Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the Avid Reader. Today our guest is James Gleick, author of Time Travel, a history. Published in September by Pantheon. Suppose it could have easily been Time Travel a future but then this interview would have been done some time ago.

James was born in NYC graduated from Harvard and worked for years as an editor and reporter for the NYT.

He recently wrote The Information, a history, a theory, a flood. Before that was Chaos a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist. He also wrote Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (my hero) and Isaac Newton both shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. As well as so many others.

Without Time (both the book and the concept), there would be very little to do. Here or anywhere. We would have all the space in the universe and no place to go.

Time gives us a chance to be born to play baseball, to fall in love, to marry have children, watch them grow, grow old ourselves die as we remember chunks of what was a life either well lived or not.

And wouldn’t it be nice if we could go back through time and lazily revisit those moments that we hold so dear or perhaps better yet scurry back to those moments where we went terribly wrong and perhaps took the road more travelled and perhaps carefully and with plenty of time untangle what would otherwise be Gordian knots but with the advantage of slowing things down and letting the gears slip backward are now just slipknots.

But...James says we can’t do it.

But he has provided us with a framework within which we structure our universe and our consciousness’ highway and James has given us a bit of a roadmap to that highway and whether or not it is a one way street or a thoroughfare which can be traversed both ways.