Ironically, I had just rewatched this yesterday. Two comments: 1) A good time-travel movie with the premise that communication with the past is possible, but not physical travel, is Frequency (2000), starring Jim Caviezel. The Caviezel character has to communicate back to 1969 to prevent the death of his father, and it's all tied up with the Mets winning the World Series that year. That might be worth reviewing. 2) The radiation suits in Back to the Future are used improperly. The suits provide no appreciable shielding, so the only reasons for them are to have disposable clothing in case some plutonium gets on you and to have air filters to prevent breathing in aerosolized plutonium, which is only an issue if there is a fire or explosion. So you would want to be wearing the suits when the machine is running (in case the DeLorean blows up), but they're unnecessary when simply inserting the fuel. (I do, however, like the fact that the dog Einstein has his own suit.) Still, that's a minor nitpick that in no way takes away from the excellence of the film.
One thing I'd like to have seen addressed is where Johnny B Goode came from. Marty knows the song because he's learnt it from the Chuck Berry version, but Chuck learned it from hearing Marty playing it in 1955.
One of my favorite Grandfather Paradoxes was in the TV show Legends of Tomorrow. John Constantine tries to kick his father in a sensitive spot on the night of his conception, and blinks out of existence for a second right before impact.
One of my all time favourite movies, and still as enjoyable today as when it first came out. Scary to think though that more time has actually passed between the present day and when 'Back To The Future' was made in 1985 (39 years), than the time between Marty McFly's journey from 1985 to 1955, (30 years).
"I'll allow it. :)" Exactly! It's a great movie. Perfect script, great acting. Of course the time travel doesn't make much sense, but it's internally consistent, whatever rules are set up, are kept, and they don't stretch the science fiction premise further than it can take without breaking under the load of silliness (unlike for instance, the Matrix sequels). And just as I finished writing the previous sentences, I got to the last two minutes of the video. :D
The real heart of this movie is empathy, and the movie is right to treat everything in service to that in a somewhat silly way. So, what I mean is that the kid learns to take his parents seriously even to the point of disturbing sexual attraction, and then his older mentor as well in his frustrations. Anyway, I find that all of the silliness can be accepted once you put that in mind. I saw this movie in theaters when it came out when I was age 8. It felt amazing.
First saw this classic on a bootleg VHS in 1986. An aunt brought it over, said they liked it so much they wanted to share it. And now ... here we are in the future.
Cool Worlds did an interesting video about faster than light, time travel and breaking causality: "Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes"
One minor thing. The "flux" definition you gave, was incomplete. : a substance used to promote fusion (as of metals or minerals) especially : one (such as rosin) applied to surfaces to be joined by soldering, brazing, or welding to clean and free them from oxide and promote their union In steelmaking, we also had a "flux" that was put into the mold of a continuous caster. The flux would float on top of the steel in the mold, creating a barrier to prevent oxygen from reacting with the steel, changing it's chemistry. Also, the flux would melt, flow between the liquid steel, and the edges of the mold as a lubricant, to try to prevent the newly forming steel shell from bonding with the steel (or nickel) of the mold wall.
Awesome review! I'm pretty sure they designed the flux capacitor after a real life device (the visual aspect of it) which is called a flux-valve. It's a component of Gyromagnetic Compasses that senses the horizontal component of earth's magnetic field. When a directional gyro is "mated" with a magnetic compass, it provides a much more stable platform compared to a traditional "wet" compass due to the short term stability of the gyro platform and the magnetic-sensing capability of the flux-valve.
My first thought is that the capacitor serves some functionality between capacitors in electronics and "pattern buffers" in Star Trek. My second thought is that the capacitor serves a similar function to a bedpan or water bottle or a "pot", in keeping with the comedy aspect of the series. A flux-valve as a timing and/or navigational mechanism for use outside of normal space-time is an interesting notion, while it may not be "common knowledge", that does not mean it was not known at some point to the writers of the series. One wonders if Gyromagnetic Compasses might have wound up as bathroom reading material at some point,... Something akin to the flux-valve may be required to facilitate re-emerge from a "temporal displacement" in the exact same place. However, with a dog in the pilot seat, would that not invoke some kind of A.I. control system which can respond to the navigational data received from a "flux-valve" type device?
