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133-460: In the novel, Jeremy and Amanda Solter are two teenagers living in the late 21st century. Their parents work for Crosstime Traffic, a trading company using time travel to go back and forth from parallel versions of Earth to trade for resources to help sustain their version of Earth. One summer, the children work with their parents, going to Polisso – in our timeline a village in Romania with

266-420: A statistical law, so decreasing entropy and non-increasing entropy are not impossible, just improbable. Additionally, entropy statistically increases in systems which are isolated, so non-isolated systems, such as an object, that interact with the outside world, can become less worn and decrease in entropy, and it's possible for an object whose world-line forms a closed loop to be always in the same condition in

399-484: A Canadian reprint of the English edition in 2008. In 1976, Marvel Comics published a new version of The Time Machine , as #2 in their Marvel Classics Comics series, with art by Alex Niño . (This adaptation was originally published in 1973 by Pendulum Press as part of their Pendulum Now Age Classics series; it was colorized and reprinted by Marvel in 1976.) In 1977, Polish painter Waldemar Andrzejewski adapted

532-593: A Scots word for rubbish, or a reference to the Morlacchi community in Dalmatia. The Time Machine can be read as a symbolic novel. The time machine itself can be viewed as a symbol, and there are several symbols in the narrative, including the Sphinx, flowers, and fire. The CBS radio anthology Escape adapted The Time Machine twice, in 1948 starring Jeff Corey , and again in 1950 starring Lawrence Dobkin as

665-628: A U.S. academic journal The Undying Fire , devoted to H.G. Wells studies, has published three articles since its inception in 2002. The name Eloi is the Hebrew plural for Elohim , or lesser gods, in the Old Testament . Wells's source for the name Morlock is less clear. It may refer to the Canaanite god Moloch associated with child sacrifice. The name Morlock may also be a play on mollocks – what miners might call themselves – or

798-530: A character skipping forward in time. In Hindu mythology, the Vishnu Purana mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi , who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is surprised to learn when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed. The Buddhist Pāli Canon mentions the relativity of time. The Payasi Sutta tells of one of the Buddha 's chief disciples, Kumara Kassapa , who explains to

931-644: A cylinder is infinitely long and spins fast enough about its long axis, then a spaceship flying around the cylinder on a spiral path could travel back in time (or forward, depending on the direction of its spiral). However, the density and speed required is so great that ordinary matter is not strong enough to construct it. Physicist Ronald Mallett is attempting to recreate the conditions of a rotating black hole with ring lasers, in order to bend spacetime and allow for time travel. A more fundamental objection to time travel schemes based on rotating cylinders or cosmic strings has been put forward by Stephen Hawking, who proved

1064-471: A definitive judgment on the issue without a theory of quantum gravity to join quantum mechanics and general relativity into a completely unified theory. The theory of general relativity describes the universe under a system of field equations that determine the metric , or distance function, of spacetime. There exist exact solutions to these equations that include closed time-like curves , which are world lines that intersect themselves; some point in

1197-501: A different universe than the one they came from; it's been argued that since the traveler arrives in a different universe's history and not their own history, this is not "genuine" time travel. The accepted many-worlds interpretation suggests that all possible quantum events can occur in mutually exclusive histories. However, some variations allow different universes to interact. This concept is most often used in science-fiction, but some physicists such as David Deutsch have suggested that

1330-574: A draper's apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end. This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre . The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red also places The Time Machine within the realm of eschatology ; that is, the study of the end times, the end of the world, and the ultimate destiny of humankind. Holt, Rinehart & Winston re-published

1463-484: A female Eloi named Mara, played by Samantha Mumba , who essentially takes the place of Weena, from the earlier versions of the story. In this film, the Eloi have, as a tradition, preserved a "stone language" that is identical to English. The Morlocks are much more barbaric and agile, and the Time Traveller has a direct impact on the plot. In Time After Time , H.G. Wells invents a time machine and shows it to some friends in

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1596-420: A few milliseconds compared to another body is not feasible with current technology. As for backward time travel, it is possible to find solutions in general relativity that allow for it, such as a rotating black hole . Traveling to an arbitrary point in spacetime has very limited support in theoretical physics , and is usually connected only with quantum mechanics or wormholes . Some ancient myths depict

1729-452: A finite cylinder might produce closed timelike curves if the rotation rate were fast enough, he did not prove this. But Hawking points out that because of his theorem, "it can't be done with positive energy density everywhere! I can prove that to build a finite time machine, you need negative energy." This result comes from Hawking's 1992 paper on the chronology protection conjecture , which Hawking states as "The laws of physics do not allow

1862-438: A large gravity well such as a black hole . A time machine that utilizes this principle might be, for instance, a spherical shell with a diameter of five meters and the mass of Jupiter . A person at its center will travel forward in time at a rate four times slower than that of distant observers. Squeezing the mass of a large planet into such a small structure is not expected to be within humanity's technological capabilities in

1995-431: A major outcome of this was the 1995 conference and substantial anthology of academic papers, which was collected in print as H.G. Wells's Perennial Time Machine . This publication then allowed the development of a guide-book for academic study at Master's and Ph.D. level: H.G. Wells's The Time Machine: A Reference Guide . The scholarly journal The Wellsian has published around twenty articles on The Time Machine , and

2128-554: A man picking fruit from a fully mature carob tree. Asked whether he had planted it, the man replied that he had not, but that his grandfather had planted it for him. In Christian tradition, there is a similar, story of "the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus ", which recounts a group of early Christians who hid in a cave circa 250 AD, to escape the persecution of Christians during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius . They fell into

