The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked.
When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a special edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland That puzzlement is what Australian theoretical physicist Paul Davies explores in a wonderfully mind-bending passage from his altogether terrific 1995 book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution ( public library), which embodies my three criteria for what makes a great science book. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self - an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves. “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is.
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