Has anyone as a kid read the Danny Dunn books? I've never heard anyone make a comparison but BttF always reminds me of those books. A boy and his wacky old scientist friend and the adventures that ensue.
Welcome back, glad you are doing better. Great review. My nitpick: Flux can be a thing. It is also a substance that is used in soldering, welding, etc, that acts as a barrier against air, preventing oxidization and promoting a better bond. As the DeLorean has a flux capacitor it sounds like it is just his name for a type of energy or some such thing. I would imagine that the rest of the explanation would be that the stainless steel construction allowed for an even dispersion of the flux, whatever it really is, creating a more even field.
I frequently correlate the "flux capacitor" with "pattern buffers" from Star Trek's transporter devices. Stainless Steel might just be the Doc's preference regarding bathroom fixtures.
Fellow Gen Xer here and I've watched this film countless time. Interesting the first clip at 02:01 for decades I always wondered what that weird look MJF did looking over and down to his right was all about?
In BttF II, Michael J Fox was beginning to have trouble riding his skateboard. Unbeknownst at the time, this was an extremely early manifestation of increasing Parkinson’s symptoms.
OK, here's my wacky time/space-travel hypothesis: IF you built a time machine AND the universe is constantly expanding (or antitime-contracting), couldn't you just step into your machine, dial it to the moment when (say) TRAPPIST-1f was/would be in your neighborhood, then just step out and explore it? P.S. I saw this movie many times in the theater as a 30-year old, and knew it to be a classic for exactly the reasons you stated: the script, cast, and story.
4:00 I'm reminded of Doc's repeated comment that Marty "wasn't thinking fourth-dimensionally". The Bobs weren't thinking -- I can't think of an appropriate phrase about the earth moving. 6:40 Electric flux and magnetic flux don't involve flowing. I think the word was chosen in analogy with flowing things, like the choice of words used in these movies. 7:10 A problem with non-continuous time travel is violation of energy and momentum conservation. A second problem involves matter already where the time machine materializes -- in particular, the electrons' Pauli exclusion principle. The movies might have addressed it for air with the sonic booms. 11:30 Unwittingly (perhaps) the movie used "gigawatt" correctly. (And I pronounce it that way as well.) 29:30 One minute at 88 mph corresponds to about 1.5 miles. 31:00 In my view, the laws of physics are local. A picture wouldn't just fade out. Nor would a human. (I also imagine a bloody mess if a human fades out little by little.) 32:00 I wish that Doc had put just a little more together, and figured it out without the note. I also wish that Doc wasn't such a numbskull at the phrase, "Your life depends on it!" 36:00 I try to recover by having Mr. Fusion extract deuterium from the waste, and use the rest of the matter to carry the energy and momentum. The sequels would have been radically different had the Bobs considered the possibility.
One thing you don't touch on is that the physical items that are carried from one time to another should not change - photos fading, writing changing, etc - if the movie is using the multiverse solution. Oh, and I rate Zemeckis right at the top. These movies, Forrest Gump, Roger Rabbit, Romancing the Stone, Castaway ... all brilliant.
About Tom Wilson, he played a large part on the space combat game franchise, Wing Commander. It started with the game's creator wanting to make an X-Wing game, but Lucas Arts shot him down - like George Lucas was shot down in trying to make a Flash Gordon movie. Just like Lucas, he shrugged and made his own thing. Wing Commander follows the career of a fighter pilot in an interstellar war. The first two are animated, occupying 5 and 15 Mb of your HD, respectivelly. Nowadays it would be enough for a chess game. Maybe. But games 3 and 4 are live action. We have Mark frigging Hammill as colonel Christopher Blair, the stand in for the player, his frenemy Maniac (Tom Wilson), his mentor, Paladin (John Rhys Davies) and his boss, Admiral Tolwyn (Malcolm McDowell). WC 3 is a more or less straightforward combat simulator. There's a subplot about whom should you trust, but it was basically good versus evil. The fourth game, though... It was Mass Effect before Mass Effect. A deep exploration of the costs of old loyalties, what victory in a bitter war really means, and more. Few SF movies have a script as good as that game, and Tom Wilson was essential to that story. The science is a little skimpy, but the drama was A+, and people should review this franchise.
