The Time Machine Hypothesis

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality-time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

Every age has characteristic inventions that change the world. In the 19th century it was the steam engine and the train. For the 20th, electric and gasoline power, aircraft, nuclear weapons, even ventures into space. Today, the planet is awash with electronic business, chatter and virtual-reality entertainment so brilliant that the division between real and simulated is hard to discern. But one new idea from the 19th century has failed, so far, to enter reality—time travel, using machines to turn the time dimension into a two-way highway. Will it come true, as foreseen in science fiction? Might we expect visits to and from the future, sooner than from space? That is the Time Machine Hypothesis, examined here by futurist Damien Broderick, an award-winning writer and theorist of the genre of the future. Broderick homes in on the topic through the lens of science as well as fiction, exploring some fifty different time-travel scenarios and conundrums found in the science fiction literature and film.

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a science fiction classic, which lends itself well to visualization. This version, illustrated by Yoann Laurent-Rouault, an illustrator master who graduated from the Beaux-Arts, and published in the international literary collection Memoria Books, is a reference on the time travel theme. Wells transports us in the year 802 701, in a society made up of the “Elois”, who live peacefully in a kind of big Garden of Eden, eating fruits and sleeping high up, while underground lives another species, also descending from men, the “Morlocks”, who do not stand the light anymore, living in the dark for too long now. At night, they return to the surface, going back up by the wells, in order to kidnap some Elois that they eat ; these last became livestock unknowingly. In The Time Machine, made into a movie several times, the last of them in 2002 by Simon Wells, the great-grandson of H. G. Wells, time is both a pretext to move the class struggle and warn... and also, in a way, a full character, who fascinates, arbitrates, transcends... The illustrations come to reinforce the time travel and provide a new experience to the reader.

Wells was interested in the implications of evolutionary theory on the future of human beings at the biological, sociological, and cultural levels, and The Time Machine, short and readable, draws on many of the social and scientific debates of the time. The Broadview edition of this science fiction classic includes extensive materials on Wells’s scientific and political influences.

Acclaimed as a work of genius when first published in 1895, The Time Machine represents a revolution in storytelling. H. G. Wells's first--and greatest--novel has been recognized worldwide as a founding text of the science fiction genre and one of the most seminal narratives of the last hundred years. This collection of essays offers a series of original, penetrating, and wide-ranging perspectives on Wells's masterpiece by an international group of major Wells and science fiction scholars. The authors explore such textual topics as the narrative techniques and mythological undertones of the novel as well as its contribution to modern ideas of time and evolution and its focusing of the intellectual cross-currents of the late nineteenth century. This insightful volume captures the innovative imagination, richness, and fascinating ambiguity that resulted in a classic literary work and demonstrates that Wells's novel is both a visionary story and an unstoppable idea.

Inspired at an impressionable age by the work of science fiction writers H.G.Wells and Arthur C Clarke, Paul Davies has thought long and hard about ways to travel in time. Here, the best-selling popular science writer finally reveals how it can be done - without breaking the laws of physics and without causing any earth-shattering paradoxes. Since time is money, time travel is a costly business. But with the help of a handy black hole, or better a wormhole, and a bit of luck, Davies's guide illustrates how this new mode of travel could yet be a viable option. "An entertaining tour around a fascinating topic, conducted by a world-class physicist" - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

A "Fictitious Textbook" in the form of an "Interview with an AI", "Beyond the Limits of Time™: A Practical Guide to Creating & Using a Time Machine" takes readers on a thrilling adventure using practical examples to both guide & instruct them on how to use an AI to build & operate a Time Machine, as well as all the parts & technologies needed each step along the way!

This is the first comprehensive book on the philosophy of time. Leading philosophers discuss the metaphysics of time, our experience and representation of time, the role of time in ethics and action, and philosophical issues in the sciences of time, especially quantum mechanics and relativity theory.