Printable View
In The Time Machine, H.G. Wells talks about how the time machine only travels through the dimension of time. So if this were to somehow have really happened, wouldnt the time traveller find himself randomly in space at times, seeing as how the machine might not follow the earth's revolution around the sun? Would it only go through time, or would it really keep him on earth like in the book and travel through time and space at the same speed as the earth?
Yeah, I was wondering that. And if some rule did make him stick on Earth, it was lucky he stopped on ground that was the exact level as he left. I would have expected him to get stuck in a hill or miles above ground or in an ocean.
I used to think this too, but it is a flaw of thinking about the problem being in a classical (Newtonian) universe. In such a universe you have absolute coordinates referencing back to some ur-coordinate. Drop out of time there and you will drop back in where all the places have moved. And as you say, that could be a Bad Thing.
In our universe however such an absolute reference point is nonsense. You can choose you reference point arbitarily and the best thing is all these gravity wells bobbing about. Moving about in time while using your local big gravity well (eg the earth) as reference and you dont 'move' at all and niether does it. Everything else however, will of dashed about like lunatics.
Maybe the time machine keeps its momentum and is still subject to the same gravitational forces as the rest of the Earth. Maybe this is a faulty analogy: if someone drops something in a moving train, say a plastic coffee stirrer, it falls straight to the floor as the passenger sees it. It does get blown away to the back of the carriage.