“Interesting” is an understatement. The movie’s writer/director has a mathematics degree and really worked out a lot of what makes time travel plausible enough that it seems like an accident! And then explores the trust issues that come with two friends in business having this technology offer opportunities to backstab each other.
I agree that this would be a very interesting movie to get his reaction or take on, but it would be hard not to spoil the movie by talking about it. The structure of the movie is really important.
The one internal inconsistency that has always bugged me is that Marty's parents don't recognize him as that weird "Calvin Klein" guy they met back in high school (especially since his dad has clearly written about the experiences of that time in his own fiction).
I've thought the same thing, but in reality the inconsistency would be if they *did' recognize him! That's near impossible. They knew him for only a few days long ago - remember that guy you met a few times in the course of a week thirty years ago, what exactly did he look like? - while they've been watching their little Marty grow from a baby to a teenager and gotten to associate that face with him, not that half forgotten guy thirty years ago. Of course there's the alternative explanation that they already did notice a similarity and talked about it, but those memories haven't caught up to original Marty yet, if they ever will. It's not as if the "new" parents see Marty for the first time when he returns from '55, so why should they mention it just then?
I think it works assuming they do know and act like they don’t. They do kind of wink at it in the final scenes. Parents have to hide all sorts of bemusements at their own kids. This is just one more?
Can someone please answer this question? Imagine a time machine like the one in the 1960 movie "The Time Machine", that is basically a vehicle that moves in time and not in space. The time traveler takes a seat in the machine and pulls the lever that lets him travel into the future. This means, from his perspective, the world outside the machine moves faster. For example, the hands of the clock on the wall move faster than the hands of the time traveler's wristwatch. But if everything outside the machine moves faster, wouldn't that also mean that light is moving faster than light? And what happens with the movement of light when the machine moves backwards in time? The hands of the clock on the wall now move counterclockwise. Does light also move backwards? How would that affect the visual perception of the time traveler? (Please don't tell me that time travel is impossible. I know that. My question refers to the logic of the movie.)
I'm trying to think about what would happen if you were close to a black hole. Your time will slow down relative to distant objects. Light near you will move at 299,792 km/s, and light far away from you will also move at 299,792 km/s - but the length of a second will be different in the 2 locations. That allows more things to happen in 1 second for you than happen in 1 second far away, so your clock would show less time passing than a distant clock. I'm not sure what you would actually _see_ with light moving towards you up the gravitational gradient: constant speed (m/s) but with time changing. As it got closer, light from successive events might arrive with the same distance between events, therefore now less time between them - wouldn't that mean an increase the light's frequency too, so you see things move faster and turn blue? Backwards in time is even harder to imagine; things would have to "un-happen", but light ought to still move at 299,792 km/s for the local definition of a second - even if that "second" is now backwards! Of course what's really happening is that the movie is showing you, the viewer, the passage of time in a way the director hopes you will understand, living in 1960 and not being familiar with relativity or black holes, while trying not to break the 4th wall.
The crazy thing is that the 30-year time distance in the movie is almost a decade less than the time difference between today and when the movie came out.
I offer Niven's hypothesis. If A. It is possible to have a time machine for traveling into the past, and B. It is possible for the use of such a machine to alter past history somehow, where will the blizzard of time paradoxes reach a stable state? Exactly, with preventing the activation of the machine 😂 !
It's theoretically possible to turn a wormhole into a time machine but it doesn't allow travel to before it was created, so even if we manage to do this at some point in the future we won't see any travelers in the present.
Regarding time travel and "grand parents" paradox etc, why is it nobody are considering the possibility "UFO's" are not aliens from other civilizations, but simply ourselves time traveling? And exactly the risk of influencing on "the past" is the reason why we never manage to figure out what it is, they simply split as soon as they notice anyone observe them?
