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scientifically correct visualization of the traveling through the wormhole. In addition, it turned out that
the black holes allowed not only the possibility of hyperspace connections but also the time travel!
H. G. Wells and The Time Machine
Time travel is very popular among the SF writers, and it is also a very fine theme for the SF movies.
Accordingly approximately 10% of all SF movies address the problem of time travel. Perhaps the best
known time travel novel is “The Time Machine”, written by Herbert George Wells. What is not obvious
for a casual reader is that when examined under a more technical light, this novel glimmers with
insightful scientific principles. Wells exposes the scientific theories behind the concept of time travel
years before such ideas were addressed by many scientists.
“Scientific people . . . know very well that Time is only a kind of Space”, wrote H. G. Wells in “The Time
Machine”. As the narrative opens, the Time Traveler presents a notable example of one such
innovative theory. Explaining to his guests the fundamentals behind time travel, the Time Traveler
suggests: “Any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth,
thickness, and -- duration”. With the concept of time as a fourth dimension is usually credited Albert
Einstein. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity bridged space and time, leading to the notion of the
space-time continuum, and the idea that time is a fourth dimension. However, Einstein’s Theory of
Relativity was not published until 1905, a full decade after Wells depicted such a fourth dimension.
At the end of “The Time Machine”, Wells’s narrator watches the Time Traveler depart: “I seemed to
see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass . . . but this phantasm
vanished . . . The Time Machine had gone”.
Kurt Gödel and the rotating Universe . . .
Frank Tipler and the rotating cylinder . . .
Roy Kerr and the rotating black hole . . .
Whirling? So that was how the Time Machine worked . . .
ZEITREISEN - 16. INTERNATIONALE PROJEKTWOCHE DES IAAC IN TANZENBERG SEITE 51