There are those who argue that given enough technology, theoretical physicists and, er, time we might eventually develop a way to snare some of these infinitesimally tiny wormholes and then make them billions of times bigger so we could go where and when we wanted. That’s way too small to squeeze a spaceship through. Even Professor Hawking, who admits to being “obsessed by time” and to wanting to believe time travel is possible, points out that wormholes are only thought to exist in the “quantum foam” right down below even the scale of atoms. Just one word of warning though before anyone attempts to build a spaceship and steer for the nearest wormhole: they may be real, they may be common and they may bridge time and space, but having a wormhole is one thing, having one you can use is quite another. No wonder the idea of wormholes is so often borrowed by a whole slew of so so-called sci-fi (including Star Trek, Stargate, the Avengers and Interstellar). While entirely compatible with Einstein’s theory of relativity and most other current big ideas about the nature of reality, they open up the possibility not only of journeys in time – popping in one end of a wormhole and popping out days, years or centuries earlier – but also of instantly linking distant parts of the cosmos, effectively enabling faster-than-light travel. Stephen Hawking is one of many respected scientists who now believe that our entire Universe is permeated by wormholes, effectively shortcuts through time and space. Unlike other favourite science-fiction themes such as smarter-than-human robots or interstellar travel or encounters with aliens – all of which are somewhere on a scale of theoretically possible to eventually probable – time travel to the past is now and forever a complete scientific no-no. Hence screen time machines have included a police box (Dr Who), a phone booth (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure), a DeLorean sports car (Back to the Future) and a big nudes-only energy ball (Terminator). For Hollywood, applause and special effects are more important than cause and effect, and time travel offers unlimited opportunities to push both imagination and CGI to their limits. That doesn’t stop filmmakers exploring the consequences if you could somehow drop in on history. Changing the past would violate that: your actions would affect what caused you to go back in the first place – so if you did manage to kill Hitler he wouldn’t have done what led you to go back and kill him.
One of the fundamentals that underpins not just physics but every aspect of existence is the law of cause and effect, always in that order. And the Universe, as far as we understand it, likes to play by the rules. What prevents the whole parade of paradoxes thrown up by time travel to the past – becoming your own grandfather, killing Hitler before he starts World War Two and so on – is that they trash big laws of physics. Consider this – if someone builds a time machine what’s to prevent them going back one minute and smashing it up before they first use it? Which means it never gets used – so how did it get smashed up. Things very quickly get very brain boggling.
#Movies about going back in time movie
Like all of them it’s chronologically illogical: the split second a movie has someone monkeying with time you are doomed – predestined, you might say – to abandon the science and enter a plea of temporal insanity. Like many of them, Predestination has its own engaging twist: Ethan Hawke plays a time agent who nips back through history to snuff out crimes before they can be committed. There’s been more than 100 since the Terminator and Back to the Future franchises began 30 years ago – all of which are science fiction that have little to do with the science facts.
The movie Predestination, released in the UK this week, is the very latest in the long history of time travel films.
0 kommentar(er)