I like the idea of the many worlds theory and things like "ghosts" and ufos are things breaking through dimensions but I 100% dont belive it just one of those fun things to ponder
Strange detail. In the German dub, it's not a Flux Capacitor but a Flux Compensator. Has to do with the length and sound of the words, but I always thought it makes slightly more sense. 🙂
I'm not sure the 'time travel rules' are actually fully internally consistent. For example when Marty gets back to 1985 near the end of the movie he observes his earlier self fleeing from the Libyans in the Delorean and accidentally time-travelling to 1955 - however, since our Marty who we've been watching for the entire movie has changed the past and changed the lives of his family and also clearly affected the Doc Brown of 1985 who read Marty's letter and thus knew to wear the Kevlar vest that night....all of this surely must mean that the other Marty was affected also. THAT Marty must have had a different life than 'our' Marty. While our Marty is surprised to observe all the changes in his family home the other Marty is the one who had been living with them in the meantime and, for him, it would all have been normal. So why does the movie seem to be saying that he is the exact same Marty as from the start of the movie? And when HE goes back in time shouldn't he be going back into the newly altered version of 1955 since THAT is now the past of his reality? Bit of a plothole but I do allow it. The movie is ''timelessly'' enjoyable.
I always thought that it kinda worked like releasing a pull-back motor. Doc did probably activate a seperate gear mechanism on the wheelbase to engage the already spinning drivetrain of the DeLorean. The wheelbase and drivetrain are connected in normal cars, but the Doc probably seperated these two components in the DeLorean for some reason.
"... just go during the day ...." nice dead mall joke! 4 malls in this city ... one has thrived since built and still is. One failed to launch, was dead for 30yrs, then turned into a corporate campus; it's finally successful! The other two .... thrived, died, were renovated, thrived ... now one is a big-box strip and plodding along, the other has been condemned by the fire marshal. It's big anchor stores still operate (kinda), but the mall itself is a blocked off cave. I rented a room to a guy who was a commercial construction PM ... his company redeveloped dead malls, and their business was booming!
Why would you point out the grandma's number thing especially in a period movie series on steroids like Back To The Future... it implements the at any given moment current communication methods right into the flippin' story. I'm not a fan of this obsolescence notion when it comes to stories of a specific time (and the itching need to remake movies because of this may i say), let us have the level of intelligence required to understand what was the norm at a given time in history. It's very dangerous if people have the sincere reaction of "gramma's landline phone number WTF?!", it indicates how deeply intertwined people's minds are with stupid trendy tech, that may go any moment from changes in fashion or even some sort of global catastrophe.
Ironically, I had just rewatched this yesterday. Two comments:
1) A good time-travel movie with the premise that communication with the past is possible, but not physical travel, is Frequency (2000), starring Jim Caviezel. The Caviezel character has to communicate back to 1969 to prevent the death of his father, and it's all tied up with the Mets winning the World Series that year. That might be worth reviewing.
2) The radiation suits in Back to the Future are used improperly. The suits provide no appreciable shielding, so the only reasons for them are to have disposable clothing in case some plutonium gets on you and to have air filters to prevent breathing in aerosolized plutonium, which is only an issue if there is a fire or explosion. So you would want to be wearing the suits when the machine is running (in case the DeLorean blows up), but they're unnecessary when simply inserting the fuel. (I do, however, like the fact that the dog Einstein has his own suit.) Still, that's a minor nitpick that in no way takes away from the excellence of the film.
The radiation suits in the movie also end above the ankle and they are not wearing boots.
One thing I'd like to have seen addressed is where Johnny B Goode came from. Marty knows the song because he's learnt it from the Chuck Berry version, but Chuck learned it from hearing Marty playing it in 1955.
One of my favorite Grandfather Paradoxes was in the TV show Legends of Tomorrow. John Constantine tries to kick his father in a sensitive spot on the night of his conception, and blinks out of existence for a second right before impact.
You're back? I've never been this chanel before, so does that mean that I have seen you first time in the future?
This is heavy. :O
One of my all time favourite movies, and still as enjoyable today as when it first came out. Scary to think though that more time has actually passed between the present day and when 'Back To The Future' was made in 1985 (39 years), than the time between Marty McFly's journey from 1985 to 1955, (30 years).
