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PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
sand years in the past. He meets a monk from an ancient monastery
and tries to explain to him how history will progress for the next thousand years. Afterward he suddenly finds himself just as mysteriously
transported back to the present, except that he has missed his coach.
Even the 1843 Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol, is a kind
of time travel story, since Ebenezer Scrooge is taken into the past and
into the future to witness the world before the present and after his
death.
In American literature the first appearance of time travel dates
back to Mark Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court. A nineteenth-century Yankee is wrenched backward
through time to wind up in Ring Arthur's court in AD 528. He is taken
prisoner and is about to be burned at the stake, but then he declares he
has the power to blot out the sun, knowing that an eclipse of the sun
would happen on that very day. When the sun is eclipsed, the mob is
horrified and agrees to set him free and grant him privileges in exchange for the return of the sun.
But the first serious attempt to explore time travel in fiction was H. G.
Wells's classic The Time Machine, in which the hero is sent hundreds of
thousands of years into the future. In that distant future, humanity itself
has genetically split into two races, the menacing Moorlocks who maintain the grimy underground machines, and the useless, childlike Eloi
who dance in the sunlight in the world above, never realizing their awful fate (to be eaten by the Moorlocks).
Since then, time travel has become a regular feature of science fiction, from Star Trek to Back to the Future. In Superman I, when Superman learns that Lois Lane has died, he decides in desperation to turn
back the hands of time, rocketing himself around the Earth, faster than
the speed of light, until time itself goes backward. The Earth slows
down, stops, and eventually spins in the opposite direction, until all
clocks on the Earth beat backward. Floodwaters rage backward, broken dams miraculously heal themselves, and Lois Lane comes back
from the dead.
From the perspective of science, time travel was impossible in
Newton's universe, where time was seen as an arrow. Once fired, it
PHVSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
sand years in the past. He meets a monk from an ancient monastery
and tries to explain to him how history will progress for the next thousand years. Afterward he suddenly finds himself just as mysteriously
transported back to the present, except that he has missed his coach.
Even the 1843 Charles Dickens novel, A Christmas Carol, is a kind
of time travel story, since Ebenezer Scrooge is taken into the past and
into the future to witness the world before the present and after his
death.
In American literature the first appearance of time travel dates
back to Mark Twain's 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court. A nineteenth-century Yankee is wrenched backward
through time to wind up in Ring Arthur's court in AD 528. He is taken
prisoner and is about to be burned at the stake, but then he declares he
has the power to blot out the sun, knowing that an eclipse of the sun
would happen on that very day. When the sun is eclipsed, the mob is
horrified and agrees to set him free and grant him privileges in exchange for the return of the sun.
But the first serious attempt to explore time travel in fiction was H. G.
Wells's classic The Time Machine, in which the hero is sent hundreds of
thousands of years into the future. In that distant future, humanity itself
has genetically split into two races, the menacing Moorlocks who maintain the grimy underground machines, and the useless, childlike Eloi
who dance in the sunlight in the world above, never realizing their awful fate (to be eaten by the Moorlocks).
Since then, time travel has become a regular feature of science fiction, from Star Trek to Back to the Future. In Superman I, when Superman learns that Lois Lane has died, he decides in desperation to turn
back the hands of time, rocketing himself around the Earth, faster than
the speed of light, until time itself goes backward. The Earth slows
down, stops, and eventually spins in the opposite direction, until all
clocks on the Earth beat backward. Floodwaters rage backward, broken dams miraculously heal themselves, and Lois Lane comes back
from the dead.
From the perspective of science, time travel was impossible in
Newton's universe, where time was seen as an arrow. Once fired, it