Science of Discworld III

Machine of 1895, and this set a standard for all that followed. The novel tells of a Victorian inventor who builds a time machine and travels into the far future. There he finds that humanity has speciated into two distinct types – the nasty Morlocks, who live deep inside caverns, and the ethereal Eloi, who are preyed on by the Morlocks and are too indolent to do anything about it. Several movies, all fairly ghastly, have been based on the book.
    The novel had inauspicious beginnings. Wells studied biology, mathematics, physics, geology, drawing, and astrophysics at the Normal School of Science, which became the Royal College of Science and eventually merged with Imperial College of Science andTechnology. While a student there, he began the work that led up to The Time Machine . His first time-travel story ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ appeared in 1888 in the Science Schools Journal , which Wells helped to found. The protagonist voyages into the past and commits a murder. The story offers no rationale for time travel and is more of a mad-scientist tale in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , but nowhere near as well written. Wells later destroyed every copy of it he could locate, because it embarrassed him so much. It lacked even the paradoxical element of the 1891 Tourmalin’s Time Cheques by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, which introduced many of the standard time-travel paradoxes.
    Over the following three years, Wells produced two more versions of his time-travel story, now lost, but along the way the storyline mutated into a far-future vision of the human race. The next version appeared in 1894 in the National Observer magazine, as three connected tales with the title ‘The Time Machine’. This version has many features in common with the final novel, but before publication was complete, the editor of the magazine moved to the New Review . There he commissioned the same series again, but this time Wells made substantial changes. The manuscripts include many scenes that were never printed: the hero journeys into the past, running into a prehistoric hippopotamus 6 and meeting the Puritans in 1645. The published magazine version is very similar to the one that appeared in book form in 1895. In this version the Time Traveller moves only into the future, where he finds out what will happen to the human race, which splits into the languid Eloi and the horrid Morlocks – both equally distasteful.
    Where did Wells get the idea? The standard SF writer’s reply to this question is that ‘you make it up’, but we have some fairly specific information in this case. In a foreword to the 1932 edition, Wells says that he was motivated by ‘student discussions in the laboratories and debating society of the Royal College of Science in the eighties’. According to Wells’s son, the idea came from a paper on the fourth dimension read by another student. In the introduction to the novel, the Time Traveller (he is never named, but in the early version he is Dr Nebo-gipfel, so perhaps it’s just as well) invokes the fourth dimension to explain why such a machine is possible:
    ‘But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?’
    ‘Don’t follow you,’ said Filby.
    ‘Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?’
    Filby became pensive.
    ‘Clearly,’ the Time Traveller proceeded, ‘any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration …
    ‘… There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives …
    ‘… But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly – why not another direction at right angles to the three? – and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago.’
    The notion of time as a fourth dimension was becoming common scientific currency in the late Victorian era. The mathematicians hadstarted it, by wondering what a dimension was, and deciding that it need not be a direction in real space. A dimension was just a quantity that could be varied, and the number of