"I'll allow it. :)"
Exactly! It's a great movie. Perfect script, great acting.
Of course the time travel doesn't make much sense, but it's internally consistent, whatever rules are set up, are kept, and they don't stretch the science fiction premise further than it can take without breaking under the load of silliness (unlike for instance, the Matrix sequels). And just as I finished writing the previous sentences, I got to the last two minutes of the video. :D
The real heart of this movie is empathy, and the movie is right to treat everything in service to that in a somewhat silly way. So, what I mean is that the kid learns to take his parents seriously even to the point of disturbing sexual attraction, and then his older mentor as well in his frustrations.
Anyway, I find that all of the silliness can be accepted once you put that in mind.
I saw this movie in theaters when it came out when I was age 8. It felt amazing.
First saw this classic on a bootleg VHS in 1986. An aunt brought it over, said they liked it so much they wanted to share it. And now ... here we are in the future.
Welcome back! Glad you're feeling better.
Cool Worlds did an interesting video about faster than light, time travel and breaking causality: "Why Going Faster-Than-Light Leads to Time Paradoxes"
One minor thing. The "flux" definition you gave, was incomplete.
: a substance used to promote fusion (as of metals or minerals)
especially : one (such as rosin) applied to surfaces to be joined by soldering, brazing, or welding to clean and free them from oxide and promote their union
In steelmaking, we also had a "flux" that was put into the mold of a continuous caster. The flux would float on top of the steel in the mold, creating a barrier to prevent oxygen from reacting with the steel, changing it's chemistry.
Also, the flux would melt, flow between the liquid steel, and the edges of the mold as a lubricant, to try to prevent the newly forming steel shell from bonding with the steel (or nickel) of the mold wall.
Awesome review! I'm pretty sure they designed the flux capacitor after a real life device (the visual aspect of it) which is called a flux-valve. It's a component of Gyromagnetic Compasses that senses the horizontal component of earth's magnetic field. When a directional gyro is "mated" with a magnetic compass, it provides a much more stable platform compared to a traditional "wet" compass due to the short term stability of the gyro platform and the magnetic-sensing capability of the flux-valve.
My first thought is that the capacitor serves some functionality between capacitors in electronics and "pattern buffers" in Star Trek. My second thought is that the capacitor serves a similar function to a bedpan or water bottle or a "pot", in keeping with the comedy aspect of the series. A flux-valve as a timing and/or navigational mechanism for use outside of normal space-time is an interesting notion, while it may not be "common knowledge", that does not mean it was not known at some point to the writers of the series. One wonders if Gyromagnetic Compasses might have wound up as bathroom reading material at some point,...
Something akin to the flux-valve may be required to facilitate re-emerge from a "temporal displacement" in the exact same place. However, with a dog in the pilot seat, would that not invoke some kind of A.I. control system which can respond to the navigational data received from a "flux-valve" type device?
Loving your scientific breakdown 💖
Has anyone as a kid read the Danny Dunn books? I've never heard anyone make a comparison but BttF always reminds me of those books. A boy and his wacky old scientist friend and the adventures that ensue.
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.
Welcome back, glad you are doing better. Great review.
My nitpick: Flux can be a thing. It is also a substance that is used in soldering, welding, etc, that acts as a barrier against air, preventing oxidization and promoting a better bond.
As the DeLorean has a flux capacitor it sounds like it is just his name for a type of energy or some such thing. I would imagine that the rest of the explanation would be that the stainless steel construction allowed for an even dispersion of the flux, whatever it really is, creating a more even field.
I frequently correlate the "flux capacitor" with "pattern buffers" from Star Trek's transporter devices. Stainless Steel might just be the Doc's preference regarding bathroom fixtures.
Fellow Gen Xer here and I've watched this film countless time. Interesting the first clip at 02:01 for decades I always wondered what that weird look MJF did looking over and down to his right was all about?
Was he not checking the boy was filming?
It was something about Marty's shoes. They were untied, I think?
