Time Travel: A History

The expression “turn of the century” didn’t exist until the twentieth. Now, finally, the Future was becoming an object of interest.

BEFORE WE HAVE clocks we experience time as fluid, mercurial, and inconstant.

IN POINT OF FACT, time is not a river. We possess a great metaphorical tool kit with utensils for every occasion. We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows, and all those are metaphors.

Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era. When Wells in his lamp-lit room imagined a time machine, he also invented a new mode of thought.

“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” In surprisingly short order this notion would become part of the orthodoxy of theoretical

What is time? Time is nothing but one more direction, orthogonal to the rest.

No one bothered with the future in 1516. It was indistinguishable from the present. However, sailors were discovering remote places and strange peoples, so remote places served well for speculative authors spinning fantasies.

before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress.