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The idea of the time machine may
have become a permanent fixture in the world's imagination after the publication
of H. G. Wells's classic novel The Time Machine. His time machine was a
simple one; two levers controlled it. One sent it into the future, the other
into the past. Exactly how the machine was able to travel through time was never
described in detail, but then Wells's book was a work of imagination, not fact.
At the beginning of the novel, the
time traveler shows a small model of his machine to a group of friends. He then
sends it on a one-way trip through time to demonstrate that the machine is real.
One friend asks if it has traveled to the future.
The time traveler replies:
"Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which."
Another friend says, "I presume
that it has not moved in space, and if it traveled into the future it would
still be here all this time...."
But that friend's guess--that the
machine travels in time but not in space--is one important reason why time
machines seem to be impossible.
They are also impossible as shown in
the movie Back to the Future.
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by James M. Deem