In BttF II, Michael J Fox was beginning to have trouble riding his skateboard. Unbeknownst at the time, this was an extremely early manifestation of increasing Parkinson’s symptoms.
OK, here's my wacky time/space-travel hypothesis: IF you built a time machine AND the universe is constantly expanding (or antitime-contracting), couldn't you just step into your machine, dial it to the moment when (say) TRAPPIST-1f was/would be in your neighborhood, then just step out and explore it? P.S. I saw this movie many times in the theater as a 30-year old, and knew it to be a classic for exactly the reasons you stated: the script, cast, and story.
4:00 I'm reminded of Doc's repeated comment that Marty "wasn't thinking fourth-dimensionally". The Bobs weren't thinking -- I can't think of an appropriate phrase about the earth moving.
6:40 Electric flux and magnetic flux don't involve flowing. I think the word was chosen in analogy with flowing things, like the choice of words used in these movies.
7:10 A problem with non-continuous time travel is violation of energy and momentum conservation. A second problem involves matter already where the time machine materializes -- in particular, the electrons' Pauli exclusion principle. The movies might have addressed it for air with the sonic booms.
11:30 Unwittingly (perhaps) the movie used "gigawatt" correctly. (And I pronounce it that way as well.)
29:30 One minute at 88 mph corresponds to about 1.5 miles.
31:00 In my view, the laws of physics are local. A picture wouldn't just fade out. Nor would a human. (I also imagine a bloody mess if a human fades out little by little.)
32:00 I wish that Doc had put just a little more together, and figured it out without the note. I also wish that Doc wasn't such a numbskull at the phrase, "Your life depends on it!"
36:00 I try to recover by having Mr. Fusion extract deuterium from the waste, and use the rest of the matter to carry the energy and momentum.
The sequels would have been radically different had the Bobs considered the possibility.
One thing you don't touch on is that the physical items that are carried from one time to another should not change - photos fading, writing changing, etc - if the movie is using the multiverse solution.
Oh, and I rate Zemeckis right at the top. These movies, Forrest Gump, Roger Rabbit, Romancing the Stone, Castaway ... all brilliant.
About Tom Wilson, he played a large part on the space combat game franchise, Wing Commander.
It started with the game's creator wanting to make an X-Wing game, but Lucas Arts shot him down - like George Lucas was shot down in trying to make a Flash Gordon movie. Just like Lucas, he shrugged and made his own thing.
Wing Commander follows the career of a fighter pilot in an interstellar war. The first two are animated, occupying 5 and 15 Mb of your HD, respectivelly. Nowadays it would be enough for a chess game. Maybe.
But games 3 and 4 are live action. We have Mark frigging Hammill as colonel Christopher Blair, the stand in for the player, his frenemy Maniac (Tom Wilson), his mentor, Paladin (John Rhys Davies) and his boss, Admiral Tolwyn (Malcolm McDowell).
WC 3 is a more or less straightforward combat simulator. There's a subplot about whom should you trust, but it was basically good versus evil.
The fourth game, though... It was Mass Effect before Mass Effect. A deep exploration of the costs of old loyalties, what victory in a bitter war really means, and more. Few SF movies have a script as good as that game, and Tom Wilson was essential to that story.
The science is a little skimpy, but the drama was A+, and people should review this franchise.
Loved the Wing Commander series! There's an outtake with Tom Wilson, after Hamill delivers a line, saying, "uh, isn't that the guy from Star Wars?"
@@MichaelSiegel14 Yeah, now that you mention it, I remember it.😁
good games, good actors, good people.
There is an interesting movie about timetravel called Primer. More a psycological thought experiment brought on by timetravel.
“Interesting” is an understatement. The movie’s writer/director has a mathematics degree and really worked out a lot of what makes time travel plausible enough that it seems like an accident! And then explores the trust issues that come with two friends in business having this technology offer opportunities to backstab each other.
I agree that this would be a very interesting movie to get his reaction or take on, but it would be hard not to spoil the movie by talking about it. The structure of the movie is really important.
I'll second that. Primer is such a cool movie.
I've never seen another time travel film like it.