2261-473: A manner similar to the first part of the novella. He does not know that one of his friends is Jack The Ripper. The Ripper, fleeing police, escapes to the future (1979), but without a key which prevents the machine from remaining in the future. When it does return home, Wells follows him in order to protect the future (which he imagines to be a utopia) from the Ripper. In turn, the film inspired a 2017 TV series of

2394-441: A miracle-working sage of the 1st century BC, who was a historical character to whom various myths were attached. While traveling one day, Honi saw a man planting a carob tree and asked him about it. The man explained that the tree would take 70 years to bear fruit, and that he was planting it not for himself but for the generations to follow him. Later that day, Honi sat down to rest but fell asleep for 70 years; when he awoke, he saw

2527-414: A mole between his shoulders and was older than he was. Time travel themes in science fiction and the media can be grouped into three categories: immutable timeline; mutable timeline; and alternate histories, as in the interacting- many-worlds interpretation . The non-scientific term 'timeline' is often used to refer to all physical events in history, so that where events are changed, the time traveler

2660-415: A new 100-minute radio dramatisation by Philip Osment, directed by Jeremy Mortimer as part of a BBC Radio Science Fiction season. This was the first adaptation of the novella for British radio. It was first broadcast on 22 February 2009 on BBC Radio 3 and later published as a 2-CD BBC audio book. The other cast members were: The adaptation retained the nameless status of the Time Traveller and set it as

2793-415: A pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3 ft (0.91 m) apart, using a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling . Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of." However, other physicists say that this phenomenon does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Aephraim M. Steinberg , a quantum optics expert at

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2926-543: A part of their " Classics Illustrated " series in 1978. It was a modernization of the Wells's story, making the Time Traveller a 1970s scientist working for a fictional US defence contractor , "the Mega Corporation". Dr. Neil Perry ( John Beck ), the Time Traveller, is described as one of Mega's most reliable contributors by his senior co-worker Branly (Whit Bissell, an alumnus of the 1960 adaptation). Perry's skill

3059-403: A person could travel through time. At dinner the following week, a weary, bedraggled Traveller recounts to his guests what he experienced on his journey to the future. In the new narrative , the Time Traveller goes into the future, observing things moving in quick motion around him. He sees his house disappear and turn into a lush garden. The Traveller stops in A.D. 802,701, and meets the Eloi,

3192-422: A recount of the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller's journey into the far future. A work of future history and speculative evolution , The Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi , and the savage, simian Morlocks , distant descendants of

3325-459: A region of spacetime that is warped a certain way, and hence time travelers would not be able to travel back to earlier regions in spacetime, before this region existed. Stephen Hawking stated that this would explain why the world has not already been overrun by "tourists from the future". Several experiments have been carried out to try to entice future humans, who might invent time travel technology, to come back and demonstrate it to people of

3458-454: A scientific basis for the possibility of backward time travel in certain unusual scenarios, although arguments from semiclassical gravity suggest that when quantum effects are incorporated into general relativity, these loopholes may be closed. These semiclassical arguments led Stephen Hawking to formulate the chronology protection conjecture , suggesting that the fundamental laws of nature prevent time travel, but physicists cannot come to

3591-605: A series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette , but in response to a request by W. E. Henley , the editor of National Observer , he rewrote "The Chronic Argonauts" into a series of seven loosely connected and fictionalized essays which were anonymously published in the newspaper from 17 March to 23 June 1894. The series was never completed as Henley stepped down from his role as editor in National Observer . With his encouragement, Wells continued to work on

3724-403: A signal, some form of classical communication must also be used. The no-communication theorem also gives a general proof that quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information faster than classical signals. A variation of Hugh Everett 's many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics provides a resolution to the grandfather paradox that involves the time traveler arriving in

3857-554: A sleep and woke some 200 years later during the reign of Theodosius II , to discover that the Empire had become Christian. This Christian story is recounted by Islam and appears in a Sura of the Quran , Sura Al-Kahf . The version recalls a group of young monotheists escaping from persecution within a cave and emerging hundreds of years later. This narrative describes divine protection and time suspension. Another similar story in

3990-410: A small amount of proper time passes for them, while a large amount of proper time passes elsewhere. This can be achieved by traveling at relativistic speeds or through the effects of gravity . For two identical clocks moving relative to each other without accelerating, each clock measures the other to be ticking slower. This is possible due to the relativity of simultaneity . However, the symmetry

4123-448: A society of small, childlike humanoids. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet deteriorating buildings, and adhere to a fruit-based diet . His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline. They appear happy and carefree but fear the dark, particularly moonless nights. They give no response to nocturnal disappearances, possibly because they are so afraid of them. After exploring

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4256-499: A symmetric polygon could still act as a time machine, although he concludes that this is more likely a flaw in classical quantum gravity theory rather than proof that causality violation is possible. Another approach involves a dense spinning cylinder usually referred to as a Tipler cylinder , a GR solution discovered by Willem Jacob van Stockum in 1936 and Kornel Lanczos in 1924, but not recognized as allowing closed timelike curves until an analysis by Frank Tipler in 1974. If

4389-470: A theorem showing that according to general relativity it is impossible to build a time machine of a special type (a "time machine with the compactly generated Cauchy horizon") in a region where the weak energy condition is satisfied, meaning that the region contains no matter with negative energy density ( exotic matter ). Solutions such as Tipler's assume cylinders of infinite length, which are easier to analyze mathematically, and although Tipler suggested that

