Time Travelling

There Will Be Time, IV.

Jack Havig describes the experience of time travelling to Robert Anderson just as the Time Traveller had described it to his dinner guests.

"'I'm in a shadow world while I time-travel. Lighting varies from zero to gray. If I'm crossing more than one day-and-night period, it flickers. Objects look dim, foggy, flat.'" (p. 37)

"'...night followed day like the flapping of a black wing... The landscape was misty and vague.'"

HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, pp. 24-25.

However, there is one inexplicable sensation described by the Time Traveller which Havig does not duplicate:

"'There is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback - of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.'"

-ibid., p. 24.

Why? Wells, like no doubt many of his readers, is here in the grip of the delusion that the Time Traveller is somehow accelerating forward along the Fourth Dimension. He is not. According to the Time Traveller's own account, nothing material moves along the Fourth Dimension. Everything material merely extends in that direction. He adds that consciousness/immaterial mental existences do move along the Fourth Dimension - and that I certainly disagree with - but, in any case, material objects like the Time Traveller and his machine do not. On the contrary, they are aging/enduring much more slowly than everything else. There should be no feeling of motion and Havig, rightly, does not describe any such feeling.

If three-dimensional objects did move along the Fourth Dimension and if one such object, the Time Machine, were to accelerate in that direction, then the machine would leave everything else behind it and would have to wait for them to catch up with it in 802,701 AD.

Also, of course, motion along the Fourth Dimension would take time. Therefore, that Dimension itself would not be time.