The one internal inconsistency that has always bugged me is that Marty's parents don't recognize him as that weird "Calvin Klein" guy they met back in high school (especially since his dad has clearly written about the experiences of that time in his own fiction).
I've thought the same thing, but in reality the inconsistency would be if they *did' recognize him! That's near impossible.
They knew him for only a few days long ago - remember that guy you met a few times in the course of a week thirty years ago, what exactly did he look like? - while they've been watching their little Marty grow from a baby to a teenager and gotten to associate that face with him, not that half forgotten guy thirty years ago.
Of course there's the alternative explanation that they already did notice a similarity and talked about it, but those memories haven't caught up to original Marty yet, if they ever will. It's not as if the "new" parents see Marty for the first time when he returns from '55, so why should they mention it just then?
My even bigger question is what happened to the Marty that was born and raised by these successful parents???
I think it works assuming they do know and act like they don’t. They do kind of wink at it in the final scenes. Parents have to hide all sorts of bemusements at their own kids. This is just one more?
@@BrianTRice77Yeah I think they knew. Kinda explains why he had that truck, maybe they bought it for him…
Can someone please answer this question?
Imagine a time machine like the one in the 1960 movie "The Time Machine", that is basically a vehicle that moves in time and not in space. The time traveler takes a seat in the machine and pulls the lever that lets him travel into the future. This means, from his perspective, the world outside the machine moves faster. For example, the hands of the clock on the wall move faster than the hands of the time traveler's wristwatch.
But if everything outside the machine moves faster, wouldn't that also mean that light is moving faster than light?
And what happens with the movement of light when the machine moves backwards in time? The hands of the clock on the wall now move counterclockwise. Does light also move backwards? How would that affect the visual perception of the time traveler?
(Please don't tell me that time travel is impossible. I know that. My question refers to the logic of the movie.)
I'm trying to think about what would happen if you were close to a black hole. Your time will slow down relative to distant objects. Light near you will move at 299,792 km/s, and light far away from you will also move at 299,792 km/s - but the length of a second will be different in the 2 locations. That allows more things to happen in 1 second for you than happen in 1 second far away, so your clock would show less time passing than a distant clock. I'm not sure what you would actually _see_ with light moving towards you up the gravitational gradient: constant speed (m/s) but with time changing. As it got closer, light from successive events might arrive with the same distance between events, therefore now less time between them - wouldn't that mean an increase the light's frequency too, so you see things move faster and turn blue? Backwards in time is even harder to imagine; things would have to "un-happen", but light ought to still move at 299,792 km/s for the local definition of a second - even if that "second" is now backwards!
Of course what's really happening is that the movie is showing you, the viewer, the passage of time in a way the director hopes you will understand, living in 1960 and not being familiar with relativity or black holes, while trying not to break the 4th wall.
College kids, beer bongs and flying cars? A nightmare looking for somebody to happen to. ROFLMAO
The crazy thing is that the 30-year time distance in the movie is almost a decade less than the time difference between today and when the movie came out.
I just posted a similar comment before reading yours.
Eagerly waiting for interstellar movie analysis!!!
I can watch this , Blade Runner and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a 100 times over, no issue........also glad you well :)
First off, welcome back.
Also, about travelling to the past: I don't think it's possible, or there would be some case observed in history.
I offer Niven's hypothesis. If A. It is possible to have a time machine for traveling into the past, and B. It is possible for the use of such a machine to alter past history somehow, where will the blizzard of time paradoxes reach a stable state? Exactly, with preventing the activation of the machine 😂 !
It's theoretically possible to turn a wormhole into a time machine but it doesn't allow travel to before it was created, so even if we manage to do this at some point in the future we won't see any travelers in the present.
Maybe the “flux” they are talking about is the flow of time, and the flux capacitor somehow stores that up? I’m clearly talking out my rear end.
Why do everyone assume that time travel requires else energy than space travel? "We need to get to the moon" "Oh, just wait for a lightning strike"
Regarding time travel and "grand parents" paradox etc, why is it nobody are considering the possibility "UFO's" are not aliens from other civilizations, but simply ourselves time traveling?