4522-557: A time traveler should end up in a different history than the one he started from. On the other hand, Stephen Hawking has argued that even if the MWI is correct, we should expect each time traveler to experience a single self-consistent history, so that time travelers remain within their own world rather than traveling to a different one. The physicist Allen Everett argued that Deutsch's approach "involves modifying fundamental principles of quantum mechanics; it certainly goes beyond simply adopting

4655-427: A traversable wormhole would require the existence of a substance with negative energy , often referred to as " exotic matter ". More technically, the wormhole spacetime requires a distribution of energy that violates various energy conditions , such as the null energy condition along with the weak, strong, and dominant energy conditions. However, it is known that quantum effects can lead to small measurable violations of

4788-551: A true story told to the young Wells by the time traveller, which Wells then re-tells as an older man to the US journalist, Martha, whilst firewatching on the roof of Broadcasting House during the Blitz . It also retained the deleted ending from the novella as a recorded message sent back to Wells from the future by the traveller using a prototype of his machine, with the traveller escaping the anthropoid creatures to 30 million AD at

4921-416: A vacuum. His experiment involved slow light as well as passing light through a vacuum. He generated two single photons , passing one through rubidium atoms that had been cooled with a laser (thus slowing the light) and passing one through a vacuum. Both times, apparently, the precursors preceded the photons' main bodies, and the precursor traveled at c in a vacuum. According to Du, this implies that there

5054-478: A wormhole with such an induced clock difference could not be brought together without inducing quantum field and gravitational effects that would either make the wormhole collapse or the two mouths repel each other. Because of this, the two mouths could not be brought close enough for causality violation to take place. However, in a 1997 paper, Visser hypothesized that a complex " Roman ring " (named after Tom Roman) configuration of an N number of wormholes arranged in

5187-452: Is broken if one clock accelerates, allowing for less proper time to pass for one clock than the other. The twin paradox describes this: one twin remains on Earth, while the other undergoes acceleration to relativistic speed as they travel into space, turn around, and travel back to Earth; the traveling twin ages less than the twin who stayed on Earth, because of the time dilation experienced during their acceleration. General relativity treats

5320-443: Is demonstrated by his rapid reprogramming of an off-course missile, averting a disaster that could destroy Los Angeles . His reputation secures a grant of $ 20 million for his time machine project. Although nearing completion, the corporation wants Perry to put the project on hold so that he can head a military weapon development project. Perry accelerates work on the time machine, permitting him to test it before being forced to work on

5453-449: Is described as creating a new timeline. Early science fiction stories feature characters who sleep for years and awaken in a changed society, or are transported to the past through supernatural means. Among them L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fût jamais ( The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One , 1770) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier , Rip Van Winkle (1819) by Washington Irving , Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy , and When

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5586-454: Is disputed. Presentism is a school of philosophy that holds that the future and the past exist only as changes that occurred or will occur to the present, and they have no real existence of their own. In this view, time travel is impossible because there is no future or past to travel to. Keller and Nelson have argued that even if past and future objects do not exist, there can still be definite truths about past and future events, and thus it

5719-501: Is highly unlikely to be possible. Any theory that would allow time travel would introduce potential problems of causality . The classic example of a problem involving causality is the " grandfather paradox ," which postulates travelling to the past and intervening in the conception of one's ancestors (causing the death of an ancestor before conception being frequently cited). Some physicists, such as Novikov and Deutsch, suggested that these sorts of temporal paradoxes can be avoided through

5852-447: Is impossible for the time traveler to "change" history in any way. The time traveler's actions may be the cause of events in their own past though, which leads to the potential for circular causation , sometimes called a predestination paradox, ontological paradox, or bootstrap paradox. The term bootstrap paradox was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein 's story " By His Bootstraps ". The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that

5985-516: Is no possibility of light traveling faster than c and, thus, no possibility of violating causality. Many have argued that the absence of time travelers from the future demonstrates that such technology will never be developed, suggesting that it is impossible. This is analogous to the Fermi paradox related to the absence of evidence of extraterrestrial life. As the absence of extraterrestrial visitors does not categorically prove they do not exist, so

6118-429: Is observed when one correlates measurements of idler photons to the corresponding signal photons. However, since interference can be observed only after the idler photons are measured and they are correlated with the signal photons, there is no way for experimenters to tell what choice will be made in advance just by looking at the signal photons, only by gathering classical information from the entire system; thus causality

6251-434: Is possible that a future truth about a time traveler deciding to travel back to the present date could explain the time traveler's actual appearance in the present; these views are contested by some authors. A common objection to the idea of traveling back in time is put forth in the grandfather paradox or the argument of auto-infanticide. If one were able to go back in time, inconsistencies and contradictions would ensue if

6384-488: Is preserved. The experiment of Lijun Wang might also show causality violation since it made it possible to send packages of waves through a bulb of caesium gas in such a way that the package appeared to exit the bulb 62 nanoseconds before its entry, but a wave package is not a single well-defined object but rather a sum of multiple waves of different frequencies (see Fourier analysis ), and the package can appear to move faster than light or even backward in time even if none of

6517-524: Is received before it is sent, in all reference frames. The signal could be said to have moved backward in time. This hypothetical scenario is sometimes referred to as a tachyonic antitelephone . Quantum-mechanical phenomena such as quantum teleportation , the EPR paradox , or quantum entanglement might appear to create a mechanism that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) communication or time travel, and in fact some interpretations of quantum mechanics such as

6650-473: Is still being researched. Wormholes are a hypothetical warped spacetime permitted by the Einstein field equations of general relativity. A proposed time-travel machine using a traversable wormhole would hypothetically work in the following way: One end of the wormhole is accelerated to some significant fraction of the speed of light, perhaps with some advanced propulsion system , and then brought back to

6783-643: Is that Christianity never became the Roman Empire's dominant religion, but remained one of the Empire's many religions. Persecution of Christians ceased due to a pragmatic compromise whereby Christians are obliged to burn incense "for the Emperor's health" but are not required to worship "pagan" gods. Christians are subdivided between "Imperial Christians" - mainly the richer ones - who perform this ceremony in order to advance their business interests, and more principled Christians who refuse to perform it and accept

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6916-408: Is uncertain whether time travel to the past would be physically possible. Such travel, if at all feasible, may give rise to questions of causality . Forward time travel, outside the usual sense of the perception of time , is an extensively observed phenomenon and is well understood within the framework of special relativity and general relativity . However, making one body advance or delay more than

7049-601: The Bohm interpretation presume that some information is being exchanged between particles instantaneously in order to maintain correlations between particles. This effect was referred to as " spooky action at a distance " by Einstein. Nevertheless, the fact that causality is preserved in quantum mechanics is a rigorous result in modern quantum field theories , and therefore modern theories do not allow for time travel or FTL communication . In any specific instance where FTL has been claimed, more detailed analysis has proven that to get

7182-503: The Journal Chronicle , praised the novel, saying, "I really enjoyed this one, which had lively characters and events, and whose setting seemed much more interesting and better realized than that in the author's other recent novels." The novel's name is derived from the concept of Gunpowder empires , referring to historical Muslim empires which remained stable over centuries due to their possession of gunpowder and artillery; in

7315-457: The Novikov self-consistency principle or a variation of the many-worlds interpretation with interacting worlds. Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light , such as cosmic strings , traversable wormholes , and Alcubierre drives . The theory of general relativity does suggest

7448-523: The University of Toronto , Canada, uses the analogy of a train traveling from Chicago to New York, but dropping off train cars at each station along the way, so that the center of the train moves forward at each stop; in this way, the speed of the center of the train exceeds the speed of any of the individual cars. Shengwang Du claims in a peer-reviewed journal to have observed single photons' precursors , saying that they travel no faster than c in

7581-465: The "Holt text" and "Heinemann text", respectively. Nearly all modern reprints reproduce the Heinemann text. The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the contemporary angst about industrial relations . It is also influenced by Ray Lankester 's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton 's novel Vril,

7714-633: The "World of the Ancients" ( Qin dynasty ) to retrieve a magical bell and then travels forward to the "World of the Future" ( Song dynasty ) to find an emperor who has been exiled in time. However, the time travel is taking place inside an illusory dream world created by the villain to distract and entrap him. Samuel Madden 's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in

7847-400: The 1960 film. (H.G. Wells himself can also be said to have a "cameo" appearance, in the form of a photograph on the wall of Alex's home, near the front door.) The film was directed by Wells's great-grandson Simon Wells , with an even more revised plot that incorporated the ideas of paradoxes and changing the past. The place is changed from Richmond, Surrey, to downtown New York City , where

7980-604: The Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak. Returning to the site where he arrived, the Traveller finds his machine missing; he is confident that it at least has not traveled through time, as he had removed its levers. Later, he encounters the Morlocks, ape -like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Deducing that they must have taken his time machine, he explores one of many "wells" that lead to

8113-757: The Islamic tradition is of Uzair (usually identified with the Biblical Ezra ) whose grief at the Destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians was so great that God took his soul and brought him back to life after Jerusalem was reconstructed. He rode on his revived donkey and entered his native place. But the people did not recognize him, nor did his household, except the maid, who was now an old blind woman. He prayed to God to cure her blindness and she could see again. He meets his son who recognized him by

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8246-569: The Lietuvan Army crosses the border, placing Polisso under siege. At the same time, the Roman authorities begin to grow suspicious of their trade mission and the origin of such items as watches and Swiss army knives which they offer for sale and which no artisan in the Empire can match. Roland J. Green , reviewing for Booklist , said, "Seemingly a series opener intended to introduce the concept of parallel worlds and Turtledove's take on it,

8379-580: The MWI". Everett also argues that even if Deutsch's approach is correct, it would imply that any macroscopic object composed of multiple particles would be split apart when traveling back in time through a wormhole, with different particles emerging in different worlds. Certain experiments carried out give the impression of reversed causality , but fail to show it under closer examination. The delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment performed by Marlan Scully involves pairs of entangled photons that are divided into "signal photons" and "idler photons", with

8512-440: The Morlocks' dwellings and discovers them operating the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He realizes that the Morlocks control and feed upon the Eloi. The Traveller speculates that the human race has diverged into two species: the favored aristocracy has become the Eloi, and their mechanical servants have become the Morlocks. Meanwhile, he rescues Eloi Weena from drowning, as none of

8645-546: The Power of the Coming Race (1871). It is also thought that Wells' Eloi race shares many features with the works of other English socialists, most notably William Morris and his work News from Nowhere (1890), in which money is depicted as irrelevant and work is merely undertaken as a form of pleasure. Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy 's novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) and

8778-464: The Roman Empire, a rival Lietuvan Empire has grown up similar to a still surviving Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth , with occasional wars breaking out between the two. It is said that most of these wars would end in an exchange of border provinces. Romans consider the Lietuvans as "barbarians", though in fact the two have much the same level of technology and culture. An important aspect of the book

8911-569: The Scientific Romances ) and studies of utopias/dystopias in science fiction (such as Mark R. Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians ). Much critical and textual work was done in the 1970s, including the tracing of the very complex publication history of the text, its drafts, and unpublished fragments. A further resurgence in scholarship came around the time of the novella's centenary in 1995, and

