From H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from Marcel Proust to Woody Allen, time travel is a universal human longing that has proven a fertile theme in our imagination. Here the author of Chaos: Making a New Science tracks the evolution of time travel as an idea in our culture, exploring the inevitable looping paradoxes and the porous boundary between pulp fiction and modern physics. Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and the late Stephen Hawking appear side-by-side with Jorge Luis Borges, Edwin Abbott's Flatland, and Back to the Future. James Gleick also looks at the stranger-than-fiction, instantaneous wired world, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.