THE BHAWANIPUR

EDUCATION SOCIETY
COLLEGE

TIME MACHINE

Name : Samadrita Ghosh

Roll number : 203017-21-0076

Registration number : 017-1111-0606-20

Year : 2021-2022
B.Sc. 3rd Semester

Department of Physics
University of Calcutta
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 ABSTRACT

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H.G. Wells wrote
his celebrated novel ”The Time Machine” in 1895. But can it be really done?
Is building a time machine even possible? For decades time travel lay be-
yond the fringe of respectable science. However, in more recent times, it has
become something of a cottage industry for theoretical physicists round the
world. The motivation is party recreational-time travel is fun to think about.
But this research has a serious side too. Understanding the relation between
cause and effect is a primary step towards the ultimate goal of an unified
theory of physics. If unrestricted time travel is possible then it can drasti-
cally change the nature of such unified theory.In definition, time travel is the
concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement
between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the
use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Our best understand-
ing of time comes from Einstein’s theory of relativity. Prior to these theories,
time was widely regarded as absolute and universal, the same for everyone
no matter what their physical circumstances were. In this special theory,
Einstein proposed that the measured interval between two events depends
on how the observer is moving. It is uncertain if time travel to the past is
physically possible. Forward time travel, outside the usual sense of the per-
ception of time, is an extensively observed phenomenon and well-understood
within the framework of special relativity and general relativity. However,
making one body advance or delay more than a few milliseconds compared to
another body is not feasible with current technology. As for backward time
travel, it is possible to find solutions in general relativity that allow for it,
such as a rotating black hole. Traveling to an arbitrary point in space-time
has very limited support in theoretical physics, and is usually connected only
with quantum mechanics.

Key word: Wormhole, Paradox, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Time

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 INDEX

Serial no. Topic Page no.

1 Introduction 4
2 H.G. Wells’ 5-11
THE TIME MACHINE
3 Conceptualising a Wormhole 12-13
Time Machine In Three
Not So Easy Steps
4 Temporal Paradox 14-15
5 Acknowledgement 16

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 1. Introduction

Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, anal-
ogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a per-
son, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine.
Time travel is a widely recognized concept in philosophy and fiction, partic-
ularly science fiction. The idea of a time machine was popularized by H. G.
Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine.
Some ancient myths depict a character skipping forward in time. In Hindu
mythology, the Mahabharata mentions the story of King Raivata Kakudmi,
who travels to heaven to meet the creator Brahma and is surprised to learn
when he returns to Earth that many ages have passed. The Buddhist Pāli
Canon mentions the relativity of time. The Payasi Sutta tells of one of the
Buddha’s chief disciples, Kumara Kassapa, who explains to the skeptic Payasi
that time in the Heavens passes differently than on Earth.The Japanese tale
of ”Urashima Tarō”, first described in the Manyoshu tells of a young fish-
erman named Urashima-no-ko who visits an undersea palace. After three
days, he returns home to his village and finds himself 300 years in the future,
where he has been forgotten, his house is in ruins, and his family has died.In
Jewish tradition, the 1st-century BC scholar Honi ha-M’agel is said to have
fallen asleep and slept for seventy years. When waking up he returned home
but found none of the people he knew, and no one believed his claims of who
he was.
One of the first stories to feature time travel by means of a machine is
”The Clock that Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell, which appeared
in the New York Sun in 1881. However, the mechanism borders on fantasy.
An unusual clock, when wound, runs backwards and transports people nearby
back in time. The author does not explain the origin or properties of the
clock. Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau’s El Anacronópete (1887) may have been
the first story to feature a vessel engineered to travel through time. Andrew
Sawyer has commented that the story ”does seem to be the first literary
description of a time machine noted so far”, adding that ”Edward Page
Mitchell’s story ’The Clock That Went Backward’ (1881) is usually described
as the first time-machine story, but I’m not sure that a clock quite counts”.
H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) popularized the concept of time travel
by mechanical means.