9044-586: The Sleeper Awakes (1899) by H. G. Wells. Prolonged sleep is used as a means of time travel in these stories. The date of the earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. The Chinese novel A Supplement to the Journey to the West ( c.  1640 ) by Dong Yue features magical mirrors and jade gateways that connect various points in time. The protagonist Sun Wukong travels back in time to

9177-465: The Time Traveller moves forward in time to find answers to his questions on 'Practical Application of Time Travel;' first in 2030 New York, to witness an orbital lunar catastrophe in 2037, before moving on to 802,701 for the main plot. He later briefly finds himself in 635,427,810 with toxic clouds and a world laid waste (presumably by the Morlocks) with devastation and Morlock artifacts stretching out to

9310-413: The Traveller flees into the next day, finding that the creature has apparently eaten the tiny humanoid. The Dover Press and Easton Press editions of the novella restore this deleted segment. Significant scholarly commentary on The Time Machine began from the early 1960s, initially contained in various broad studies of Wells's early novels (such as Bernard Bergonzi's The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of

9443-402: The Traveller's escape from the Morlocks. He finds himself in the distant future in a frost-covered moorland with simple grasses and black bushes, populated with furry, hopping herbivores resembling kangaroos . He stuns or kills one with a rock, and upon closer examination realises they are probably the descendants of humans / Eloi / Morlocks. A gigantic, centipede-like arthropod approaches and

9576-463: The Traveller's house the next day, finding him preparing for another journey and promising to return in a short time. After waiting for three years, however, the narrator says that the Traveller has not returned. A section from the thirteenth chapter of the serial published in New Review (May 1895, partway down p. 577 to p. 580, line 29) does not appear in either of the 1895 editions of

9709-422: The absence of time travelers fails to prove time travel is physically impossible; it might be that time travel is physically possible but is never developed or is cautiously used. Carl Sagan once suggested the possibility that time travelers could be here but are disguising their existence or are not recognized as time travelers. Some versions of general relativity suggest that time travel might only be possible in

9842-551: The ancient Porolissum ruins nearby, in the alternate timeline a major city of a Roman Empire that never collapsed. In the intervening centuries, the Romans advanced to the extent of inventing gunpowder – hence the title of the book – putting their armies on about 17th Century level. By 2100, they had not, however, gone through an Industrial Revolution and many of their social institutions, in particular slavery , remain much as they were in earlier Roman times. North of

9975-399: The appearance of closed timelike curves." When a signal is sent from one location and received at another location, then as long as the signal is moving at the speed of light or slower, the mathematics of simultaneity in the theory of relativity show that all reference frames agree that the transmission-event happened before the reception-event. When the signal travels faster than light, it

10108-454: The area around the Eloi's residences, the Traveller reaches the top of a hill overlooking what was once London and finds the ruins of what once was a metropolis . He concludes that the entire planet became a garden, with little trace of human society or engineering from the hundreds of thousands of years prior, and that communism has at last been achieved. He also theorizes that intelligence springs from necessity; with no real challenges facing

10241-565: The book in 2000, paired with The War of the Worlds , and commissioned Michael Koelsch to illustrate a new cover art. A Victorian Englishman, identified only as the Time Traveller , tells his weekly dinner guests that he has experimental verification of a machine that can travel through time. He shows them what he says is a small model, and they watch it disappear. He says he has a big machine nearly finished in his laboratory, in which

10374-438: The book succeeds as an homage to parallelworlds pioneer Piper and a well-told, engaging tale." Peter Cannon, reviewing for Publishers Weekly , said, "Turtledove presents his teenaged heroes with a series of moral choices and dilemmas that will particularly resonate with younger fans. This is a rousing story that reminds us that "adventure" really is someone else in deep trouble a long way off." Don D'Ammassa , in his review for

10507-405: The book. It was drafted at the suggestion of Wells's editor, William Ernest Henley , who wanted Wells to "oblige your editor" by lengthening the text with, among other things, an illustration of "the ultimate degeneracy" of humanity. "There was a slight struggle," Wells later recalled, "between the writer and W. E. Henley who wanted, he said, to put a little 'writing' into the tale. But the writer

10640-411: The case that backward time travel could be possible but that it would be impossible to actually change the past in any way, an idea similar to the proposed Novikov self-consistency principle in physics. According to the philosophical theory of compossibility , what can happen, for example in the context of time travel, must be weighed against the context of everything relating to the situation. If

10773-516: The causal future of the world line is also in its causal past, a situation that can be described as time travel. Such a solution was first proposed by Kurt Gödel , a solution known as the Gödel metric , but his (and others') solution requires the universe to have physical characteristics that it does not appear to have, such as rotation and lack of Hubble expansion . Whether general relativity forbids closed time-like curves for all realistic conditions

10906-568: The contemporary upper and lower classes respectively. It is believed that Wells' depiction of the Eloi as a race living in plenitude and abandon was inspired by the utopic romance novel News from Nowhere (1890), though Wells' universe in the novel is notably more savage and brutal. In his 1931 preface to the book, Wells wrote that The Time Machine seemed "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more", though he states that "the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort". However, critics have praised

11039-453: The distraught Traveller, not understanding that he can use it to escape. He reattaches the levers before travelling further ahead to roughly 30 million years from his own time. There, he sees some of the last living things on a dying Earth: crab-like creatures wandering blood-red beaches chasing enormous butterflies , in a world covered in lichenoid vegetation. He continues to make jumps forward through time, seeing Earth's rotation cease and

