A Feasibility Study of Time Travel featured in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
Introduction
One of the most popular themes found throughout the science fiction genre is Time Travel. It can be found in many well-known novels and movies including H.G. Wells, The Time Machine , which was written in 1895. Time Travel has long been pondered and written about as early as 1733 in 'Memoirs of the Twentieth Century' by Samuel Madden and has changed dramatically as civilization has matured and advanced in technology.9 We will take a more in-depth look and analyze the feasibility of traveling in the fourth dimension with the help of modern day theoretical physics and compare this to how it's portrayed in H.G. Wells novel.
Aside from intricate fictitious time machines usually found in science fiction stories there are three possible ways that modern and quantum physics have demonstrated a form of time travel or time dilation. The first of these being wormholes. These can be thought of as tiny "tunnels" through the time dimension found in quantum foam smaller than the microscopic level. They occur all around us constantly opening, collapsing and then re-opening in the quantum world.3 The only problem is they're extremely small and by no means could a human be able to fit through one at the size they are now. The second form of time travel comes in the form of time dilation or slowing down time based on the viewer's perspective. Einstein determined that physical mass has an important role on time causing it to slow down. So an object that is extremely dense, like a black hole, causes time to actually slow down more and more the closer you get to it allowing you to technically travel into the future. The only problem the time traveler faces is not getting sucked into the black hole where escape is impossible. The last and most viable means to time travel comes in the form of moving at or extremely close to the speed of light. Nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second.6 This is much faster than even the Apollo 10 spacecraft which clocked in as the fastest manned vehicle at 24,791 miles per hour.7 The closer you get to reaching the speed of light, time begins to slow down as a way to ensure that the principle of the speed of light doesn't get broken. All three forms of time travel are very theoretically based and still need lots of research and advancement in technology before they could become even remotely practical for a human.
H.G. Wells Time Machine
In the beginning of the novel, The Time Machine , the Time Traveler gives a very brief and vague description of the time machine he uses to travel into the future to the year 802,701 A.D. where he meets the Eloi and Morlocks:
"The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.
Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of
drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be".5
I think it was a pretty smart tactic the author used so that there were still a lot of questions and mysteriousness to what the actual machine looked like. During the time the novel was written the industrial revolution was beginning in the Victorian Age England, and a lot of advancement in technology was occurring. I believe the author truly felt that time travel was very possible, especially with all the development that was currently happening around him during this time. Keeping the description vague and incorporating unknown substances like crystalline and quartz makes the reader believe that time travel could be possible and entices them further into the book.
Portrayal of the Time Machine
Wormholes
If the machine H.G. Wells describes was able to travel forward in time I believe that it would have used the concept of the wormhole to do so. As stated earlier wormholes exist on the quantum level forming and reforming over and over everywhere on earth linking space and time to one another. One of the key problems that scientists have faced so far is finding a way to capture or freeze the worm hole and then expanding it large enough for someone to fit through. Obviously with current day technology we don't have the means to do this and another constraining factor is the amount of pure energy needed.3 The type of time travel which is described in the novel takes a Ptolemaic view, meaning the earth is the unmoving center of the universe.2 As the Time Traveler accelerates into the future he describes it as everything was moving around him. The housekeeper, the sun and the planets all moved around him, and after he came back in time after the journey the time machine came to rest across the room from its original location-the same distance that the Morlocks moved it when they put it under the Sphynx. This concept of Ptolemy goes against reality because the earth is constantly moving and spinning through the universe changing its spatial location as the time traveler traverses the time dimension. To think that a wormhole would stay attached to that specific location so the Time Traveler could return just a couple feet away across the room completely ignores the fact of the earth's movement in the universe. This phenomena would make it tough for H.G. Wells to account for while writing the novel, so I believe it was ignored for simplicity.
