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The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Got some time? Here’s at least a day’s worth of time travel flicks.
Holly wood loves time travel -they’re always punting people forward in time or backward in time, or just plopping them into a feedback loop where they relive the same day over and over again. Even though time travel is scientifically impossible (sorry to disappoint), it doesn’t keep people from making or going to movies about it.
Army of Darkness: Technically the third part of director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series, but it’s not like you need a road map for this plot, which features a one-handed discount store salesman (the impossibly lantern-jawed Bruce Campbell) hurled back into the Middle Ages to fight zombies and skeletons and a creepy, man-eating flying book. It’s kind of dumb, but all horror freaks love it (and you know how high their standards are). It’s pretty funny, in a stupid comic-book way. Besides, any movie in which a minimum wage-earner from the future can condescendingly call a castle full of medieval types a bunch of “monkeys” can’t be all that bad.
Back to the Future: Michael J. Fox goes back to the 1950s and is called “Calvin” because that’s the name sewn into his underwear (Calvin Klein underwear -can’t believe we need to explain this). The film’s still funny in it’s own right (especially with freaky Crispin Glover as Fox’s loser dad), but now it’s like two time travel movies in on. First you get the 1950s, which Fox goes back to, then you get the 1980s, which is the “present”‘ for this film. It’s enough to give you a shiver (look for the Huey Lewis cameo). There were two more Back to the Future films, but unless you’ve got a thing for Michael J., you needn’t bother.
Groundhog Day: Bill Murray goes back in time -exactly one day, over and over again. In the process he turns from obnoxious twit to the perfect man (or at least the perfect man for Andie McDowell, and who wouldn’t want to be that kind of man?). It’s a fine, fine film, and in addition to being funny, it’s actually sweet and a little serious, and it proved that Murray was a little better of an actor than anyone ever gave him credit for before. But let’s not kid ourselves: If you had to live Groundhog Day over and over again, you’d become a little zen yourself to keep from going utterly freakin’ insane.
more …
Or at least, if he does know how to travel through time, he certainly is keeping tight lipped about it. He does have a good point though.
Link Via Geeks Are Sexy
Danger Room tells us of a claim made by Andrew D. Basiago and William Stillings, a pair of self-proclaimed time-traveling government agents, that President Obama was part of a CIA mission to explore Mars beginning in 1980. They say he was teleported to the red planet.
Obama wasn’t the only one making the otherworldly voyage. As “Barry Soetero,” the 19-year-old Obama was one of 10 youths selected to secretly teleport to and from Mars, forming a band of interplanetary Teen Titans. Regina Dugan, the director of Darpa, was another member.
Between 1981 and 1983, Obama is supposed to have visited Mars twice, by way of a teleportation chamber called a “jump room.” Basiago, a fellow chrononaut, told the website Exopolitics that he saw Obama “walk back to the jump room from across the Martian terrain.” To acknowledge his comrade, Obama is said to have told Basiago, “We’re here” — apparently, “with some sense of fatalism.”
It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. (Socializing Martian health care, perhaps? Building a birth-certificate printing press?) His mission was a perilous one, according to Basiago and Stillings. The CIA wished to “establish a defense regime protecting the Earth from threats from space” as well as a legal claim to “territorial sovereignty,” making Obama something of a Martian conquistador. Presumably, Obama’s CIA handlers needed him to “acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to their presence” in order to secure the U.S.-Martian alliance. (We’ll bet you weren’t even aware of Martian animals.)
“Simply put, your task is to be seen and not eaten,” an elder chrononaut, retired Army Maj. Ed Dames, is alleged to have told a young Obama.
A spokesman for the National Security Council says that Obama has never been to Mars. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Arikia Millikan)
In 1995, the now-defunct pop culture, music, and fashion magazine The Face asked physicist Stephen Hawking for a formula for time travel. Letters of Note has a photo of the fax that he sent in response. He probably just doesn’t want to share his secrets.
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All I know about the 2004 time travel film Primer is that it’s very confusing. That was made clear in an xkcd plot graph that we linked (Primer is at the bottom right). Although the movie covers only five days, there are nine timelines, according to this graph at Unreality magazine (which you can enlarge at the link). Does this clear things up? Link
Doc Brown from the Back to The Future trilogy has got to be one of the all time most memorable time travelers. He and Marty McFly usually save the day, but what if Doc had been the protagonist in other time travel movies? Great Scott!