11172-484: The effects of acceleration and the effects of gravity as equivalent , and shows that time dilation also occurs in gravity wells , with a clock deeper in the well ticking more slowly; this effect is taken into account when calibrating the clocks on the satellites of the Global Positioning System , and it could lead to significant differences in rates of aging for observers at different distances from

11305-406: The end of the universe before disappearing or dying there. On 5 September 2017, Big Finish Productions released an adaptation of The Time Machine . This adaptation was written by Marc Platt and starred Ben Miles as the Time Traveller. Platt explained in an interview that adapting The Time Machine to audio was not much different from writing Doctor Who , and that he could see where some of

11438-430: The famous and easy-to-replicate observation of atmospheric muon decay . The theory of relativity states that the speed of light is invariant for all observers in any frame of reference ; that is, it is always the same. Time dilation is a direct consequence of the invariance of the speed of light. Time dilation may be regarded in a limited sense as "time travel into the future": a person may use time dilation so that

11571-473: The film Somewhere in Time as an example of such an ontological paradox, where a watch is given to a person, and 60 years later the same watch is brought back in time and given to the same character. Ross states that entropy of the watch will increase, and the watch carried back in time will be more worn with each repetition of its history. The second law of thermodynamics is understood by modern physicists to be

11704-489: The first story to feature an alternate history created as a result of time travel. One of the first stories to feature time travel by means of a machine is " The Clock that Went Backward " by Edward Page Mitchell , which appeared in the New York Sun in 1881. However, the mechanism borders on fantasy. An unusual clock, when wound, runs backwards and transports people nearby back in time. The author does not explain

11837-471: The first time-machine story, but I'm not sure that a clock quite counts". H. G. Wells ' The Time Machine (1895) popularized the concept of time travel by mechanical means. Some theories, most notably special and general relativity , suggest that suitable geometries of spacetime or specific types of motion in space might allow time travel into the past and future if these geometries or motions were possible. In technical papers, physicists discuss

11970-549: The first to toy with the rich idea of time-travel in the form of an artifact sent backward from the future to be discovered in the present". In the science fiction anthology Far Boundaries (1951), editor August Derleth claims that an early short story about time travel is An Anachronism; or, Missing One's Coach , written for the Dublin Literary Magazine by an anonymous author in the June 1838 issue . While

12103-414: The future world. Because the tiring journey back to Weena's home is too much for them, they stop in the forest for the night. They are eventually attacked by Morlocks, and Weena faints. The Traveller escapes when a small fire he left behind them to repel the Morlocks turns into a forest fire ; Weena and the Morlocks are lost in the blaze. The Morlocks open the Sphinx and use the machine as bait to capture

12236-401: The future. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device. Utilizing a frame story set in then-present Victorian England , Wells' text focuses on

12369-554: The horizon. It was met with mixed reviews and earned $ 56 million before VHS/DVD sales. The Time Machine used a design that was very reminiscent of the one in the Pal film but was much larger and employed polished turned brass construction, along with rotating glass reminiscent of the Fresnel lenses common to lighthouses. (In Wells's original book, the Time Traveller mentioned his 'scientific papers on optics'.) Hartdegen becomes involved with

12502-432: The idea of absolute time , while his contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz maintained that time is only a relation between events and it cannot be expressed independently. The latter approach eventually gave rise to the spacetime of relativity . Many philosophers have argued that relativity implies eternalism , the idea that the past and future exist in a real sense, not only as changes that occurred or will occur to

12635-432: The later film Metropolis (1927), dealt with similar themes. In his later reassessment of the book, published as the 1931 preface to The Time Machine , Wells wrote that the text has "lasted as long as the diamond-framed safety bicycle , which came in at about the date of its first publication", and is "assured it will outlive him", attesting to the power of the book. Based on Wells's personal experiences and childhood,

12768-411: The local laws of physics in a region of spacetime containing time travelers cannot be any different from the local laws of physics in any other region of spacetime. The philosopher Kelley L. Ross argues in "Time Travel Paradoxes" that in a scenario involving a physical object whose world-line or history forms a closed loop in time there can be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics . Ross uses

12901-671: The narrator waits under a tree for a coach to take him out of Newcastle upon Tyne , he is transported back in time over a thousand years. He encounters the Venerable Bede in a monastery and explains to him the developments of the coming centuries. However, the story never makes it clear whether these events are real or a dream. Another early work about time travel is The Forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon by Alexander Veltman published in 1836. Charles Dickens 's A Christmas Carol (1843) has early depictions of mystical time travel in both directions, as

13034-416: The near future. With current technologies, it is only possible to cause a human traveler to age less than companions on Earth by a few milliseconds after a few hundred days of space travel. Philosophers have discussed the philosophy of space and time since at least the time of ancient Greece ; for example, Parmenides presented the view that time is an illusion. Centuries later, Isaac Newton supported

13167-461: The new project. The 1960 film was remade in 2002, starring Guy Pearce as the Time Traveller, a mechanical engineering professor named Alexander Hartdegen, Mark Addy as his colleague David Philby, Sienna Guillory as Alex's ill-fated fiancée Emma, Phyllida Law as Mrs. Watchit, and Jeremy Irons as the Uber-Morlock. Playing a quick cameo as a shopkeeper was Alan Young , who featured in

13300-491: The novel as a 22-page comic book, written in Polish by Antoni Wolski. From April 1990, Eternity Comics published a three-issue miniseries adaptation of The Time Machine , written by Bill Spangler and illustrated by John Ross — this was collected as a trade paperback graphic novel in 1991. In 2018, US imprint Insight Comics published an adaptation of the novel, as part of their "H. G. Wells" series of comic books. In 2024

