Time Travel

[AndyC]

Just saw Paycheck. As a Philip K. Dick fan, I couldn't resist. They changed Dick's story about as much as I had expected, but it was pretty entertaining.

Anyway, it led to an interesting debate between my wife and I.

Time travel stories fascinate me, and I mentioned how interesting it was that the time machine's own existence became a significant factor in the future it predicted (made me think of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Lori then suggested it was like a series of books she had read, in which a woman travels back to the middle ages, and tries to change history, but in so doing, actually causes the events to happen.

While I agreed that the bleak future in Paycheck comes about because of people acting to prevent future events, I felt it was different. This led to a discussion of the different views of time travel in science fiction.

In Paycheck, the future is changeable. With a thoughtful approach, as was used with the bag of trinkets, the future could be changed for the better. I suppose this would require seeing the future obstacle, getting the object that is needed, looking again to see if it will work, then seeing the next problem, and repeating until the desired outcome is achieved.

I saw it as being compatible with the most common, simplistic view of time travel, as seen in Back to the Future, Star Trek, Millennium (the movie) and many other places. Change something and you change everything that comes after. Of course, few examples really show how big a difference even a tiny change could make. This line of thinking also has the most paradoxes, at least when dealing with the past.

I saw Lori's example as the more deterministic view of time travel seen in such movies as The Final Countdown. Everything happens once, and the time traveller was always part of it. Not bad, except that it means there is no free will.

A variation on this is seen in the remake of The Time Machine, and in Terminator 3. Certain events are destined to take place, and if you prevent them, the time line will readjust itself to make them happen some other way.

Another line of thinking is that time travel actually involves parallel universes, all slightly offset in time and capable of changing. That eliminates paradoxes because you're not actually changing your own history, but rather participating in someone else's present, but it makes things extremely complicated just the same. There is also something unsatisfying about it, since it's not really time travel. This version is used in Dragonball Z.

Of course, Paycheck differs from all of these, in that it only deals with future events. There is never any indication that the past can be viewed or changed at all. The future we see, as in Dickens, is merely the shadows of things that might be, if nothing is changed.

By the time I was done explaining this, Lori was not so much convinced as she was confused. She admitted that she has never really understood time travel stories. Not exactly a victory, but it works for me.

Any thoughts on this? What are your favourite time travel movies? What theory of time travel do you like best?



Post Edited (01-05-04 13:38)

[ulthar]

AndyC wrote:

>
> Any thoughts on this? What are your favourite time travel
> movies? What theory of time travel do you like best?
>

My favorite time travel movies are "Back to the Future" (for the pure fun of the story, and you gotta love Christopher Lloyd's character) and "The Final Countdown."  These are the two that come to mind.  The Simpson's Time Travel Toaster episode was pretty funny, too.

Star Trek TNG (forget even discussing Voyager) fell on its face with time travel episodes, but they were fun.

I once read a logically simple explanation that one cannot travel backward in time to a point BEFORE the time machine being used existed.  I suppose that could be seen as being more of a technological issue than a theoretical one.

Einstein's Special Relativity tells us that what most of us think about time is at the very least incomplete.  I suspect that that Theory was only the beginning of our understanding of how time exists.  One of my college profs years ago was found of asking if time really existed or if it was an artifact of man.  Certainly there are theoretical equations that include time as a parameter, but we have to remember that these theories are HUMAN constructs within our own perception.

Whew.

Beyond the basic space-time stuff decribed in Special Relativity, I don't believe time travel per se is possible.  A few years ago the concept of worm holes was a popular mechanism for time travel.  However, I think these same theories gave reasons for why it would be impossible (uh, like the gravity well in a worm hole is essentially the same as that in a black hole).  Fun to talk about and play with on ST episodes, but not really practical.

I saw a show not too long ago (was it the new Twilight Zone??) where a lady went back in time to kill Hitler as an infant.  She went to work as a nanny for Hitler's mom.  Anyway, she killed the infant, but the Mom was so frightened of Hitler's dad finding out that she bought a baby from a street woman.  You guessed it - that baby was raised as young Adolf.

Most of these stories sort of follow the same type of pattern, in that sense, I think.  Even though they are essentially predictable, they are still fun.  Sorry, I haven't seen Paycheck; if it is different, then it will certainly be worth a look.

Sliders was sort of the opposite premise - that all these universes exist at the same time and the sliding was from one to another.  That was an interesting concept for a show, in my opinion.

[AndyC]

Hmmm, thinking some more about Star Trek, the approach to time travel varied quite a bit. The Guardian of Forever allowed McCoy to change history, drastically changing the present. Kirk was able to put things back exactly as they were, simply by stopping McCoy from doing one thing, in spite of all their interactions with people by Kirk, Spock and McCoy over a couple of weeks, and one guy who was killed by accident.

Going forward to TNG, Time's Arrow seems to have a more deterministic approach, with Data's head being found before he went back in time, and the time travellers being part of events as they happened.

First Contact, however, has the Borg going back in time, and Earth changing into a Borg planet before our eyes, until they are defeated in the past.

