of the massive quick changes happening in Europe. I have never met a historian or archaeologist that does not have time travel fantasies regarding the past. Jung mentioned people who were living in the wrong era, people who felt they should have been born some time in the past. He pointed out that these people always saw themselves as truly belonging in the past, never in the future. Even knowing how horrible life was in many places at many times, the unknown future is more intimidating than the relatively known past

The BBC investigated the literary roots of time travel: HG Wells or Enrique Gaspar: Whose time machine was first? www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12900390 It mentions: Edward Page Mitchell's story The Clock That Went Backward (1881) Enrique Gaspar's El Anacronopete (1887) HG Wells' The Time Machine (1894) Altough Mitchell's story doesn't have much time travel, while Gaspar's very clearly does.

This guy needs to do better research. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Clock That Went Backward, and Memoirs of the Twentieth Century were all years before H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. His point stands that time travel in fiction is a relatively new idea, but The Time Machine is not the first.

@tadpoleontheweb

7 жыл бұрын

To be fair, Mark Twain's novel is less about time travel than it is an indictment of the literary romanticism of medieval society and the pitfalls of an authoritarian state. The fact that the protagonist, Hank Morgan, travels back in time by getting hit on the head, would probably not inspire many people to think of time travel as a literal possibility. In fact, in the context of 'Yankee', it is a kind of throwaway plot device in order to get the main thrust of the story which is a kind of fish-out-of-water satire. It is really more fantasy than science fiction. Time travel stories have a deliberate intention to them where the consequences and implications of such an ability are at the core of the story and not simply a shortcut device to make plausible an implausible situation. Time travel is the least important aspect of 'Yankee'. That's what makes 'The Time Machine' such a pivotal concept. It's right there in the title.

@candiduscorvus

7 жыл бұрын

All true, but that's just one of the three I mentioned.

@tadpoleontheweb

7 жыл бұрын

You're probably right about The Clock That Went Backward. Edward Page Mitchell has languished in obscurity and it could be argued that he is the true father of modern science-fiction. I suppose Gleick decided to go with the H.G.Wells example because it is more familiar to more people and it's the earliest time machine story to have a true traveler intentionally using technology combined with science to time travel. Explanation for time travel in the Mitchell story? Metaphysics. Not too scientific. Besides, if we just presumed that the clock is magic, would that change the story? Not really.

@tadpoleontheweb

7 жыл бұрын

Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is not sci-fi and contains no time travel. It is speculative fiction and considered more as satire. It imagines a somewhat 'dystopian' future where certain minor sects in the Catholic church come to gain power and dominate. It serves more as a warning about what can happen if minor religious factions are allowed to flourish unfettered. Life as imagined in the 20th century is not much different than in the 18th in this conception and no mention is made of technology as an explanation for observing the future.

@flgomer

7 жыл бұрын

He admitted it wasn't the first to deal with time travel. But it was the first to gain notoriety and become popular.

In the Time Machine, he did travel to the past to stop his fiance's death. He realized he could not change the past which is why he went to the future.

@maxedout6775

8 ай бұрын

That was only in the movie adaptation from 2002

Charles Dickens Christmas Carol(1849) shows events of a possible future and of the past. The Clock that Went Backwards(1881) by Edward Page Mitchell . The secret to time travel is also the secret to all knowledge. Just dream the bigger you dream and the more effort you use to make those dreams come true more you will accomplish.

@creepygnome

7 жыл бұрын

Yeah "The Clock that Went Backwards" is the one I came up with to as being before HG Wells book. While this was 14 years early I would have expected HG Wells in England to have read that newspaper from New York that it was published in, but you never know. (Let the conspiracy theories begin!)

