The New York Review of Books Time Regained! JUNE 6.2013 James Gleick Time Reborn: From the crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 319 pp., $28.00 A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. Wells's Time Traveller ("for so it will be convenient to speak of him") gathers his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation marked something of a watershed, more telling than young Wells, who had never even published a book before The Time Machine, imagined just before the turn of the twentieth century. What is time? Nothing but a fourth dimension, after length, breadth, and thickness. "Through a natural infirmity of the flesh," the cheerful host explains, "we incline to overlook this fact." The geometry taught in school needs revision. "Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked.... There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it" Fundacie Gala•Salvador Onli, Figueres.Catalonia,Spain Salvador Deli, Fundoci6 CalaSalvador Dal i, Anisis Rights Society (ARS),NewYotk 2011 Salvador Dali: The Sense of Speed, 1931 Wells didn't make this up. It was in the air, the kind of thing bruited by students in the debating society of the Royal College of Science. But no one had made the case as persuasively as he did in 1895, by way of trying to gin up a plausible plot device in a piece of fantastic storytelling. Albert Einstein was then just a boy at gymnasium. Not till 1908 did the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski announce his "radical" idea that space and time were a single entity: "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality." EFTA00603479