With Added Doc Brown: The Doc appears in place of Michael Biehn’s resistance fighter, repeatedly turning up in the nick of time to spirit Sarah off to safety. This is one occasion in which he’s happy to meddle with the timeline!
Risk To The Space/Time Continuum: Despite keeping Sarah safe, the Doc lacks Biehn’s general hunkiness, meaning Connor remains unwooed, and young John is never born. Thus, humanity is screwed anyway.
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When you think about it, Bill & Ted and the Doctor both travel through time in some sort of public phone booth and they both have sexy babes travel with them at times. You can buy this most excellent shirt for only $22 on RedBubble.
Update 6/30/11 by Alex: We’ve also got a lot of neat Doctor Who stuff in the NeatoShop!
That’s "Toto Mitsumata no Zu," a drawing by artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, showing a couple of men working to waterproof their boat. It’s a fine piece of ukiyo-e style woodblock print and a rather mysterious example of time travel artefact.
You see, the woodblock print, which is dated from 1831, clearly showed the Tokyo Sky Tree being built today:
The ukiyo-e print drew particular attention over mysterious tower depicted on the left part of the work, leading some to surmise that the artist had predicted the emergence of Tokyo Sky Tree in modern times. [...]
The left side of the work shows two thin, high-rise buildings looking down on the town of old Tokyo across the river. The one on the far left is believed to be a fire-watch tower. However, experts say no building as tall as the mysterious one next to it existed back in those days.
Link – via metafilter
You know it as Slaughterhouse-Five, but it goes by another name, too. The complete title of Kurt Vonnegut’s acclaimed novel is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, A Fourth-Generation German-American Low Living in Easy Circumstances on Cape Cod [and Smoking Too Much], Who, as an American Infantry Scout Hors de Combat, as a Prisoner of War, Witnessed the Fire Bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a Long Time Ago, and Survived to Tell the Tale. This is a Novel Somewhat in the Telegraphic Schizophrenic Manner of Tales of the Planet Tralfamadore, Where the Flying Saucers Come From. Peace.
Weird, yes. But when you get to know the book, it actually makes a lot of sense. Even the bit about the flying saucers. Allow us to explain.
THE STORY
Slaughterhouse-Five isn’t told in the standard, chronological way. On the contrary, its main character, Billy Pilgrim, is an unwitting time traveler. One moment he’s living in 1945, then 1968, then 1954.
Arguably the novel’s most compelling sections take place during World War II, when young Billy is serving as a U.S. soldier. The Germans capture Pilgrim, who’s lost behind enemy lines, and take him to Dresden, a beautiful city untouched by war. There, he and other POWs are kept in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where they escape the Allied bombing of Dresden in an underground meat locker. Although they are safe, they can still hear the firebombs pounding above. And when they emerge, everyone has been killed, and everything destroyed.
Pilgrim returns to these memories frequently. But after coming home from the war, he marries, graduates from optometry school, and becomes a respected businessman. Despite such positive steps, tragedy seems to follow him. First, he turns up the sole survivor of a plane crash. Next, his wife dies in a car accident. Following these events, Pilgrim starts telling people he was kidnapped by aliens called Tralfamadorians, who taught him that the past, present, and future don’t really exist. Instead, they believe time is a conceptual whole. Pilgrim accepts the Tralfamadorian theory, and as he floats through the unalterable events of his life, he accepts that he has no power over his fate.
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Dresden, Germany was indeed firebombed on the night of February 13thy, 1945, and Kurt Vonnegut was one of the POWs who witnessed the attack. On that evening, Allied forces killed at least 25,000 people (although some estimates that as many as 130,000 people died). Vonnegut decided to write about his experience in Dresden as soon as he returned from the war, but it took him more than twenty years to finish the book. While crafting the novel, he realized that conventional narrative structure imposed logic on events -and that the events he witnessed in Dresden had none. Slaughterhouse-Five therefore lacks conflict, climax, and conclusion. Thus, the short, episodic style of the novel doesn’t allow the reader to draw morals from the story, nor allow the characters to find peace. To underscore this point, he inserts himself into the narrative, making it clear that even the author can find no way to form a lesson from such horror.
