On Designing a Time Machine

And speaking of time, this time in lower-case, what mental picture do you see when you hear the word “time machine”? Because the majority of our mental pictures involve the canonical 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, we think of the golden-domed glass elevator Wonkavator that soars over the dreary skyline (which for some reason, we’ve always assumed to be postwar Belgium) in the final sequence. Kurt Andersen examines the finer points of time machine design in the