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This Chapter contains a review of many important aspects of modern black hole theory and its applications. It begins with a general definition of a (not‐necessary stationary) black hole and formulation of the most important results on generic properties of black holes, including the Penrose theorem on the structure of the event horizon, the Hawking theorems on the topology and area of the event horizon and black hole uniqueness theorems. Gravitational radiation from black holes in a binary system and modern status and perspectives of the gravitation waves search from black holes and other compact sources are discussed. We also describe black hole models proposed for the explanation of the gamma‐ray bursts. Modeling of black hole properties, in particular their Hawking radiation, in the laboratory experiments is reviewed. We also discuss recent models with large extra dimensions and possibility of micro black hole creation in the collider experiments. This subject is directly connected with the problem of the higher dimensional black holes. Higher dimensional generalization of the Kerr metric, and a variety of new exact solutions for higher dimensional black objects with the non‐spherical topology of the horizon are discussed. The Chapter ends with remarks on two closely related problems on the wormhole and ‘time machine’ existence. It is shown that in order to create and support macroscopic objects of this type a new exotic form of the matter is requires. It seams that this and possible instabilities make the existence of such objects questionable at least at the present state of our knowledge. These and other fascinating open problems are still wait for their solution.

This chapter argues that, during the 1890s, many of the problems facing Britain were temporal disorders, characterized by the collision of everyday repetition with progress or with catastrophe. The signs were everywhere: the economy was mired in a depression popularly attributed to overproduction; the expansion of the electorate provoked a fear of political vulgarization; and the empire threatened to collapse under the weight of its own acquisitions. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine conveys its anxieties about the everyday via reservations about the socialist utopia that, as a political essayist, Wells was otherwise urging into existence. In the utopian everyday, the leisure society of the mindless Eloi signals the end of fiction itself: not only have the Eloi lost the ability to create art, but even the Time Traveller's story repeatedly verges on evaporation while in their company at the “end” of history. For this crisis of anomie, Wells evokes William Thomson's troping of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to imagine the “heat death” of the universe, a modern apocalypse wrought not by any catastrophe but merely by a cessation of events. It is not just an egalitarian distribution of wealth but also the exhaustion of fiction, or at least a dominant model of narrative organization, that signals the enervated end of mankind, thought, and time.

This chapter focuses on works by H.G. Wells structured by metaphors of time travel, space travel, shipwreck and bicycle travel that pose questions about existing social tendencies and the adequacy of current conceptual frameworks. Wells’s narrative methods unsettle his readers and provoke a reconsideration of their position.

This chapter discusses the ways in which one might travel back in time. Of course, there are no actual, known instances of time travel, so the different modes are drawn from fiction, historical thought, and speculative physics: perhaps we could ‘teleport’, discontinuously, back into the past; perhaps we could travel back into the past in the same way we persist forwards, traversing the intervening instants between ourselves and the past; perhaps we instead warp spacetime to allow us to come back to where we began. The chapter ends by discussing two things that are not technically time travel—cases of frozen time and time being an illusion—which are nevertheless closely connected.

After reading H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine in Autumn 1895, Paul lodged a provisional patent for a theatrical entertainment that would simulate travelling through time, and the two young men met to discuss its feasibility. Although this was never developed, its conception lodged Paul in the popular history of cinema published by Terry Ramsaye in 1926; and Wells would incorporate film into several of his early scientific romances, notably The Sleeper Awakes (1899). During 1897, Paul took stock of the potential of animated photography, copywriting some of his films, and offering samples of his work to the British Museum and seeking investment in a public company, both without success. However, the year brought a major commercial success with the filming of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession through London, recorded by Paul and many other companies, thus providing a record of the event for distant audiences and for posterity.

This chapter starts with a discussion of the merits and problems of science fiction, a literary genre that frequently posits time travel, faster than light speeds and other currently unobserved phenomena. The advantages and disadvantages of reading science fiction are pointed out. This is followed by commentary on the work of H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and others, and how such authors explain away the unphysical aspects of their stories. The chapter ends with a critique of several popular plot devices, such as alternate universes, alternative futures, time machines, and hyperspace. These are plot devices used in science fiction to discuss the problems and paradoxes of time travel in an attempt to avoid the constraints of special relativity.

The epilogue considers the persistence of the Re-Generation's Fifties fantasies in contemporary America. Considering a new wave of Eighties nostalgia in film, television, popular music, video games and online fan communities, the epilogue argues for the continued relevance of pop nostalgia visions of the Fifties in American consciousness. The comedy Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and the online mash-up video “Brokeback to the Future” serve as evidence for the contemporary impulse to both enthusiastically re-live and critically re-examine the cultural attitudes of the Reagan Era. The film and the viral video open up new potential readings for Back to the Future, and encourage viewers to engage with pop nostalgia’s construction of history with skepticism.

Higher dimensions were explored by mathematicians Bernhard Riemann and Ludwig Schläfli in the middle years of the nineteenth century. Charles Howard Hinton was the key figure to popularize the notion of higher dimensions, and Chapter 17 introduces the idea of a fourth spatial dimension and the methods devised by Hinton to make higher dimensions accessible. Hinton’s books were very influential in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine was inspired by Hinton’s ideas. A simplified version of Hinton’s methods was published in a famous short story, Flatland, written by the Reverend Edwin A. Abbott. Following conviction and imprisonment for bigamy, Hinton left England with his family and eventually settled in America.

Christianity is a story of origins and Darwinism, in major respects its offspring, is likewise a story of origins. A process as slow and undirected as natural selection demands vast eons of time, something addressed by the novelists, especially Thomas Hardy in The Return of the Native and H. G. Wells in the Time Machine. Christianity points to a God-driven miraculous creation where all is intended and designed whereas Darwinism points to a natural creation where chance rules supreme and nothing is guaranteed permanent existence. Extinct beasts, especially dinosaurs, were prominent in verse (Lewis Carroll) and fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle), and several, including Mathilde Blind and Augustus Charles Swinburne, explored the very idea of natural origins in verse. Relatedly, novelists, notably Hardy in A Pair of Blue Eyes, made the actual course of life’s history a prominent theme in their work.