WHY THE STORY MATTERS
ANTI-PLOT, NON-HERO: Vonnegut abandons traditional storytelling by drastically altering chronology. This strategy allows him to reflect Pilgrim’s disjointed reality and avoid a conventional plot. Vonnegut also discards the traditional literary hero. Christ-like in his suffering, Pilgrim does not act, but is instead acted upon -a victim of destiny without any motivation beyond basic survival. Through Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut paints all participants of war as the “listless playthings of powerful forces.”
LITTLE GREEN CREATURES IN FLYING SAUCERS: The science-fiction segments of Slaughterhouse-Five strike most readers as bizarre, even distracting. Out of nowhere,. Billy Pilgrim is kidnapped, displayed in an alien zoo, and mated with a movie star. Vonnegut never says his alien stories are imaginary, but Pilgrim does read science-fiction novels with similar plots. Real or not, the Tralfamadorians are a coping mechanism that enables him to accept empty tragedies. He clings to the Tralfamadorian saying about life and death: “So it goes.”
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Literary VIPs
BILLY PILGRIM: Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on POW Billy Pilgrim. His first name (Billy, not William) marks him as permanently childlike. His last name identifies him as a voyager, but with one poignant exception: Billy is on a pilgrimage without a purpose.
KURT VONNEGUT: Vonnegut appears as a character in his own book, both in the semi-autobiographical first and last chapters and occasionally in the body text itself. He uses these appearances to remind the reader that many of the events are true, and that he experienced them himself.
Scenes to Remember
* Vonnegut visits his war buddy Bernard O’Hare to talk about Dresden. He’s surprised by the hostility of O’Hare’s wife, Mary, who accuses his books of portraying war as glamorous, as in a movie with Frank Sinatra or John Wayne. Vonnegut promises her Slaughterhouse-Five won’t have a part in it for Sinatra.
* Two days after the war ends, Pilgrim rides on the back of a green cart pulled by two horses. If he could choose to remember only the happy times and ignore the bad, this would be the moment he’d choose: lying in the sunshine with the birds singing in the trees. This is Pilgrim’s happiest memory -not his wedding day or the birth of his children, but an experience of simple animal comfort.
Famous Last Words
* “I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the German had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, ‘I know, I know, I know.’”*
*Though horrified by Nazi atrocities, Vonnegut refused to allow for a “just war” or a “right side.” He tried to curtail the inevitable criticism of the book by addressing it within the novel itself.
* “I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve sad before, bugs in amber.”
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The above article by Elizabeth Lunday is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2005 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
If you think you’ve got a firm grasp on reality, obviously you’re not a quantum physicist.
Recently, a new study by physicists in Australia revealed that quantum entanglement – a puzzling quantum physics phenomenon that Einstein himself called "spooky action at a distance" – also exists in respect to time.
I’ll skip the technical explanation (not that I understand it anyhow), but the study posits an interesting idea:
… Olson and Ralph’s teleportation provides a shortcut into the future. What they’re saying is that it’s possible to travel into the future without being present during the time in between.
That’s a fascinating scenario that immediately raises many questions. One of the first that springs to mind is what advantage might we get from this process. Might it be possible, for example, to make short-lived particles live longer by teleporting them into the future?
By Eric Schulman1,2, Eric Schulman3,4, Eric Schulman5, and Eric Schulman6
Figure 1. Eric Schulman, nearby disk galaxy expert |
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Saving for retirement can be an arduous task. The galactic fountain model predicts that energetic stellar winds and supernovae in OB associations produce superbubbles containing hot gas that breaks out of the galactic disk, cools radiatively as it rises upward, and recombines and returns to the disk ballistically. Time travel has occurred when the separation between the time of departure and the time of arrival does not equal the duration of the journey. Open book management theories include teaching employees the rules of the game, giving them the information needed to play the game, and making sure that they share in the risks and the rewards.