13433-471: The novel, the surviving Roman Empire develops along similar lines. Time travel Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future . Time travel is a concept in philosophy and fiction , particularly science fiction . In fiction , time travel is typically achieved through the use of a device known as a time machine . The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G. Wells 's 1895 novel The Time Machine . It

13566-452: The novella's handling of its thematic concerns, with Marina Warner writing that the book was the most significant contribution to understanding fragments of desire before Sigmund Freud 's The Interpretation of Dreams , with the novel "[conveying] how close he felt to the melancholy seeker after a door that he once opened on to a luminous vision and could never find again". The Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films of

13699-467: The null energy condition, and many physicists believe that the required negative energy may actually be possible due to the Casimir effect in quantum physics. Although early calculations suggested that a very large amount of negative energy would be required, later calculations showed that the amount of negative energy can be made arbitrarily small. In 1993, Matt Visser argued that the two mouths of

13832-410: The origin or properties of the clock. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau 's El Anacronópete (1887) may have been the first story to feature a vessel engineered to travel through time. Andrew Sawyer has commented that the story "does seem to be the first literary description of a time machine noted so far", adding that "Edward Page Mitchell's story The Clock That Went Backward (1881) is usually described as

13965-399: The other Eloi take any notice of her plight. The Traveller takes Weena with him on an expedition to "The Palace of Green Porcelain", a distant structure which turns out to be a derelict museum. Here, the Traveller finds fresh matches and fashions a crude weapon against Morlocks, whom he must fight to recover his machine. He plans to take Weena back to his own time to save her from the horrors of

14098-407: The outside. One significant limitation of such a time machine is that it is only possible to go as far back in time as the initial creation of the machine; in essence, it is more of a path through time than it is a device that itself moves through time, and it would not allow the technology itself to be moved backward in time. According to current theories on the nature of wormholes, construction of

14231-453: The parts of the Eloi. The drama is approximately two hours long and is more faithful to the story than several of the film adaptations. Some changes are made to reflect modern language and knowledge of science. In 2000, Alan Young read The Time Machine for 7th Voyage Productions, Inc., in 2016 to celebrate the 120th Anniversary of H.G. Wells's novella. Robert Glenister starred as the Time Traveller, with William Gaunt as H. G. Wells in

14364-431: The past is a certain way, it's not possible for it to be any other way. What can happen when a time traveler visits the past is limited to what did happen, in order to prevent logical contradictions. The Novikov self-consistency principle , named after Igor Dmitrievich Novikov , states that any actions taken by a time traveler or by an object that travels back in time were part of history all along, and therefore it

14497-404: The past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future. Because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian angel , Paul Alkon suggests in his book Origins of Futuristic Fiction that "the first time-traveler in English literature is a guardian angel". Madden does not explain how the angel obtains these documents, but Alkon asserts that Madden "deserves recognition as

14630-485: The point of origin. Alternatively, another way is to take one entrance of the wormhole and move it to within the gravitational field of an object that has higher gravity than the other entrance, and then return it to a position near the other entrance. For both these methods, time dilation causes the end of the wormhole that has been moved to have aged less, or become "younger", than the stationary end as seen by an external observer; however, time connects differently through

14763-444: The possibility of closed timelike curves , which are world lines that form closed loops in spacetime, allowing objects to return to their own past. There are known to be solutions to the equations of general relativity that describe spacetimes which contain closed timelike curves, such as Gödel spacetime , but the physical plausibility of these solutions is uncertain. Many in the scientific community believe that backward time travel

14896-534: The possibility of generating a positive result demonstrating the existence of time travel, but have failed so far—no time travelers are known to have attended either event. Some versions of the many-worlds interpretation can be used to suggest that future humans have traveled back in time, but have traveled back to the meeting time and place in a parallel universe . There is a great deal of observable evidence for time dilation in special relativity and gravitational time dilation in general relativity, for example in

15029-555: The present time. Events such as Perth's Destination Day , MIT 's Time Traveler Convention and Stephen Hawking's Reception For Time Travellers heavily publicized permanent "advertisements" of a meeting time and place for future time travelers to meet. In 1982, a group in Baltimore , Maryland , identifying itself as the Krononauts, hosted an event of this type welcoming visitors from the future. These experiments only stood

15162-437: The present. Philosopher of science Dean Rickles disagrees with some qualifications, but notes that "the consensus among philosophers seems to be that special and general relativity are incompatible with presentism". Some philosophers view time as a dimension equal to spatial dimensions, that future events are "already there" in the same sense different places exist, and that there is no objective flow of time; however, this view

15295-463: The protagonist is transported to the prehistoric past by the magic of a "lame demon" (a French pun on Boitard's name), where he encounters a Plesiosaur and an apelike ancestor and is able to interact with ancient creatures. Edward Everett Hale 's "Hands Off" (1881) tells the story of an unnamed being, possibly the soul of a person who has recently died, who interferes with ancient Egyptian history by preventing Joseph 's enslavement. This may have been

15428-481: The protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, is transported to Christmases past and future. Other stories employ the same template, where a character naturally goes to sleep, and upon waking up finds themself in a different time. A clearer example of backward time travel is found in the 1861 book Paris avant les hommes ( Paris before Men ) by the French botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard , published posthumously. In this story,

