Un interviu in limba engleza in care Dr. Fred Alan Wolf raspunde intrebarilor despre cartea sa.

What prompted you to do a book on time travel?

I have been interested in time travel since I was a child. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of my early interest in magic, perhaps not. However this interest developed, the ideas of traveling through time in the unusual manner of moving (and I use a stream metaphor here) either faster than the "usual flow of time" (imagined to be such that you experience more time than the normal flow or slower (wherein you experience less time than usual) still interests me. As I grew up, I noticed that many events of my life would occur about which I seemed to have the uncanny feeling of déja vu and I would often find myself "knowing" that I already knew those events would occur and that’s why they seemed so familiar. When I write, I realize that I am really time traveling, that the words I write down are not just popping into my mind, but are actually already written down in my mind, and that my mind is really a time machine just going ahead into time, bringing the words from the future, and copying them down.

What is it that fascinates people about time?  Does our society have serious issues with time?  Note for instance, people’s difficulties with being on time, not having enough time, or the aging process itself. Why do you think that is?  Do you have any specific "issues" with time?

About our fascination with time, Saint Augustine remarked "if no one asks me [about time], I know [what it is], but if any person should require me to tell him, I cannot." Perhaps the Saint was referring to how difficult it is to reconcile our common subjective sense of time with our objective and mathematical description of time. Or perhaps our Saint from Hippo was jumping into the future and talking about that peculiar quantum physics paradox called the complementarity principle wherein (from a psychological point of view) you cannot express your knowledge without altering it. Hence it is probably safe to say that no one really understands just what time is as if time had some objective qualities that we could find to compare "it" with. The fact that we can’t "pin time down" as we supposed can do with objective materials like books and apples, continues to both fascinate and bother us.

Our fascination and our inability to "grab hold of time" has both gotten us into a lot of trouble and made technological advance in science, by modeling time as a straight line, possible. About the latter, we are certainly aware of the rapid march of technology and science, so I’ll not say more. About the former, we got into trouble because we needed to make a model of time that fit our desire to control nature and survive in our Western way. This "linear" model has time forever marching on and, through our need to control work and energy, marking time’s passing with clocks. But as we all know, especially those of us in the workforce we are rarely able to work on a clock’s timetable and as a result often find ourselves frustrated and feeling at times inadequate and worried that we simply don’t "have enough time or money" as if time was like apples and coins that one holds in one’s pocket. Even the idea that time is money occupies our worried minds making us think of both as equivalent.

The fact of our aging and encroaching deaths also puts us into "funks" from which many never recover feeling that both time and money are simply lacking in life.
Although our bodies transform continuously as some would simply call advancing decrepitude I don’t see this in this way. Yes as I age (I am in my 70^th year of existence on earth) I certainly feel the effects of this transformation in time so I too have the familiar aches and pains we have all grown up with. But here is what I discovered, my pains aren’t really worse as I age, I have just become more sensitive and conscious concerning them.