Figure 2. Eric Schulman, open book management expert |
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The most popular and widespread methods for obtaining a nest egg are in stocks and bonds. The hot gas was observed with X-ray telescopes, while the cool returning neutral hydrogen was observed through 21-centimeter emission from high-velocity clouds. There are three major paradoxes within time travel: reverse causation, casual loops, and the time traveler’s ability to alter the past. In modern day Corporate America, this unpretentious set of principles applies to every business.
Figure 3. Eric Schulman, time travel paradox expert |
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Both equities offer a wide array of sectors in which to put your money and can be extremely profitable when playing the market correctly. High-resolution X-ray images of M33 revealed two possible superbubbles, while sensitive 21-centimeter observations found high-velocity neutral hydrogen in 10 of 14 nearby disk galaxies. It does not matter if getting into the time machine produces arrival in the past, because the personal time of the traveler does not depend on the external time. Employees can be taught to play this game, but they are also required to have the information needed in order to play successfully.
This entails trading when you have a liquid derivative in the height of demand or conversely obtain the derivative at the beginning of the ascent. Galaxies with high-velocity neutral hydrogen have more dust-enshrouded far-infrared sources and an average star formation rate an order of magnitude larger than galaxies without it. Time travel can still occur without the existence of causal loops, and their removal eliminates a major paradox. Information should not be something that is used as a method of domination or power.
Figure 2. Eric Schulman, open book management expert |
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These two types of savings plans are geared for investors who plan to continue making money for an elongated period of time and can afford to take a loss and recover. Both of these results are expected if a substantial fraction of the high-velocity clouds are produced in galactic fountains. The second, and far more satisfying and clever resolution of this dilemma, comes with the possibility of branching timelines. Open book management is not for everyone, but for a radical change, it may be just what a company needs.
As Figure 5 shows, it is of vital importance when planning for retirement to ensure that employees have all the information necessary to support managers when they use high-velocity gas to go back in time in order to kill their grandfathers, thus creating a new temporal branch in which hands-on training leads to increased profits from the recirculation of the galactic fountain in nearby disk galaxies and therefore a steady star formation rate later in life when your risk should be lower.
Figure 5. The operational risk in each of the Basel II event type categories measured in solar masses per galaxy per year as a function of the number of grandfathers killed after having gone back in time. |
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In this paper we conclusively demonstrated the utility of planning for retirement by solving time travel paradoxes using open book management in nearby disk galaxies.
1Alexandria, Virginia; 2The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; 3Johnson & Wales University, Providence, Rhode Island; 4Saint Leo University, Saint Leo, Florida; 5Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts: 6Economic Analysis Group Ltd., Washington, DC
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This article is republished with permission from the March-April 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
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Photo: Shutterstock
Every self-respecting author who writes science fiction has tackled time travel at one point in time or another, but this short story by Neatoramanaut Melphistopheles is probably my favorite:
I ran into myself on the bus today. One minute he wasn’t there, the next he was. He didn’t introduce himself, as I immediately recognized me, and of course he remembered that. I turn out a bit chubbier, and wrinklier with a lot more white hair, but still a lot of red, and still in a ponytail. He had a mechanical hand.
"Still wearing the ponytail." I said.
"Shut up." I replied.
This is going to get confusing, so I’m going to refer to old me as he or him, even though it’s actually me.
Read more: Link
In The Daily Mail, Stephen Hawking writes that time travel may be possible. Since time and space are “wrinkled”, people might use these wrinkles as shortcuts in time:
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you’ll find holes and wrinkles in it. It’s a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it’s easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it’s also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times. [...]
Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I’m not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.
Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing.
Link via Geekologie | Image: NASA
If you’re like me, you were counting the hours until the new season of Doctor Who premiered. For those of you who did watch it, did you like it? How did you feel about the new doctor, played by Matt Smith?
If you are a fan, then hopefully this bit of trivia about the show and The Doctor will help hold you over until the next episode comes on.
Running on more than 30 seasons, Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction show in the world and considered the most successful science fiction show of all time based on ratings and sales. In fact, more than 750 episodes have been broadcast since the show started. (Take that Star Trek.)
Even one of the top directors of all time, Steven Spielberg has said that “the world would be a poorer place without Doctor Who.”
