An article recently sent me down a rabbit hole. Titled ‘The Shape of Time’, it argues that our instinct to imagine time as a straight line—the past falling behind us, the future stretching ahead—is a distinctly modern habit of mind. Ancient cultures, by contrast, imagined time as cyclical. The heavens turned above, bringing day and night, spring and summer, joy and sorrow—events both distinct and recurring, like beads on a rosary.
‘The Shape of Time’ is by Emily Thomas, a British professor of philosophy, and was published in Aeon, a web magazine known as much for its thoughtful design as for its stimulating essays on science and culture. On a desktop or iPad, the article opens with what designers call a full-bleed hero—a lavish edge-to-edge image that gives the page a cinematic sweep. The article’s full-bleed hero is a meticulously detailed foldable chart created by a 19th-century Presbyterian minister—a timeline of world history from Adam and Eve to 1871, the year of its publication.
The chart is not decorative; it represents Thomas’s core argument. It was in the 19th century, she writes, that the linear view of time eclipsed the older, cyclical view. By representing events in a forward-moving line, a timeline not just organises history, but also quietly trains our mind to think of time as progressive and irreversible.
One key reason for this shift, Thomas says, was H.G. Wells. In 1895, Wells published a novel inspired by a radical idea: that time might be the fourth dimension of space. The idea was first proposed by Wells’s contemporary Charles Hinton, who believed that beyond length, breadth and thickness lay dimensions invisible to humans. To help people see time, the fourth dimension, Hinton devised diagrams of what he called four-dimensional cubes. A mathematical genius, he succeeded only in producing images so complex that most people failed to grasp their meaning.
Wells transformed the diagrams into a fascinating story. In The Time Machine, a scientist invents a devise that allows him to travel through time as one might travel through space. Explaining his theory to a group of dinner guests, the anonymous Time Traveller insists that every three-dimensional object must also extend in a fourth direction. A cube cannot exist with only length, breadth and thickness; it must also have duration. “Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” he asks.
So begins The Time Machine, a classic that continues to withstand the test of time. “After Wells, time-travel stories exploded,” Thomas writes, noting how the linear conception of time is now dominant. “Time travel stories run rife,” she writes. “Back to the Future. Groundhog Day. The Time Traveller’s Wife.”
But The Time Machine itself has returned in cycles. Its first visual adaptation appeared as a BBC teleplay in 1949, starring the Australian actor Russell Napier. The first feature-film version came in 1960, with another Australian actor, Rod Taylor, as the Time Traveller.
That film’s most memorable sequence shows the Time Traveller taking his inaugural ride in the machine. A table clock’s hands whirl like fan blades; a candle burns down in seconds; buds burst into bloom. As the machine accelerates, seasons flicker, World War II erupts and ends, mannequins in shop windows go through decades of fashion. The film’s time-lapse photography—groundbreaking for its era—won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects.
When The Time Machine returned again, 42 years later, with the Australian star Guy Pearce playing the Time Traveller, I was old enough to go to the cinema and buy a ticket. I did not grasp then how uncanny his casting was. Pearce’s previous role had been as a man with short-term memory loss in Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan. That character was trapped in a time loop, unable to form new memories. Pearce was now riding the clean, forward arrow of time in The Time Machine—and that, too, under the direction of Simon Wells, the great-grandson of the man who first imagined it all.
Did the line of time bend back on itself, briefly forming a circle, to make that convergence possible?
“Cyclical and linear conceptions of time thrived side by side for centuries, sometimes blurring into one another,” Thomas writes. “Yet in the 19th-century world of frock coats, petticoats and suet puddings, change was afoot.”
That change accelerates in the 2002 film as the Time Traveller hurtles into the future. Mannequins shed and acquire fashions in seconds; the sun streaks across the sky; skyscrapers thrust themselves upward; a colonising spacecraft lands on the moon, as the blue earth continues to hover in space and revolve. In the background plays a remarkable piece of music—Klaus Badelt’s ‘I Don’t Belong Here’—where a grand orchestral swell builds the film’s theme in a circular form. After all, what is music if not time rhythmically captured both in its linear and cyclical modes?
Simon Wells shifts his grandfather’s creation through space as well as time. The Traveller is no longer anonymous; he is Alexander Hartdegen. He is no longer British; he is a professor at Columbia University, New York. He is no longer rooted in the 19th century, but placed in 1903, at the threshold of the 20th.
Hartdegen builds the machine not out of curiosity, but out of grief. A mugger has killed his fiancée, Emma, in 1899. He travels back to intercept the moment of her death and save her. He succeeds only briefly. Emma survives the attack, only to die moments later in an accident. Hartdegen learns that while he can move freely along time’s linear track, he cannot extend Emma’s duration within it. Is it fate, or time’s deeper, cyclical logic, asserting itself?
Leaving Emma behind, Hartdegen becomes a full-bleed hero, sweeping towards the edges of human history. Along the way he pauses in 2030. His home has become part of a futuristic city block. A woman in athletic gear unlocks a bike-share bicycle—a system still considered speculative in 2002. “The Future is Here,” declares an electronic billboard. To watch this scene now is to feel strange, because bike-sharing has long since become ordinary. The future imagined by The Time Machine is already past.
Is time accelerating? If it is, part of the reason would be a scientist who spent decades pursuing a radical idea: that machines can think. His research birthed artificial intelligence, which is now reshaping how humans understand reality and time itself. He is Charles Hinton’s great-grandson: Geoffrey Hinton.
Philosophers, Thomas reminds us, still debate whether the past and future are real, or merely ideas we entertain in the present. Time itself remains unsettled, endlessly redefined by science and stories. Were we to reshape our idea of time, Thomas suggests, we might find reality itself bending into new forms.
Perhaps, we would discover that we are all, in one way or the other, trapped in the machine.