Spring Break
Science fantasy: Time travel isn't happening, get over it
Time travel is impossible. Hollywood needs to realize this.
By: Abid Mujtaba
Issue date: 6/30/08 Section: Opinion
In a darkened theatre punctuated by the slow crunching of popcorn, the audience gazes in wonder as our hero steps in to a time machine to right the past and save the future, and I cringe. I have lost count of the number of times Hollywood has left me in a black depression when they decide to send someone back in time.
This is supposed to be science fiction, the stress should be laid on the first word: "science," not "fiction." The genre demands that we take leaps of fancy but that our imagination remains grounded in known fact, that we retain the baby as we throw out the bathwater. This is an essential element of any fiction, and much more so when it comes to sci-fi, that the story, the new ideas be connected with our common experience; that they grow upon them. Science fiction is supposed to be on the cutting edge, just on the verge of happening, give or take a few centuries.
Hollywood's problem is of course the light-hearted way in which they approach technical details - its penchant for providing for the lowest common denominator in the audience. When it comes to time machines the concept of causality seems to be alien to them. Causality, for the uninitiated, is one of the holiest physical principles that we think the universe obeys: that all causes precede their effects. Use time travel to violate causality and you have all sorts of nasty time-travel paradoxes on your hands.
Let us take "The Terminator" for instance. I am a huge fan of the second installment, but that doesn't change the fact that they took great liberties with the space-time continuum in the plot. Rest assured, if you are alive today then no one can go back in time and kill you in the past. Your being alive today means that any attempts to kill you in the past by cybernetic organisms sent by evil artificial intelligentsia have necessarily failed, otherwise how could you be here. This view of time travel revolves around the absoluteness of time. It says that what has happened, has happened; what will happen, will happen, nothing can change that, all time travel has already been incorporated in to this and it all works out in a nice self-consistent way.
This is supposed to be science fiction, the stress should be laid on the first word: "science," not "fiction." The genre demands that we take leaps of fancy but that our imagination remains grounded in known fact, that we retain the baby as we throw out the bathwater. This is an essential element of any fiction, and much more so when it comes to sci-fi, that the story, the new ideas be connected with our common experience; that they grow upon them. Science fiction is supposed to be on the cutting edge, just on the verge of happening, give or take a few centuries.
Hollywood's problem is of course the light-hearted way in which they approach technical details - its penchant for providing for the lowest common denominator in the audience. When it comes to time machines the concept of causality seems to be alien to them. Causality, for the uninitiated, is one of the holiest physical principles that we think the universe obeys: that all causes precede their effects. Use time travel to violate causality and you have all sorts of nasty time-travel paradoxes on your hands.
Let us take "The Terminator" for instance. I am a huge fan of the second installment, but that doesn't change the fact that they took great liberties with the space-time continuum in the plot. Rest assured, if you are alive today then no one can go back in time and kill you in the past. Your being alive today means that any attempts to kill you in the past by cybernetic organisms sent by evil artificial intelligentsia have necessarily failed, otherwise how could you be here. This view of time travel revolves around the absoluteness of time. It says that what has happened, has happened; what will happen, will happen, nothing can change that, all time travel has already been incorporated in to this and it all works out in a nice self-consistent way.
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