Image of writer/producer Steven Moffat with his Hugo Award via Dennis Schnapp [Flickr]
In addition to re-spawning the show in 2005, the Doctor Who series has resulted in at least five attempts at television spin-offs –the most successful of which is probably Torchwood –an anagram of Doctor Who. (On a side note, am I the only one who considers Jack Harkness, the main character of Torchwood, to have a name that’s almost too bizarrely close to my own? Think about it, Jill Harness & Jack Harkness…maybe we’re name soul mates.)
Not all of the spin-offs are so good though; there’s a very good reason K-9 and Company, a very 80’s detective-like show featuring K-9 and Sarah Jane, never made it past the pilot episode.
Image via Foomandoonian [Flickr]
A lot of people who are familiar with the show but who don’t actually watch it wonder how one character can be portrayed by so many different actors. Those of you who do watch the show know that it’s because The Doctor is a Time Lord and his race regenerates every time they should die.
Not all fans of Doctor Who know that a Time Lord is only supposed to be able to regenerate a total of 12 times though and The Doctor has so far regenerated a total of 10 times (he’s on his 11th body now). Assuming the show continues to do well, do you think The Doctor may be able to cheat this standard Time Lord rule and regenerate more than 12 times, like his enemy The Master?
Unsurprisingly, the ability to regenerate was developed as a means to keep the doctor alive after the first actor, William Hartnell, announced his desire to leave the show in 1966. In fact, regeneration was never even conceived of until they needed an excuse to keep the show going.
A recent BBC archive release stated that the team based the regeneration cycle on bad LSD trips. The memos said the transformation was a horrifying experience, like the “hell and dank horror” associated with a bad acid dose.
Doctor collage via Wikipedia
After each regeneration, The Doctor looks completely different and takes on a slightly modified personality. This is because each body is supposed to represent a different aspect of the same character. He always maintains the same memories, but his emotions and personality will change to some extent.
Because the purpose of regeneration is partially to allow The Doctor to enjoy a new and youthful body, his character becomes younger every time he regenerates. Fans of the show may recall how old the first Doctors were, particularly when compared with 26 year-old Matt Smith.
Funny enough, Matt Smith is still much younger than anyone on the show or the network wanted The Doctor to be. Few people believed that a 26 year-old could adequately portray the knowledge and life-experience that helps to define The Doctor.
Even so, when he auditioned for the role on the first day, the production team, particularly head writer and producer Steven Moffat were so blown away by his acting abilities, that they immediately knew he was the one. When they announced their decision, they stood firm behind his casting, stating, it had “always been Matt.”
Because Matt was so unknown at the time, the announcement of his casting led both Reuters and The Independent to announce the news as a question, their headlines proclaiming, “Doctor Who?”
Image via Alun.Vega [Flickr]
Many people, including Caitlin Moran, a reviewer for The Times, have noted that Doctor Who is “quintessential to being British.” Many fans believe part of any English childhood should be spent watching Doctor Who from “behind the sofa” and popping your head out when the scary parts are over.
Unfortunately, it’s these scary bits that made the show a target for morality police during the 1970’s. Legendary campaigner Mary Whitehouse repeatedly filed complaints with the BBC about the show’s frightening and gory content. Every time she complained though, it only helped to boost the show’s rating. It got to the point where the show’s producer during the 80’s, John Nathan-Turner, said that he looked forward to her comments because the show’s ratings would jump as soon as she made them.
On the other hand, Whitehouse was definitely onto something. A BBC study in 1972 found that Doctor Who was the most violent of all dramatic programs produced by the network at the time.
Perhaps part of the reason the show survived throughout these controversies though was its noble goal of educating children and providing a family-oriented show for all ages. The plot originally alternated historical stories and futuristic stories in an attempt to get children interested in both history and science and The Doctor’s original companions were even a science teacher and a history teacher.
They soon started cutting back on the historical episodes though because the production team didn’t enjoy making them as much as the sci fi ones and the ratings were never as high anyway. (Personally, I’m a sucker for the historical episodes, but I’m a history nerd anyway.)
Image via Stuart Bryant [Flickr]
Another thing that always seemed to score high with the viewers were monsters, particularly the Daleks. To some extent, the Daleks, are even more famous than The Doctor himself. The Daleks became so popular during the 60’s that they even spawned what was known as Dalekmania, where the public would eat up anything related to the Daleks, including the 1964 board game, “Dodge The Daleks.” The phenomenon was so major, they even made a film titled Dalekmania in 1995 that focused on the fad obsession with the aliens.