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 2. H.G. Wells’ THE TIME
MACHINE

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in

1895. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept
of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively
forward or backward through time. The term ”time machine”, coined by
Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.The
Time Machine was first published in 1894 as a serial under the name The
Time Traveller in the National Observer. It was brought out as a book the
next year under its current name and sold more than six thousand copies
in a few months. H. G. Wells was just twenty-seven years old when the
story, which came to be called a ”scientific romance,” was published. Wells’s
friend, William Henley, edited the National Observer, and Wells became part
of a group of writers called ”Henley’s young men.” The novel’s appeal lies
in its attempt to fathom what will become of human beings in the distant
future. By making the central character of his story a time traveler who
can transport himself back and forth in time with the aid of a machine he
invented, Wells is able to explore many of the themes that obsessed him,
including class inequality, evolution, and the relationship between science
and society.

Figure 1: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine

The Time Machine begins in the Time Traveller’s home at a dinner at-

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tended by various friends and acquaintances, including the Medical Man, the
Psychologist, the Very Young Man, the Provincial Mayor, Filby, and Hillyer,
the narrator. As the Time Traveller describes how time is the Fourth Di-
mension, his guests argue with him, claiming that it cannot be a dimension
because people cannot move through it as they can through space.Traveling
faster than a year per minute, the Time Traveller describes the disorientation
he feels flying through time as seasons pass in a blur.
Hillyer is the narrator and the only person who believes the Time Trav-
eller’s story. The bulk of the novel is the Time Traveller’s story, as told
to Hillyer. However, Hillyer directly addresses readers in the first, second,
and twelfth chapters, and in the epilogue. Unlike the Time Traveller, who
is pessimistic about humanity’s future, Hillyer maintains hope, saying that
even if the Time Traveller’s story is true and that humanity is doomed for
extinction, ”it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”

Wells’s novella has become one of the cornerstones of science-fiction lit-

erature. As a result, it has spawned many offspring. Works expanding on
Wells’s story include:

La Belle Valence by Théo Varlet and André Blandin (1923) in which a

squadron of World War I soldiers find the Time Machine and are transported
back to the Spanish town of Valencia in the 14th century. Translated by Brian
Stableford as Timeslip Troopers (2012).

Die Rückkehr der Zeitmaschine (1946) by Egon Friedell was the first
direct sequel. It dwells heavily on the technical details of the machine and
the time-paradoxes it might cause when the time machine was used to visit
the past. After visiting a futuristic 1995 where London is in the sky and the
weather is created by companies, as well as the year 2123 where he meets
two Egyptians who study history using intuition instead of actual science,
the time traveler, who is given the name James MacMorton, travels to the
past and ends up weeks before the time machine was built, causing it to
disappear. He is forced to use the miniature version of his time machine,
which already existed at that time, to send telegraphic messages through
time to a friend (the author), instructing him to send him things that will
allow him to build a new machine. After returning to the present, he tells
his friend what happened. The 24,000-word German original was translated
into English by Eddy C. Bertin in the 1940s and eventually published in
paperback as The Return of the Time Machine (1972, DAW).

The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper, first published in 1976. It

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 Figure 2: 1960 film based on H.G. Wells novel of same name

features a ”manuscript”, which reports the Time Traveller’s activities after

the end of the original story. According to this manuscript, the Time Trav-
eller disappeared, because his Time Machine had been damaged by the Mor-
locks without him knowing it. He only found out when it stopped operating
during his next attempted time travel. He found himself on 27 August 1665,
in London during the outbreak of the Great Plague of London. The rest of
the novel is devoted to his efforts to repair the Time Machine and leave this
time period before getting infected with the disease. He also has an encounter
with Robert Hooke. He eventually dies of the disease on 20 September 1665.
The story gives a list of subsequent owners of the manuscript until 1976. It
also gives the name of the Time Traveller as Robert James Pensley, born to
James and Martha Pensley in 1850 and disappearing without trace on 18
June 1894.