'Ask yourself, as a farmer, in the 16th century where do you see your grandchildren?'' Witchcraft, demonology etc all perceived future/ past events (which is basic time travel) the idea of living or transporting to the future or past (without a machine) even goes back to superstition; cats who have nine lives etc. it is inevitable that someone got an idea to write about a machine that can bounce around. Also, don't forget superman

Haven't people always said something along the lines of "It takes a fortnight by horse to get from place X to place Y."?

is time travel to past future really possible and how i want to do it please help me for tis

The problem with a time machine is that the universe doesnt record information in a way that exists as it did in a previous state. Take a tape recorder for example. Yes you can rewind and fast forward and revisit all the material on the tape but that is only possible because the material exists in that exact data form giving the tape machine something to read. The universe might not get rid of information and matter but it and the events surrounding it no longer exist in the same form that it once had. Now you could be able to reconstruct and interpret that information one day to form it as it was but it would be its own identity and no longer consist of the environment it once came from and existed in. It would consist of the present and exist in the present. Time travel is like religion in such that it exists for our own desires. The multiple dimension theory is also not a case of time travel in the true sense of the notion. Multiple dimensions would be seperate and of little to no consquence of our own. The idea that there exists past versions of our universe comes from the idea that these multiple dimensions are infinite meaning no beginning or ending of numbers thus any possibility will occure.

@bizzee1

7 жыл бұрын

You make many absolute statements about how the universe is which assume A-theory of time. However, quantum physics and Einstein's Relativistic physics provide some evidence of the possibility of B-theory of time where the future already exists and the past is not gone. So, I don't know how you can make such absolute statements that assume A-theory of time.

@AmazingKevinWClark

7 жыл бұрын

If you can provide an example where nature has a storage of information in its past existance then I would make every effort to consider the implications however the universe and physics Im familiar with are cuase and effect and always changing with no cognitive motivations.

@bizzee1

7 жыл бұрын

You don't have absolute proof of A-theory, so why do you need such proof of B-theory in order to simply not make unqualified, absolute statements that assume A-theory? Like I said, quantum physics and Einstein's Relativistic physics provide some evidence of the possibility of B-theory of time where the future already exists and the past is not gone. Look into B-theory and you'll understand that you shouldn't be making such unqualified, absolute statements that assume A-theory.

@calcarchr

7 жыл бұрын

No storage is necessary. You are literally travelling in the dimension of time if you were to time travel. When you leave a room no storage of that room is necessary to come back to it. You merely travel in that dimension back to it.

@projectknowhow

7 жыл бұрын

I think Kevin is talking about a standard way in which time travel would be possible, to me it seems he's correct, we only travel forward in time due to the chaotic nature of entropy. Things don't go from chaos to order but they do go from order to chaos. Looking at time in this way is kind of like looking at movement in space as moving everything in space and you staying stationary to achieve movement. Although I don't think it needs stored information on each state it just needs the information on the current and next state, information being position, direction, velocity, weight, heat etc. for the given state the information can bring the next state or the previous state can be deduced. So I think time travel could use that but that's like moving every atom in the universe in relation to an object in order to move that. I think the amount of energy to time travel in this sense would be too large to every be practical. I also think that dimensions, the future existing and the past existing seems to be theories and have no practical use as of yet.

Great piece. What about a "A Christmas Carol"? I suppose Scrooge can't interact with the past and future there though, so it doesn't really count as travel.

@simonkane

7 жыл бұрын

Although... seeing yourself young and seeing a world after your death are also crucial points of interest in time travel lore.

Before you can define time travel you have to define time. Time as we generally think of it is is just a human invention. The reason the Industrial revolution is significant is because before man didn't live by the clock. Afterwards he did. Humans lived life by the passing of the seasons, the movement of the sun and the moon. A ticking clock brought about an acute awareness of the passing of our lives.

Idk, there lots of different things in the 16th century.. renaissance was going on. New ships and possibilities, so we got to be specific of what exactly is different enough for time travel. Physics had lots going on, maybe not so much for medicine tho.. food preservation, which adds to understand how much you can manipulate things in the future. Plus people were very religious, so their fantasies were more set in religion, ancients and traveling in the real world.

In the last book of the Confessions, Augustine discusses the nature of time. His view was that time was established by God--in a sense like a movie reel that's unrolled back into the past.

Interestingly, in Well's "The Time Machine", there is NO concept whatsoever about changing something, either in the past (the possibility of travelling into the past is only briefly mentioned in the novel but it IS mentioned) or in the future.

