The Butterfly Effect Is Silly

James Gleick's new book Time Travel: A History is strange and uncategorizable: it begins as a history of the idea of time travel-- H.G. Wells was the first to marry those words together-- and then the chapters twist and turn through philosophy, physics, literature, memory psychology, technology and the meaning of the digital world . . . the book invites you to think about time as much as it details all the thoughts that have come before, I found myself deciding that the "butterfly effect" is rather silly-- ecosystems are more robust than that and one butterfly isn't going to throw all that much off . . . and our minds are probably similar, one change here or there in the fabric of our timelines wouldn't do all that much to our personality and fate (if it were a butterfly sized change) but we'll never know of course, because the most important thing about time to conscious individuals is that we live through it, our perceptions prisoners to the moments, and no matter what the physicists tell us about the reversibility of cause and effect, time is a one-way street for our bodies and a layered labyrinth for our brains . . . anyway, the book is full of quotable quotes, long summaries of time travel books and movies, philosophical implications of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of food for thought . . . it makes me want to go back and reread some of Gleick's other great books, Chaos and Faster and The Information, and rereading is a method of time travel as well, one espoused by Nabokov, you return to a text knowing the framework and then start to observe it as a whole, outside of the timescape of flipping pages and forward progress, and know it differently . . . and if you like thinking about such things, then you'll love Time Travel: A History.