The Space Machine by Christopher Priest, first published in 1976. Be-

cause of the movement of planets, stars, and galaxies, for a time machine
to stay in one spot on Earth as it travels through time, it must also follow

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the Earth’s trajectory through space. In Priest’s book, a travelling salesman
damages a Time Machine similar to the original, and arrives on Mars, just
before the start of the invasion described in The War of the Worlds. H.G.
Wells appears as a minor character.

Morlock Night by K. W. Jeter, first published in 1979. A steampunk

fantasy novel in which the Morlocks, having studied the Traveller’s machine,
duplicate it and invade Victorian London. This culminates in Westminster
Abbey being used as a butcher shop of human beings by the Morlocks in the
20th century, and a total disruption and collapse of the time stream. There
the hero and Merlin must find – and destroy – the Time Machine, to restore
the time stream and history.

Time Machine II by George Pal and Joe Morhaim, published in 1981.

The Time Traveller, named George, and the pregnant Weena try to return
to his time, but instead land in the London Blitz, dying during a bombing
raid. Their newborn son is rescued by an American ambulance driver and
grows up in the United States under the name Christopher Jones. Sought
out by the lookalike son of James Filby, Jones goes to England to collect his
inheritance, leading ultimately to George’s journals, and the Time Machine’s
original plans. He builds his own machine with 1970s upgrades and seeks his
parents in the future. Pal also worked on a detailed synopsis for a third
sequel, which was partly filmed for a 1980s U.S. TV special on the making
of Pal’s film version of The Time Machine, using the original actors. This
third sequel, the plot of which does not seem to fit with Pal’s second, opens
with the Time Traveller enjoying a happy life with Weena, in a future world
in which the Morlocks have died out. He and his son return to save Filby
in World War I. This act changes the future, causing the nuclear war not to
happen. He and his son are thus cut off from Weena in the far future. The
Time Traveller thus has to solve a dilemma – allow his friend to die, and
cause the later death of millions, or give up Weena forever.

The Man Who Loved Morlocks (1981) and The Truth about Weena (1998)
are two different sequels, the former a novel and the latter a short story, by
David J. Lake. Each of them concerns the Time Traveller’s return to the
future. In the former, he discovers that he cannot enter any period in time
he has already visited, forcing him to travel into the further future, where he
finds love with a woman whose race evolved from Morlock stock. In the latter,
he is accompanied by Wells and succeeds in rescuing Weena and bringing her
back to the 1890s, where her political ideas cause a peaceful revolution.

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 The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter, first published in 1995. This sequel
was officially authorised by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the
original’s publication. In its wide-ranging narrative, the Traveller’s desire to
return and rescue Weena is thwarted by the fact that he has changed history
(by telling his tale to his friends, one of whom published the account). With
a Morlock (in the new history, the Morlocks are intelligent and cultured), he
travels through the multiverse as increasingly complicated timelines unravel
around him, eventually meeting mankind’s far future descendants, whose
ambition is to travel back to the birth of the universe, and modify the way
the multiverse will unfold. This sequel includes many nods to the prehistory
of Wells’s story in the names of characters and chapters.

In ”The Richmond Enigma” by John DeChancie, Sherlock Holmes inves-

tigates the disappearance of the Time Traveler, a contemporary and, in this
story, a distant relative. The intervention of Holmes and Watson succeeds in
calling back the missing Time Traveler, who has resolved to prevent the time
machine’s existence, out of concern for the danger it could make possible.
The story appeared in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1995).

The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime
Novel by Joe R. Lansdale, first published in The Long Ones (1999). In this
story, the Time Traveller accidentally damages the space-time continuum
and is transformed into the vampire-like Dark Rider. The 2003 short story
”On the Surface” by Robert J. Sawyer begins with this quote from the Wells
original: ”I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken
it [the time machine] to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its
purpose.” In the Sawyer story, the Morlocks develop a fleet of time machines
and use them to conquer the same far future Wells depicted at the end of the
original, by which time, because the sun has grown red and dim and thus no
longer blinds them, they can reclaim the surface of the world.

The Time Traveller and his machine appear in the story Allan and the
Sundered Veil by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, which acts as a prequel to
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One. The Time Traveller
shares an adventure with fellow literary icons Allan Quatermain, John Carter,
and Randolph Carter.