Enterprise, however, returns us to the deterministic view, when the Borg in the past send their signal, which is apparently what attracted the Borg in the first place, before the Borg went back in time.

Of course, there are plenty of other episodes of the various series, and movies, that jump around the map in their approach to time travel.

Can anybody name some other examples?

[KINGDINOSAUR]

A couple of variations on time travel can be found in the Frank Capra movie IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and the old TWILIGHT ZONE episode "Walking Distance".  These two are very satisfying because they downplay the dreams of time travel.  The moral being live the moment without looking to far into the past or the future.

I've always been annoyed by the rhetorical question "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?  In 10 years?".  Has anyone ever imagined a horrible scenario for themselves?  If not, then what is the purpose of this exercise?  Sure, planning is important for shaping individual futures but looking too far ahead can lead to disappointment when, inevitably, not everything pans out.

Time travel just seems like the ultimate fantasy to me.  It doesn't stand a chance in Hell of ever occurring.  It's on par with imagining yourself as a God with no moral or ethical concerns for anyone else.  The ability would be too intoxicating for mankind.  If the power existed in the future then current events would be altered every other day.  It would take only one obsessive-compulsive personality to destroy the universe.

Scott
MOTAZart.com

[Ash]

Howstuffworks.com has an interesting article on how time travel might work.
Go here to view it:  

http://science.howstuffworks.com/time-travel.htm

Also, here is a lecture of "Space & Time Warps" by Stephen Hawking (a PDF document):  

http://www.hawking.org.uk/pdf/warp.pdf

Interesting stuff!



Post Edited (01-05-04 16:49)

[ulthar]

KINGDINOSAUR wrote:

>
> I've always been annoyed by the rhetorical question "Where do
> you see yourself in 5 years?  In 10 years?".  Has anyone ever
> imagined a horrible scenario for themselves?  If not, then what
> is the purpose of this exercise?  Sure, planning is important
> for shaping individual futures but looking too far ahead can
> lead to disappointment when, inevitably, not everything pans
> out.
>

Actually, pretty much every day I imagine "what if I got splatted by this time tomorrow."  It's not as depressing as it sounds.  Like you said, it helps me make sure my wife and I do not part (too) angry at each other, that a chance to say "I love you" is not wasted, etc.

[ulthar]

AndyC wrote:

>
> Can anybody name some other examples?
>

Probably my favorite ST-TNG episode involving time, uh, not really travel but 'issues' I believe was called "Conundrum" (I am not good at remembering episode names).  Anyway, it was the one where the Enterprise collided with a vessel suddenly coming through a rift in space-time and was destroyed.  They lived the event over and over until they found a way 'out' of the loop.

However, there were some frustrating things about this.  At the end, they realized how long they had been in the loop by checking a Star Fleet time beacon (or some such) and noticing that it was different than their on board chronometers.  Is that even remotely logical within the framework of the story?   If they were RELIVING the same couple of days, would their chronometers not be RELIVING the same couple of days also, and therefore, NOT get out of synch??

I don't mean to nitpick, but that just seemed to unnecessarily destroy the ending.  Why not just leave it as "whew, we made it through that scary situation" without having to try to tie it up neatly.  The universe is big and scary and unknown, and leaving 'what the -bleep- just happened to us' as a confusing unknown would have been, in my opinion, more artistic.

Anyway, that is an episode of TNG that I really liked.  But it failed on the time travel issue on one main point - they offered too much detail.  Because time travel is pure science fiction, the imagined details overtake the essence of the story.

As for this episode relating to a deterministic future vs. a random one, I think it suggests the future is deterministic.  That's the only reason they would have been able to send messages "back" each time - because the Enterprise was really MEANT to survive.

That's part of the beauty of 'Back to the Future:' virtually no 'science' and the mechanism of time travel is just 'fun.'

Incidentally, I really did not like the "Time's Arrow" episode of TNG...I found that hokey, very hokey.

What I thought was a MUCH more interesting story was in the original ST when they find the planet inhabited by people 'from' the 1930s.  That made some sense ... their observations of Earth was from that time period, and that is what they mimicked.  It seems to me that with that approach, they avoided the hairy issues and pitfalls of time travel, but got to play with the story of Star Trek era folks dealing with 1930s Chicago-like gangs.

Finally, I remember the episode of TNG where Picard had to kill himself.   Hokey.  My word for the day.

[raj]

My head hurts now.  
Personally, I think the parallel universe version makes the most sense, because if you in fact do go back in time and make a change, the things that happened between those moments don't suddenly disappear.  

My favorite Time travel movie is the Time Machine -- 1960's version.  Morlocks!

[JohnL]

>I saw a show not too long ago (was it the new Twilight Zone??)

Yup, that was UPN's Twilight Zone, starring Katherine Heigl.

>At the end, they realized how long they had been in the loop by checking a Star
>Fleet time beacon (or some such) and noticing that it was different than their on
>board chronometers. Is that even remotely logical within the framework of the
>story? If they were RELIVING the same couple of days, would their
>chronometers not be RELIVING the same couple of days also, and therefore,
>NOT get out of synch??