And exactly the risk of influencing on "the past" is the reason why we never manage to figure out what it is, they simply split as soon as they notice anyone observe them?
I like the idea of the many worlds theory and things like "ghosts" and ufos are things breaking through dimensions but I 100% dont belive it just one of those fun things to ponder
Absolute Champion - Thanks Michael 👌🏆 Childhood Fav.
P.S - Can we get your opinion on THHGTG and its wacky science please. Just send me the Bill 🖖
Strange detail. In the German dub, it's not a Flux Capacitor but a Flux Compensator.
Has to do with the length and sound of the words, but I always thought it makes slightly more sense. 🙂
Hmmm. The arrow of time, Times arrow. There is something you should review
well done sir
Go back and see the signing of the D of I. Well they would have been 2 days late!
D of I was actually signed on the 2nd of July.
I'm not sure the 'time travel rules' are actually fully internally consistent. For example when Marty gets back to 1985 near the end of the movie he observes his earlier self fleeing from the Libyans in the Delorean and accidentally time-travelling to 1955 - however, since our Marty who we've been watching for the entire movie has changed the past and changed the lives of his family and also clearly affected the Doc Brown of 1985 who read Marty's letter and thus knew to wear the Kevlar vest that night....all of this surely must mean that the other Marty was affected also. THAT Marty must have had a different life than 'our' Marty. While our Marty is surprised to observe all the changes in his family home the other Marty is the one who had been living with them in the meantime and, for him, it would all have been normal. So why does the movie seem to be saying that he is the exact same Marty as from the start of the movie? And when HE goes back in time shouldn't he be going back into the newly altered version of 1955 since THAT is now the past of his reality?
Bit of a plothole but I do allow it. The movie is ''timelessly'' enjoyable.
I never could figure out what makes Robert Zemeckis movies stand out until I realized its as simple as everyone is always shouting their lines.
Loved this one! If you do another movie about time, travel, please consider Predestination, based on a Robert Heinlein story!
That is an outstanding movie.
Can we consider people in New Zealand as being from the future, or in the future?
if we could drive in 3rd dimension we would all probably get to the scene of the crash faster.
My biggest issue with BttF is that you cannot accelerate while standing still (as the DeLorean does in the parking lot with Einstein on board).
I always thought that it kinda worked like releasing a pull-back motor. Doc did probably activate a seperate gear mechanism on the wheelbase to engage the already spinning drivetrain of the DeLorean. The wheelbase and drivetrain are connected in normal cars, but the Doc probably seperated these two components in the DeLorean for some reason.
Yeah i guess, give me a long unbroken take over a thousand fancy camera worky quick-quick takes any time of the day!
Please do TENET 😉
Tenet is one of those movies where the more people explained it to me, the more confused I got. :)
Michael… I love your videos and would like to interview for my column in Skeptical Inquirer online. Let me know if you are interested.
If you go to my personal website or PSU website, you'll find my e-mail details.
"... just go during the day ...." nice dead mall joke! 4 malls in this city ... one has thrived since built and still is. One failed to launch, was dead for 30yrs, then turned into a corporate campus; it's finally successful! The other two .... thrived, died, were renovated, thrived ... now one is a big-box strip and plodding along, the other has been condemned by the fire marshal. It's big anchor stores still operate (kinda), but the mall itself is a blocked off cave. I rented a room to a guy who was a commercial construction PM ... his company redeveloped dead malls, and their business was booming!
Dude. It's only a freaking movie. Dang. Get for Freaking real.
Take your knowledge and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
Movie, fiction
Why would you point out the grandma's number thing especially in a period movie series on steroids like Back To The Future... it implements the at any given moment current communication methods right into the flippin' story. I'm not a fan of this obsolescence notion when it comes to stories of a specific time (and the itching need to remake movies because of this may i say), let us have the level of intelligence required to understand what was the norm at a given time in history. It's very dangerous if people have the sincere reaction of "gramma's landline phone number WTF?!", it indicates how deeply intertwined people's minds are with stupid trendy tech, that may go any moment from changes in fashion or even some sort of global catastrophe.