The artists perceptions are much faster than science in picking up on environment change.

@paritoshmehta4048

7 жыл бұрын

It's called design thinking

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? Mark Twain, 1889.

When they say H G Wella was the first one to introduced Time Travel and portals Never read the Celtic Tales and more. I laugh at those who don't read. Or some who read a try to make us dumb.

Awesome

Time travel is there in the story of balarama marrying his wife from tretayuga , while he is in dwaparayuga .

Looking at the comments... What Wells brings to the table is not the idea of time travel per se but rather the idea of voluntary time travel. In the comments I read of prophecies and gods taking ppl into the future... yeah but Wells takes the industrial revolution, and the wonders of man-made machines and thinks of what ppl could eventually achieve with that. Thats the difference.

The Celtic and Saxon folktales that inspired Brigadoon and other stories. Wow I must be a 'geek'.

Late Victorian era, maybe. HG Wells? No. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was six years before The Time Machine. And prophecy has been around for millennia and is essentially informational time travel. "King Oedipus" was playing around with time travel paradoxes long before "The Terminator".

@mattandersomm688

7 жыл бұрын

But there is no time travel in Oedipus. Time is linear there.

@wratched

7 жыл бұрын

Matt Andersomm The information of his eventual crimes travelled through time.

@mattandersomm688

7 жыл бұрын

They were a prophecy. That's not traveling through time but predicting the future. Intresting take nonetheless.

If far fetched fiction has a quantitative effect on the direction that science takes, should we consider it slightly less of a financial endeavor and more of a public service?

Charles Dickens

Edward Bellamy - Looking Backward, published in 1888

neat

Thought it was Jeremy Kyle on the thumb nail

Vsauce covered this and noted that the concept was published in The Sun newspaper.

Everyone just repeats the same arguments against the main thesis of James Gleick not understanding that he speaks 1) of a specific kind of technological time travelling that indicates a new physical understanding of time 2) speaks about a book intending this new understanding, reflecting it and making it to the main topic! That is different from other books. That time and the metaphysical wish to change time is important in books before "the time machine" is not the most intelligent observation. I would recommend to read books by dickens or twain instead using them for arguments like theologians did using bible verses against bible verses (dicta probantia).

I don't know the jokes, what are the JOKES!?!?!

8:24 look at this graph...

@IABITVpresents

4 жыл бұрын

every time I do it makes me graph

Not sure who this book is for. A time travel fan would be bored with these obvious questions, and I can't see a non-fan buying this. We imagine time travel now because of more rapid advances in society, and more plausible theories and technology to do it, and it leads to very creative novels and movies, and....so what...the end.

you should read the sequel Time Ships by Stephen Baxter! brings quantum physics into His world. including many world's theorem. more than 1 future! time war.

Fucking Rip Van WInkle, predates H.G. Wells by most of a CENTURY. The fuck is this guy on about?

3:07 to 8:09 ,

"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", by Mark Twain, was released in 1889 - six years earlier than Wells' work. This is neither an obscure nor "geeky" selection. There are certainly other, equally common examples of time travel literature previous to 1895. Your attempt to revise literary history to support your own narrative has failed, serving only to highlight your own wanton ignorance.

Do people think "mansplaining" just means a man explaining anything better?

This guy is a nut case

Have to watch this for school. Gritting my teeth and thinking "ok boomer" every time I think of contradictions.

surely, time travel must have been a kniwn paradox in relation to the omnipotence and omniscience of God. God forsees the future and the past. God can undue the present and start all over again. id like to see if timetravel was thought about in relation to an all powerful paradox proof diety.

This guy need to do research before speaking. Neither time travel or time machine is a new concept. Both concepts are well used in Indian Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata also known as Jaya long before H.G. wells or any modern author as per say.

First

Before HG Wells plagiarism was not a big thing.

Socialism is forward looking? Big think??? WHAT

liked when he said socialist, disliked when he said mainsplans

6:00 Socialism is forward looking (?) OMG . . .

FAIL! UNSUBSCRIBED!