I think it was based on the idea (which I disagree with) that the time loop was limited to just their ship, so while they kept repeating the same day, the rest of the universe moved on. Of course if they really were going back in time each loop, they would still have been in sync with the rest of the universe.

I've always liked the original Star Trek episode where they go back in time and meet Gary Seven who is working to detonate a nuclear weapon at a certain distance over the Earth. It was supposed to be the starting point for a spinoff with Robert Lansing and Teri Garr, but it never got off the ground.

I also like the Back to the Future movies, The Final Countdown (I love the scene where they encounter the Japanese zeros) and Time After Time.

Nobody knows what would happen if time travel were real, but it would probably happen like a short story I once read. Sending the small prototype time machine into the future works because the future hasn't happened yet, so there's no danger of changing anything. When the inventer sends it two minutes into the past, the entire universe ceases to exist. :)

[Susan]

I love time travel movies but most of them always fall apart in theory.
My favorite short was a new Twlight Zone episode where they had hunters of the future pay extra money to travel back in time on a set path and shoot dinosaurs that have already become extinct - so as not to cause any kind of change in the course of history. Somehow one of the men falls off the path and steps on a butterfly..killing it. When he returns back to his time, he finds everyone speaks German and it looks like Hitler won the war. The theory I enjoyed was that even one small change could set a chain of events in motion that we cannot even conceive possible.

Terminator is the theory I'm more apt to follow, that everything is set in time....that time is perhaps a constant look of existance that has already taken place and we are stuck in our moments. Travelling back in time only reiterates the fact that everything is not destined..so much as already set. That would take a big step into thinking that the past, future and present tense are all the past tense..in a sort of balled up thread. Vs thinking that this implies our future is destined and we have no control, it more suggests that we are simply following the path of the future of what we have already done a million times over? Ok..too much thinking

[Jamtoy]

I find that most time travel movies and TV shows don't seem to work in the end.  They are either too far fetched because the writers don't know what they are doing or the story is too simplistic.  The ending of Millenium, for example, was so confusing for most people.  Set the thing in reverse to go to the future?  The TV Dr. WHo movie was even worse.  Now as a Dr. Who fan, I understood the idea of the Eye of harmony being inside every Tardis and being on Galifrie and Being just outside of the Galifrien system.  Time travel paradoxes allow for this.  But the writers had a hard time making that known in the story.  It just fell apart.  It just doen't tranfere well to film.

I have always wanted to travel through time.  However, after I got my Degree and Mathematics and studied the idea,  I found that some ideas of Time travel may not work.  The idea of Parallel Universes, though the String Theory allows for this, The idea has within it a problem.  If one is to assume that all possiblities have occured within these universes, then there should exist a universe where no other possiblities can exist.  Therefore, within that universe, the laws of physics do not allow for any other Parrallel Universes.  If this Universe is not ours, then we don't exist, if it is ours, then no other parrallel universes exist.  This proof by condradiction shows that the concept of  parrallel universes in which ALL possiblities take place is NOT possible.  (Sort of like and extraineous root of equations higher than a quadratic equations.  They are "solutions" to the problem but they don't work.)

I prefer the One path only view of time travel.  (See above poof and replace "Parrallel Universe" with "Alternate Time" for the reason why.)  However once again, time must allow for one thing.  If I send one of our new 2004 - $20.00 bills back in time to 1999.  The matter and energy the will become that twenty exist in another form in 1999.  Therefore, I have just added matter and energy to the universe by doubling some portion, the amount that makes up the $20.00 bill.  Therefore, in order for time travel to work, either matter and energy is NOT constant and we can get more energy out of something than what we put into it or we need to remove the $20.00 from it's place in time and make its existence be ALL of time.  

Thet will be hard, but not impossible.

[Grumpy Guy]

Susan Wrote:

> My favorite short was a new Twlight Zone episode where they had
> hunters of the future pay extra money to travel back in time on
> a set path and shoot dinosaurs that have already become extinct
> - so as not to cause any kind of change in the course of
> history. Somehow one of the men falls off the path and steps on
> a butterfly..killing it. When he returns back to his time, he
> finds everyone speaks German and it looks like Hitler won the
> war. The theory I enjoyed was that even one small change could
> set a chain of events in motion that we cannot even conceive
> possible.

Your twilight zone episode is based on a story by Ray Bradbury, who first posited the theory of the "Butterfly Effect" as it relates to time travel.

[FearlessFreep]

"Time Guardian"  anyone ever figure that one out ?

[Scott]

Without the mind there is no time. Yep it rhymes.

[TheFeen]

I have thought long and hard about time travel and this is what i think - how could you travel to the future if the future doesnt exist? thats like trying to swim to atlantis - how can you go somewhere that doesnt exist.
On traveling back in time - Possibly, but would you actually be able to change anything if its already happened,and why would you want to? It might just make something worse happen, like in the back story to C&C Red Alert with Stalin taking over with Hitler gone