Physical Depiction of a Wormhole
Speed of Light and Black Holes
Time travel or time dilation associated with black holes and other super dense objects like the earth have been proven and occur all the time. An example of this involves the Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) that orbit miles above the earth. In each of the satellites there are extremely precise clocks that are used as part of the technology to pinpoint your location on earth. However after the satellites were put into orbit scientist started noticing errors in the positioning coordinates that were being relayed. The cause of this was due to the time on the clocks speeding up the farther away from earth the satellites got. This was due to the decrease in gravity that the satellites were experiencing. If the clocks weren't recalibrated daily the system could be off in its measurements by up to 6 miles per day.1 Now imagine this same effect except instead of the mass of one earth, it's 400 million suns compacted down to the size of a grain of sand.8 That is what a super black hole consists of, and the effects on time are much more significant. I don't believe H.G. Wells' machine used the concept of a black hole to travel in time because there aren't any located on earth, which is the first obstacle. You would have to travel about 26,000 light years away to the nearest super black hole in the galaxy.8 The second problem he would face is that the gravitational pull of a black hole is so extreme that if you get close enough not even light can escape its pull, so the Time Traveler would surely die and never make his return trip back.
The viability for the machine described to travel near the speed of light is similarly not very realistic either, especially because in the novel the Time Traveler describes his journey through the fourth dimension of time as everything moving around him while he ramained stationary. Another issue the machine would have faced was generating enough energy to even come close to reaching the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second.6 Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity gives a key insight to why reaching anywhere even close to the speed of light would be tremendously hard. In his theory he states that in order to accelerate a mass from rest to some speed it requires energy (like a rocket engine). For relatively low speeds, compared to that of the speed of light, a large amount of energy will yield a large increase in speed. The problem comes about, which nullifies using speed of light to travel forward in time, when we're at higher speeds. It takes a great deal of energy to accelerate even the smallest amount of speed when you are already traveling fast.4 In other words it would take an infinite amount of energy to actually reach the speed of light.
Blackhole
Conclusion
Current technology and knowledge from modern day physics all leads to the conclusion that time travel is still many centuries away from becoming a reality for humans. Of the three main ways to currently "travel in time" or time dilation, they all have stipulations that make them unobtainable or undesirable for humans to attempt. H.G. Wells does a great job of keeping a mysteriousness around the machine used by the Time Traveler to traverse the fourth dimension which leads the reader to use their imagination. He incorporates exotic compounds like quartz and ivory to lead the reader to believe they have some special unknown powers that when combined creates the ability to travel in time. Unfortunately, famous scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking have disproved the feasibility of theses theoretical ideas with science and mathematical modeling so for now time traveling will remain science fiction…at least until there is an unprecedented scientific discovery or break through in the future.
References
1.Hawking, Stephen. "How to Build a Time Machine." Mail Online. 27 Apr. 2010. Web.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html
2.Yorke C, Rowe L. 2006. Malchronia: Cryonics and Bionics as Primitive Weapons in the War on Time. Journal of Evolution and Technology [Internet] 15:73–85. Available from:
http://jetpress.org/volume15/yorke-rowe.html
3.Anderson, D. (2012). Wormholes. Retrieved from
http://www.andersoninstitute.com/wormholes.html
4.Mansouri, R., & Sexl, R. (1976). A Test Theory of Special Relativity: I. Simultaneity and Clock Synchronization. General Relativity and Graviation, 8(7), 497-513. Retrieved from
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00762634#page-2
5.Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. 1895. Print.
http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/free_ebooks/The_Time_Machine_NT.pdf
6.Fowler, M. (n.d.). The Speed of Light. Retrieved from
http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/spedlite.html
7.Apollo 10 The Fourth Mission: Testing the LM in Lunar Orbit. (1969, May 26). Retrieved September 13, 2015, from
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_10a_Summary.htm
8.Chou, Felicia, Janet Anderson, and Megan Watzke. "NASA’s Chandra Detects Record-Breaking Outburst from Milky Way’s Black Hole." NASA. NASA, 5 Jan. 2015. Web.
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/january/nasa-s-chandra-detects-record-breaking-outburst-from-milky-way-s-black-hole
9.Madden, S. (1733). Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (Vol. 1)
https://books.google.com/books?id=T6QOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false