In 1964, there was a single released by The Go-Go’s (not the 80’s girl band) called “I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek.” The Clash even referenced them in the song “Remote Control,” saying “Repression — gonna be a Dalek / Repression — I am a robot / Repression — I obey.”
If you think the obsession was over, then consider the 2008 study that showed 9 out of 10 British children could correctly identify a Dalek and that Daleks were featured on an English postage stamp in 1999. In recent years, they were even featured in two separate, unauthorized pornographic movies.
Dalek even appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, as does T.A.R.D.I.S., and is often used as a metaphor for authoritarian people who act robotically.
Image via Heath bar [Flickr]
Speaking of the T.A.R.D.I.S., it’s another classic Doctor Who staple that’s become more recognizable than the actual Time Lord inside of it. If you’re not an avid viewer of the show, you may wonder why the spaceship looks like a police box. All T.A.R.D.I.S.s are made with a Chameleon Circuit that allows them to blend in with the surroundings it lands in. The Doctor’s Chameleon Circuit broke when he was in 1960’s Britain when the ship was in the shape of a police box. He liked the look enough that he decided to not bother fixing the circuit.
When the BBC tried to trademark the famed blue police box in 1996, the Metropolitan Police filed an objection to the claim, arguing that they created and owned the rights to the box design. The Patent Office has since ruled in favor of the network, pointing out that the police never trademarked the box and that they never complained about the fact that the BBC was selling merchandise with the design for more than three decades. It’s also worth noting that the Doctor Who police box has never actually been a faithful replica of the real boxes used by the Metropolitan Police.
The “dimensionally transcendental” properties (as The Doctor says) of the T.A.R.D.I.S. make it much larger inside than it appears to be. While no one has ever made a map of the interior of the ship, it is quite expansive and contains living quarters, an art gallery, a greenhouse, a library, a bathroom, a swimming pool, a medical bay, a multi-storied wardrobe, storage areas, an attic and a secondary control room.
If you’ve ever wondered why such an incredible machine is always breaking down (aside from its age), then it may be beneficial for you to know that when The Doctor acquired his ship, he actually stole it from his home planet and the Type 40 T.A.R.D.I.S. he took was already unreliable and obsolete at the time.
Image via traed mawr [Flickr]
People who don’t watch the show often wonder things like, “what kind of a doctor steals space ships and fights off alien robots?” The thing is, no one actually knows if The Doctor is actually a doctor. At times seems to have some medical knowledge and he’s even claimed to have studied medicine, but he also has said specifically that he’s not a physician. When he’s with Martha Jones, he tends to insist on her doing anything medical-related, saying, “she’s a doctor; I’m The Doctor.”
Perhaps the person who explained it the best was his nemesis, The Master, who quipped that it was quite sanctimonious for The Doctor to label himself as “the man who makes people better.”
It’s not too surprising that a sci-fi show about time and space travel that’s lasted for so long has started to build up some inconsistencies. Fortunately, the new head writer/producer, Steven Moffat (who also created Coupling), has great ways to answer all of those burning fan questions regarding the show’s continuity problems.
One of the biggest issues with The Doctor is the matter of age. At first the writers decided that every time he regenerated, his age should be turned back, but this only lasted through the first regeneration and since then, his age was recorded as going forward. At times The Doctor claims to be 450 years old, 650 years old and even 906 years old. Steven Moffat has simply explained that The Doctor does not know his own age because his non-linear existence via time travel has made this calculation impossible.
In other situations, the entire history of races, such as the Daleks, have been rewritten as time has progressed. Steven Moffat simply explains these concerns away by noting, “a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can’t have a continuity error — it’s impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say ‘he changed time’,”
Are you a fan of the show? And those of you who are fans, how do you feel about the spin offs and do you know any interesting trivia I didn’t mention here?
Image via Jim Linwood [Flickr]
Sources: BBC #1, #2, Dr. Who Profile, BBC News #1, #2, #3, #4, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
This article at Discover Magazine has nothing to do with the science fiction stories we are so familiar with. Author Sean Carroll looks at time travel as a physicist. He says if time travel were possible (and it might be), there would be no paradox, because we cannot change what has already happened. Ever. Then it gets weird.
