"Be honest: who hasn't wanted to hit fast-forward or rewind on life? For as long as there has been a concept of time, that urge to break the bonds of time is, well, timeless.
"The idea of time travel is actually as old as civilization itself," said Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech. "We see the very first stories in the 'Mahābhārata,' the great Indian epic, in 400 B.C.E., so they're nearly 2,500 years old."
According to Yaszek, early time travel stories, like Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" or Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," were full of magic, not science. But, "As we moved into an industrial culture, suddenly we had trains that had to move on schedule from station to station, and ships that had to cross great bodies of water and make it into docks at certain time. We had to make sure that humans in different parts of the world were telling time in the same ways. And I think that was really exciting – we felt like we suddenly did have a little control over time."…"
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