from PRX.

This is Studio 360.

I'm Kurti Anderson.

On this podcast bonus episode, we're bringing you stories about science and creativity.

This time, it's part two of a three-part look at a scientist who is also an enduring pop culture phenomenon. Albert Einstein.

Jesus Christ, Doc. You disintegrated Einstein. That's Michael J. Fox, speaking to Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future.

Calm down, Marty. I didn't disintegrate anything.

You see, Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler.

Not Albert Einstein. Einstein's the name of the dog.

Anyway, this hour, we're talking about the real Einstein.

Exactly a hundred years after he gave the world the theory of relativity.

A reference to Einstein in a movie about time travel, like Back to the Future, is apt because it's Einstein's discovery about the space-time continuum that allows for the possibility, the theoretical possibility of time travel.

James Glick has thought a lot about fantastical movies and stories about traveling to the past or the future

because he is the author of the book Time Travel, A History.

And he explains in that book how one author was dreaming about time travel years before Einstein was anywhere close to his eureka moment.

It's almost unbelievable. I assume there are people shaking their heads if I tell them that there was no such thing as time travel before the time machine in 1895. But H.G. Wells was the first, and he wasn't trying to say anything about science.

He just wanted to speculate about the future of humanity.

But in order to tell his story, he invented this gimmick.

Clearly, the time traveler proceeded,

any real body must have extension in four directions.

There are really four dimensions,

three which we call the three planes of space, and a fourth, time.

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