David Haden’s novelette The Time Machine: A Sequel (2010) is a direct

sequel, picking up where the original finished. The Time Traveller goes back
to rescue Weena but finds the Eloi less simple than he first imagined, and
time travel far more complicated.

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 Figure 3: Iconic Time Machine Prop

Simon Baxter’s novel The British Empire: Psychic Battalions Against

the Morlocks (2010) imagines a steampunk/cyberpunk future in which the
British Empire has remained the dominant world force until the Morlocks
arrive from the future.

Hal Colebatch’s Time-Machine Troopers (2011) (Acashic Publishers) is

twice the length of the original. In it, the Time Traveller returns to the
future world about 18 years after the time he escaped from the Morlocks,
taking with him Robert Baden-Powell, the real-world founder of the Boy
Scout movement. They set out to teach the Eloi self-reliance and self-defence
against the Morlocks, but the Morlocks capture them. H.G. Wells and Win-
ston Churchill are also featured as characters.

Paul Schullery’s The Time Traveller’s Tale: Chronicle of a Morlock Cap-

tivity (2012) continues the story in the voice and manner of the original
Wells book. After many years’ absence, the Time Traveller returns and de-

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scribes his further adventures. His attempts to mobilize the Eloi in their own
defense against the Morlocks failed when he was captured by the Morlocks.
Much of the book is occupied with his deeply unsettling discoveries about the
Morlock / Eloi symbiosis, his gradual assimilation into Morlock society, and
his ultimately successful attempt to discover the true cause of humanity’s
catastrophic transformation into two such tragic races.

The Great Illustrated Classics in 1992 published an adaptation of Wells’s

novella that adds an extra destination to the Time Traveller’s adventure:
Stopping in 2200 AD on his way back home, he becomes caught up in a civil
war between factions of a technocratic society that was established to avert
ecological catastrophe.

Beyond the Time Machine by Burt Libe (2002). The first of two Time
Machine sequels written by US writer Burt Libe, it continues the story of the
Time Traveller: where he finally settles down, including his rescue of Weena
and his subsequent family with her. Highlighted are exploits of his daughters
Narra and her younger sister Belinda; coping with their 33rd-Century exis-
tence; considering their unusual past and far-Future heritage. Doing some
time travelling of their own, the daughters revisit 802,701 AD, discovering
that the so-called dual-specie Eloi and Morlock inhabitants actually are far
more complex and complicated than their father’s initial appraisal.

Tangles in Time by Burt Libe (2005). The second of two Time Ma-
chine sequels written by American writer Burt Libe, it continues the story
of younger daughter Belinda, now grown at age 22. Her father (the original
Time Traveller) has just died from old age, and she and Weena (her mother)
now must decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Weena makes a very
unusual decision, leaving Belinda to search for her own place in time. Also,
with further time travel, she locates her two long-lost brothers, previously
thought to be dead; she also meets and rescues a young man from the far
future, finding herself involved in a very confusing relationship.

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3. Conceptualising a Wormhole
Time Machine In Three Not So
Easy Steps

A Wormhole (or Einstein–Rosen bridge or Einstein–Rosen Wormhole) is a

speculative structure linking disparate points in space=time, and is based on
a special solution of the Einstein field equations.A Wormhole can be visual-
ized as a tunnel with two ends at separate points in space-time (i.e., different
locations, different points in time, or both). Wormholes are consistent with
the general theory of relativity, but whether wormholes actually exist remains
to be seen. Many scientists postulate that wormholes are merely projections
of a fourth spatial dimension, analogous to how a two-dimensional (2D) being
could experience only part of a three-dimensional (3D) object.Theoretically,
a wormhole might connect extremely long distances such as a billion light
years, or short distances such as a few meters, or different points in time, or
even different universes. In 1995, Matt Visser suggested that there may be
many wormholes in the universe if cosmic strings with negative mass were
generated in the early universe. Some physicists, such as Frank Tipler and
Kip Thorne, have suggested how to make wormholes artificially. A Wormhole
not only has the ability to take a shortcut between two positions in space, it
can also take a shortcut between two positions in time. So, the Large Hadron
Collider could be the first ever “time machine”, providing future time trav-
elers with a documented time and place where a wormhole “opened up” into
our time-line