Imagine that we have been appointed Guardian of the Gate, and our job is to keep vigilant watch over who passes through. One day, as we are standing off to the side, we see a person walk out of the rear side of the gate, emerging from one day in the future. That’s no surprise; it just means that you will see that person enter the front side of the gate tomorrow. But as you keep watch, you notice that he simply loiters around for one day, and when precisely 24 hours have passed, the traveler walks calmly through the front of the gate. Nobody ever approached from elsewhere. That 24-hour period constitutes the entire life span of this time traveler. He experiences the same thing over and over again, although he doesn’t realize it himself, since he does not accumulate new memories along the way. Every trip through the gate is precisely the same to him. That may strike you as weird or unlikely, but there is nothing paradoxical or logically inconsistent about it.
(image credit: Biwa Studios)
826LA is a non-profit organization in southern California that teaches kids how to engage in creative writing. It’s known for innovative workshops and clever marketing. We previously featured their time travel store on Neatorama. 826LA has applied that same theme to traditional propaganda posters, producing ten, including the above poster warning time travelers about the dangers of the Butterfly Effect.
1. Time travel in a Terminator movie is like plumbing in a porno: a very loose excuse to get to the action.
2. Anyone expecting accuracy is missing the point (and having much less fun than everyone else).
3. With that said, here is our attempt to construct a sensible time line of the franchise.
Note: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is not included in this project. Link -via Digg
These ten different timelines, which are all affected whenever someone uses a time machine, can be confusing (as all time travel stories are), but reading them may help you prepare for the new movie Terminator: Salvation.
I’ve mulled it over some more, and I still believe there has to be a timeline where someone other than Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. When The Terminator was a standalone movie, you could read it either way. Either there’s a circular causality, where Kyle is “always” John Connor’s father, or Kyle’s time travel creates a new branch. But Terminator 2 pretty much establishes that time travel always creates new branches, because there’s no fate but what we make. And the Connors, with their friendly T-800, are able to stop or at least delay Skynet. But of course, your mileage, even backwards and forwards through time, may vary.
The following is reprinted
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Most of the time we're willing to shovel down the popcorn and watch Yoda
lift X-Wings out of the swamp using nothing but the Force and a smattering
of questionably parsed English, or let Jean-Luc Picard get the Enterprise
out of a scrape by the convenient discovery of yet another type
of particle beam. But every once in a while we just have to vent about
some of the truly egregious "fiction" in science fiction.
1. Sounds in Space
The tag line from Alien got it right: "In Space, no one
can hear you scream". The reason no one can hear you scream is that
sound needs air to travel in, and there's none in space.
Most of space is a hard vacuum, with a molecule or two of hydrogen floating
around in every cubic meter - not nearly enough to transmit sound. Every
sound in the movies, from photon torpedoes and laser beams to exploding
starships and hyperspace booms, would never happen in real life.
For that matter, you'd never see laser beams in space either, since in
a vacuum there's no medium to reveal them. So a real-life laser dog fight
in space would be really boring to watch.
2. Faster-Than-Light TravelWarp drives and hyperspace are very useful in science fiction, but there's one catch. According to Einstein, the speed of light isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (that's about 186,000 miles per second). Even inching toward the speed of light is difficult - immense energy is required to get to even a fraction of the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy is required. The amount of energy you'd need to achieve the speed of light is infinite (i.e., more than you've got, even with those supercool long-lasting batteries). So just tossing in a few more dilithium crystals into the warp drives isn't going to make it happen. There are loopholes in our understanding of the physics that make faster-than-light travel theoretically possible. For example, it's theoretically possible to create a "bubble" of space that breaks itself off from other space and moves faster than light relative to that space (all the while everything inside both "spaces" moves no faster than the speed of light). This is known as an Alcubierre Warp Bubble. The catch (there had to be one) is that these bubbles require the existence of exotic matter that has negative energy, and wouldn't you know, there isn't really any lying around, and it's not clear that any actually exists.3. Laser Bolts You Can Dodge Aside
from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review
a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at
186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits
you is just plain silly.