15561-493: The pure waves in the sum do so. This effect cannot be used to send any matter, energy, or information faster than light, so this experiment is understood not to violate causality either. The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Koblenz , claim to have violated Einstein's theory of relativity by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light. They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons traveled "instantaneously" between

15694-508: The resulting social disabilities. The rival Lietuvan Empire, dedicated to the worship of Perkunas , is actively intolerant and Christians who attempt missionary activity there face martyrdom. When the youngsters' mother becomes sick, their father takes her back to their home time for treatment, expecting to come back in a few days – but the cross-time travel equipment suffers a break in link, stranding Jeremy and Amanda in Polisso just as

15827-449: The roots of early Doctor Who came from. The first visual adaptation of the book was a live teleplay broadcast from Alexandra Palace on 25 January 1949 by the BBC , which starred Russell Napier as the Time Traveller and Mary Donn as Weena. No recording of this live broadcast was made; the only record of the production is the script and a few black and white still photographs. A reading of

15960-456: The same name, as well as two television versions and many comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions. Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in a short story titled " The Chronic Argonauts " (1888). This work, published in his college newspaper, was the foundation for The Time Machine . He frequently stated that he had thought of using some of this material in

16093-654: The same name. Classics Illustrated was the first to adapt The Time Machine into a comic book format, issuing an American edition in July 1956. The Classics Illustrated version was published in French by Classiques Illustres in Dec 1957, and Classics Illustrated Strato Publications (Australian) in 1957, and Kuvitettuja Klassikkoja (a Finnish edition) in November 1957. There were also Classics Illustrated Greek editions in 1976, Swedish in 1987, German in 1992 and 2001, and

16226-434: The same point of its history. In 2005, Daniel Greenberger and Karl Svozil proposed that quantum theory gives a model for time travel where the past must be self-consistent. The Time Machine The Time Machine is an 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travels approximately 802,701 years into

16359-479: The script, however, suggests that this teleplay remained fairly faithful to the book. In 1960, the novella was made into a US science fiction film , also known promotionally as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine . The film starred Rod Taylor , Alan Young , and Yvette Mimieux . The film was produced and directed by George Pal , who also filmed a 1953 version of Wells's The War of the Worlds . The film won an Academy Award for time-lapse photographic effects showing

16492-479: The signal photons emerging from one of two locations and their position later measured as in the double-slit experiment . Depending on how the idler photon is measured, the experimenter can either learn which of the two locations the signal photon emerged from or "erase" that information. Even though the signal photons can be measured before the choice has been made about the idler photons, the choice seems to retroactively determine whether or not an interference pattern

16625-629: The skeptic Payasi that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth. The Japanese tale of " Urashima Tarō ", first described in the Manyoshu , tells of a young fisherman named Urashima-no-ko ( 浦嶋子 ) who visits an undersea palace. After three days, he returns home to his village and finds himself 300 years in the future, where he has been forgotten, his house is in ruins, and his family has died. One story in Judaism concerns Honi HaMe'agel ,

16758-613: The story, and at the end of the year when Henley was given the position as editor of Heinemann's periodical The New Review , he arranged for the story to be published there in serialized form in the January to May 1895 editions instead, which Wells was paid £ 100 (equal to about £15,000 today) for. Henry Holt and Company published the first book edition (possibly prepared from a different manuscript) on 7 May 1895; Heinemann published an English edition on 29 May. These two editions are different textually and are commonly referred to as

16891-490: The sun grow larger, redder, and dimmer , and the world falling silent and freezing as the last living things die out. Overwhelmed, he returns to his own time, arriving at the laboratory just three hours after he originally left. He arrives late to his own dinner party, whereupon, after eating, the Traveller relates his adventures to his disbelieving visitors, producing as evidence two unusual white flowers Weena put in his pocket. The original narrator relates that he returned to

17024-457: The time traveler were to change anything; there is a contradiction if the past becomes different from the way it is . The paradox is commonly described with a person who travels to the past and kills their own grandfather, prevents the existence of their father or mother, and therefore their own existence. Philosophers question whether these paradoxes prove time travel impossible. Some philosophers answer these paradoxes by arguing that it might be

17157-468: The traveller. A script adapted by Irving Ravetch was used in both episodes. The Time Traveller was named Dudley and was accompanied by his skeptical friend Fowler as they travelled to the year 100,080. In 1994, an audio drama was released on cassette and CD by Alien Voices, starring Leonard Nimoy as the Time Traveller (named John in this adaptation) and John de Lancie as David Filby. John de Lancie's children, Owen de Lancie and Keegan de Lancie , played

17290-488: The working class literally spent a lot of their time underground. His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father's shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became

17423-428: The world changing rapidly. In 1993, Rod Taylor hosted Time Machine: The Journey Back reuniting him with Alan Young and Whit Bissell, featuring the only sequel to Mr. Pal's classic film, written by the original screenwriter, David Duncan. In the special were Academy Award -winners special effect artists Wah Chang and Gene Warren . Sunn Classic Pictures produced a television film version of The Time Machine as

17556-416: The wormhole than outside it, so that synchronized clocks at either end of the wormhole will always remain synchronized as seen by an observer passing through the wormhole, no matter how the two ends move around. This means that an observer entering the "younger" end would exit the "older" end at a time when it was the same age as the "younger" end, effectively going back in time as seen by an observer from

17689-513: Was in reaction from that sort of thing, the Henley interpolations were cut out again, and he had his own way with his text." This portion of the story was published elsewhere as " The Final Men " (1940) and " The Grey Man ". The deleted text was also published by Forrest J Ackerman in an issue of the American edition of Perry Rhodan . The deleted text recounts an incident immediately after

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