1. FIND OR BUILD A WORMHOLE - a tunnel connecting two different

locations in space.Large wormholes might exist naturally in deep space, a
relic of the big bang. Otherwise we would have to make do with subatomic
wormholes, either natural ones (which are thought to be winking in and out
of existence all around us) or artificial ones (produced by particle accelera-
tors, as imagined here).These smaller wormholes would have to be enlarged
to useful size, perhaps using energy fields like those that caused space to
inflate shortly after the big bang.

2. STABILIZE THE WORMHOLE - an infusion of negative energy, pro-

duced by quantum means such as the so-called Casimir effect, would allow

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 Figure 4: Wormhole

a signal or object to pass safely through the wormhole. Negative energy

counteracts the tendency of the wormhole to pinch off into a point of infi-
nite or near-infinite density. In other words, it prevents the wormhole from
becoming black hole.

3. TOW THE WORMHOLE - a spaceship, presumably of highly ad-

vanced technology, would separate the mouths of the wormhole. One mouth
might be positioned near the surface of a neutron star, an extremely dense
star with strong gravitational field. The intense gravity causes time to pass
more slowly. Because time passes more quickly at the other wormhole mouth,
the two mouths become separated not only in space but also in time.

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 4. Temporal Paradox

A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox is a paradox, an

apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of
time and time travel. In physics, temporal paradoxes fall into two broad
groups: consistency paradoxes exemplified by the grandfather paradox; and
causal loops. Other paradoxes associated with time travel are a variation of
the Fermi paradox and paradoxes of free will that stem from causal loops
such as Newcomb’s paradox.

a) A causal loop is a paradox of time travel that occurs when a future event
is the cause of a past event, which in turn is the cause of the future event.
Both events then exist in space-time, but their origin cannot be determined.
A causal loop may involve an event, a person or object, or information. The
terms boot-strap paradox, predestination paradox or ontological paradox are
sometimes used in fiction to refer to a causal loop.

b) The consistency paradox or grandfather paradox occurs when the past

is changed in any way, thus creating a contradiction. If a time traveler were
ever to go back in time and kill their grandfather in his childhood, it would
result in one of the time traveler’s parents, and ergo the time traveler, not
being born. If the time traveler were not born, then it would not be possible
for them to kill the grandfather in the first place. Therefore, the grandfather
lives to offspring the time traveler’s parents, and therefore the time traveler.
There is, thus no predicted outcome to this. Consistency paradoxes occur
whenever changing the past is possible. A possible resolution is that a time
traveler can do anything that did happen, but cannot do anything that did
not happen. Doing something that did not happen results in a contradiction.

c) The Fermi paradox can be adapted for time travel, and phrased ”if
time travel were possible, where are all the visitors from the future?” An-
swers vary, from time travel not being possible, to the possibility that visitors
from the future cannot reach any arbitrary point in the past, or that they
disguise themselves to avoid detection.

d) The Newcomb’s paradox is a thought experiment showing an appar-

ent contradiction between the expected utility principle and the strategic
dominance principle. The thought experiment is often extended to explore
causality and free will by allowing for ”perfect predictors”: if perfect pre-

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 Figure 5: Grandfather Paradox

dictors of the future exist, for example if time travel exists as a mechanism
for making perfect predictions, then perfect predictions appear to contradict
free will because decisions apparently made with free will are already known
to the perfect predictor.

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 5. Acknowledgement

I would like to express my special thanks of

gratitude to my teacher Sir Arnab Gangopad-
hyay who gave me the golden opportunity to do
this wonderful project on the topic Time Ma-
chine, which also helped me in doing a lot of
Research and I came to know about so many
new things, I am really thankful to them.

Secondly, I would also like to thank my parents

and friends who helped me a lot in finalizing this
project within the limited time frame.

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