Not to mention (of course) the idea of a laser bolt being visible as
a streak that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were zapped
by a laser from a laser gun, it would look like a single stream of light,
with one end attached to the barrel of said gun, and the end attached
to whatever portion of your head had not melted yet (assuming you're having
a laser battle somewhere where there is enough air around to illuminate
the entire beam).
Most "laser" beams in science fiction movies travel slower
than bullets do today. Let's see Obi Wan whip his light saber around fast
enough to stop the spray of a Mac-10 (and let's not even begin
to talk about all the things wrong with a sword made of light).
4. Human-Looking Aliens This
is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from
entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except
for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the
result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all
these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen.
Look, humans evolved on earth and shared a basic body format (four limbs,
one head, side-to-side symmetry) with just about every other vertebrate
on the planet. It's a form that works fine for this planet, but not even
every vertebrate sticks with it (see: snakes, whales, seals, etc).
Given that any planet with life on it will have that life evolve in it's
own way, the chances of the universe being stocked with chesty alien princesses
who crave human starship captains is slim at best.
Related to this is the following.
5. Half-Breed Aliens Humans
don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply
too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.
Given this, what are the chances of successful mating with an alien species
that may not even have DNA as its genetic encoding medium?
Also going back to the idea that aliens probably won't look like Humans,
how would you do it anyway? It's not exactly the "Insert Tab A Into
Slot B" proposition it would be here at home.
6. Brain-Sucking Aliens
The
Good News of an Alien Facehugger Attack T-Shirt, art by Mike
Jacobsen
Ditto aliens that control your body by using your brains, or gestate
in your chest, or whatnot. Let's posit that any creature that controls
the brain of any other creature (not that any exist here on Earth) does
so only after a few million years of what's called "speciation"
– i.e., one species eventually enters a symbiotic relationship with
another species. This relationship would have to be pretty specific, as
symbiotic relationships are here on Earth.
Which is to say just because you're in a symbiotic relationship with
one species doesn't mean it transfers over to another species, especially
an alien species, who's body chemistry, DNA, brain wiring, etc., isn't
even remotely close to your own. So don't worry about the "Puppet
Master" scenario too much, or that you'll be nothing more than a
glorified egg sac for some nasty breed of space monster.
7. Shape-Shifting Aliens Shape-changing
aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly
human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat,
to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien
go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear,
as the case may be); it has to go somewhere.
Unless that "rat" is running around with a highly compressed
mass of a human-sized object (which presents its own problems), shape-shifting
in to different sized objects is not very likely (one of the smart things
about Terminator 2 was that the T-1000 only shape shifted into
things of roughly the same mass, like human beings or a floor).
8. Time Travel Got
an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg
during the Civil War?
The same relativistic principles that keep us from going faster than
light also keep us rom traveling backward in time and messing with the
past. It's possible to slow down time - the closer you get to
the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to your original
frame of reference - but to get the clock spinning in the other direction
would require you to go faster than light, and you can't do that.
Again, there are theoretical loopholes that could allow it - worm holes,
actually, which are "tunnels" in the fabric of space-time that
could possibly allow travel back in time. but once again, keeping these
wormholes open would require exotic matter with negative energy. Got any?
Neither do we.
9. The Planetary Gravity ScamEverywhere you go in science fiction, people are walking around like they weigh just what they do on Earth. Chances of that happening in the real universe? Slim. Consider our own solar system. On Mars, a 180-pound man would weigh just 70 pounds; on Jupiter, 424 pounds (not that you can walk on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface). That man on the moon? Just 30 pounds. The man's mass is the same, it's just that different planets have different gravitational pulls. The idea that all the planets that humans might visit would exactly match Earth's own gravitational profile is a little much. As is, alternately, the idea that all alien creatures would be as comfortable in our gravitational field as we are.10 The Planetary Sameness Principle
Tatooine looks just like the |
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The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
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Sooner or Later is a Hungarian short film by István Madarász about a prisoner who volunteered for a daring experiment in the last days of World War II.
See what happened when Nazi scientists discovered a way to let a subject travel through time.
You won’t guess the ending: Link [embedded Flash video clip, 11 min.]
