him to journey through the centuries. All he had to do was pull on a little lever and he was propelled at great speed into the future, gazing in awe as snails ran like hares, trees sprouted from the ground like geysers, the stars circled in the sky, which changed from day to night in a second … This wild and wonderful journey took him to the year 802,701, where he discovered that society had split into two different races: the beautiful and useless Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks, creatures that lived underground, feeding off their neighbors up above, whom they bred like cattle. Andrew bridled at this description, making his cousin smile, but Charles quickly added that the plot was unimportant, no more than an excuse to create a flimsy caricature of the society of his time.
What had shaken the English imagination was that Wells had envisaged time as a fourth dimension, transforming it into a sort of magic tunnel you could travel through.
“We are all aware that objects possess three dimensions: length, breadth, and thickness,” explained Charles. “But in order for this object to exist,” he went on, picking up his hat and twirling it in his hands like a conjuror, “in order for it to form part of this reality we find ourselves in, it needs duration in time as well as in space. That is what enables us to see it, and prevents it from disappearing before our very eyes. We live, then, in a four-dimensional world. If we accept that time is another dimension, what is to stop us from moving through it? In fact, that’s what we are doing. Just like our hats, you and I are moving forwards in time, albeit in a tediously linear fashion, without leaving out a single second, towards our inexorable end. What Wells is asking in his novel is why we can’t speed up this journey, or even turn around and travel backwards in time to that place we refer to as the past—which ultimately is no more than a loose thread in the skein of our lives. If time is a spatial dimension, what prevents us from moving around in it as freely as we do in the other three?” Pleased with his explanation, Charles replaced his hat on the bed. Then he studied Andrew, allowing him a moment to assimilate what he had just said.
“I must confess when I read the novel I thought it was rather an ingenious way of making what was basically a fantasy believable,” he went on a moment later when his cousin said nothing, “but I never imagined it would be scientifically achievable. The book was a raging success, Andrew, people spoke of nothing else in the clubs, the salons, the universities, during factory breaks.
Nobody talked anymore about the crisis in the United States and how it might affect England, or Waterhouse’s paintings or Oscar Wilde’s plays. The only thing people were interested in was whether time travel was possible or not. Even the women’s suffrage movement was fascinated by the subject and interrupted their regular meetings to discuss it. Speculating about what tomorrow’s world would be like or discussing which past events ought to be changed became England’s favorite pastime, the quickest way to liven up conversation during afternoon tea.
Naturally, such discussions were futile, because nobody could reach any enlightened conclusions, except in scientific circles, where an even more heated debate took place, whose progress was reported on almost daily in the national newspapers. But nobody could deny it was Wells’s novel that had sparked off people’s yearning to journey into the future, to go beyond the bounds imposed on them by their fragile, destructible bodies.
Everybody wanted to glimpse the future, and the year 2000 became the most logical objective, the year everyone wanted to see. A century was easily enough time for everything to be invented that could be invented, and for the world to have been transformed into a marvelously unrecognizable, magical, possibly even a better place. Ultimately, this all seemed to be no more
What had shaken the English imagination was that Wells had envisaged time as a fourth dimension, transforming it into a sort of magic tunnel you could travel through.
“We are all aware that objects possess three dimensions: length, breadth, and thickness,” explained Charles. “But in order for this object to exist,” he went on, picking up his hat and twirling it in his hands like a conjuror, “in order for it to form part of this reality we find ourselves in, it needs duration in time as well as in space. That is what enables us to see it, and prevents it from disappearing before our very eyes. We live, then, in a four-dimensional world. If we accept that time is another dimension, what is to stop us from moving through it? In fact, that’s what we are doing. Just like our hats, you and I are moving forwards in time, albeit in a tediously linear fashion, without leaving out a single second, towards our inexorable end. What Wells is asking in his novel is why we can’t speed up this journey, or even turn around and travel backwards in time to that place we refer to as the past—which ultimately is no more than a loose thread in the skein of our lives. If time is a spatial dimension, what prevents us from moving around in it as freely as we do in the other three?” Pleased with his explanation, Charles replaced his hat on the bed. Then he studied Andrew, allowing him a moment to assimilate what he had just said.
“I must confess when I read the novel I thought it was rather an ingenious way of making what was basically a fantasy believable,” he went on a moment later when his cousin said nothing, “but I never imagined it would be scientifically achievable. The book was a raging success, Andrew, people spoke of nothing else in the clubs, the salons, the universities, during factory breaks.
Nobody talked anymore about the crisis in the United States and how it might affect England, or Waterhouse’s paintings or Oscar Wilde’s plays. The only thing people were interested in was whether time travel was possible or not. Even the women’s suffrage movement was fascinated by the subject and interrupted their regular meetings to discuss it. Speculating about what tomorrow’s world would be like or discussing which past events ought to be changed became England’s favorite pastime, the quickest way to liven up conversation during afternoon tea.
Naturally, such discussions were futile, because nobody could reach any enlightened conclusions, except in scientific circles, where an even more heated debate took place, whose progress was reported on almost daily in the national newspapers. But nobody could deny it was Wells’s novel that had sparked off people’s yearning to journey into the future, to go beyond the bounds imposed on them by their fragile, destructible bodies.
Everybody wanted to glimpse the future, and the year 2000 became the most logical objective, the year everyone wanted to see. A century was easily enough time for everything to be invented that could be invented, and for the world to have been transformed into a marvelously unrecognizable, magical, possibly even a better place. Ultimately, this all seemed to be no more
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