Hi there, readers!
I love everything related to Physics and Chemistry. So, in my first article, I’ll talk to you about time travel, films and novels about them, etc. Stories about the time and the possibility of control it at human will have filled novel pages and film plots all over time. Trilogies like Back to the Future or Terminator, or the various versions of The time machine or The Planet of the Apes, have explored the magic of time travels and the incredible events that can cause the clash of civilizations in several epoch, or the problems and paradoxes involved in time travel.
I’ll talk about some of the many films that involve time travel or time jumps:
It’s a film which doesn’t leave anybody indifferent. It’s necessary to watch it a few times (or just once if you don’t want to understand anything) to actually know what is hapenning. If you can understand it all, and chronologically order it, then you’re a genius. I will explain why:
Leonard is the main character of the film. We only know about him that he has no short-term memory and that the only thing he remembers is the murder and rape of his wife. The movie is based, then, in the search of her murderer, but with many problems due to his memory. To try to solve it, he writes tips to himself that he doesn’t recognize later, he takes pictures of his car, his house… During the film some characters appear and “help” finding the murderer. Several unconnected parts from this mix where nothing is what it seems to be.
What is the problem of the movie? That, basically, the story is not told in order, and that is what makes it attractive and disconcerting at the time, and this is why I recommend it to you…
Primer
A real craziness, of which only a little sinopsis can be given. Everything else is imposible. Two engineers make a machine that is able to reduce the apparent mass of an object, and apply that to time travel. If you have seen Memento, this movie is even more intricate.
Paycheck
Film based in the Philip K. Dick short story, it tells the story of a great researcher (Ben Affleck) specialized in high-technology projects. When he finishes a work that takes him five years, he gets his memory cleared so he couldn’t reveal his work to another company. But when he ends the project, he gets a packet of useless objects instead of his money. He is told that he rejected to retrieve his work. Because his memory has been cleared (the standard procedure), he can’t do anything. But the objects in the packet are linked to some events that happened to him before he lost his memory, and along the film he will start remembering, with a woman’s help (Uma Thurman)…
The most amazing part of the film, that isn’t revealed until the end, is the machine created by the researcher…
The film tries to show us that the most deadly weapon ever devised is the vision of the future of humanity itself.
A movie to watch in the living room with popcorn, nothing more. The plot runs continuously throughout the film, which is fine because you don’t get bored at any moment, but focuses too much on action (standard Hollywood action), not on the philosophical background of the film. But they publicise the film very well. On the cover of the film says: “They paid him to forget a past that now depends on the future.”
Back to the future
What would we be without this film and the legendary sentence:
- Doc, have you made a time machine with a DeLorean?
The film is about a teenager, Marty McFly, a friend of Doc, a scientist who invents crazy things and few of them actually work. When Doc creates a machine to travel back in time with a DeLorean car, Marty accidentally travels to 1955. There he met their parents when they were young, and by accident, makes them impossible to meet. Thereafter, and with time against him, McFly must make his parents fall in love so he wouldn’t dissapear.
The film shows one of the classic questions of time travel: If you change the past, can it cause some disastrous changes in the future? There are lots of unknowns about the real problems and disadvantages of time travel.
But for now, what most concerns me, is to create a machine that allows me to travel in that fourth dimension…
The time machine
There are tons of versions of this film, based in the Hebert George Wells novel, who is, together with Julio Verne, the creator of Science Fiction literature. The novels tell us about the skepticism of a XIX century scientific’s friends, because he discovers the space “fourth dimension” (the Time) and builds a vehicle able to travel physically through time. With the intention of discover the future of the humankind, he travels to the year 802,701. What is his dissappointment, that instead of finding advanced, well-structed civilizations, he finds a race (the Eloi), lacking intelligence and physical strength. They just survive, because the underground is dominated by a sinister race, the Morlock, another branch of the human species that got used to living in darkness and come out at night to hunt Eloi. The inventor, after a series of events, manages to return home and tell his friends his experience… The different versions respect to the same novel are so disparate (and they don’t live up to the novel), that really doesn’t make sense to focus on one.
Of course, I left many other films, like The Planet of the Apes, Terminator, Timeline, the recent TV series Flash Forward, etc… but it would be impossible to make an exhaustive list.
I’ll finish my triple entry (movies, books and science) with a time-travel paradox:
Imagine that you’ve just invented the time machine (or that it exists, but only you can let it work). Then you think “I’m going to steal one of the most famous paintings in the world!”, Mona Lisa’s Smile, for example. Then you travel to the past, before the painting was created, you expose it and you become famous and rich.
Does anybody know what is the problem in this statement? You can write your approach in a comment. In a few days, I’ll give “the solution”.
See you!
Yo creo que no te harías ni famoso ni rico, ya que el cuadro no sería conocido ya que no ha sido creado, ya que lo has robado…
Además, y ésta es una opinión personal, como creo que todos los acontecimientos están ligados entre sí de manera que la realidad en la que vivimos es gracias a todos ellos, si robásemos el cuadro la realidad actual podría ser completamente diferente. ¡Y es que la sola presencia de alguien del futuro al pasado ya puede cambiarlo todo! Eso es lo que creo yo.
Voy a dejar que la gente diga sus opiniones, pero la línea de razonamiento es esa. En la entrada doy una pequeña “pìsta”
El problema de ese enunciado… pues… se me ocurre…
-Que si viajas antes de que se crease el cuadro no lo puedes robar
Y no sé, menos obvio sería que el éxito de un cuadro depende de la fama de su autor (?), ni idea xD
[...] Los viajes en el tiempo en el cine http://www.barail.es/cine/time-travels-movies por Moussenger hace 2 segundos [...]
Si robas la Mona Lisa en la época actual y viajas en el tiempo, cambiará el pasado, por lo que en el presente no supondrá un problema el haber robado el cuadro pues se alterará según como camie el pasado.
Y si la expones antes de que lo cree Da Vinci, tal vez Da Vinci se inspire en ese cuadro y pinte otra mona lisa distinta, o que de la casualidad que se pintasen casualmente el mismo cuadro, en cuyo caso Da Vinci sería acusado de plagio pero tú no podrías defender la obra de arte ante las preguntas ajenas porque no sabes en qué se basó Da Vincipara pintar eso. Y si consigues defender el cuadro ante la crítica, te harás famoso. Pero nacerás medio milenio más tarde y descubrirás que tu nombre aparece en tu libro de historia del arte.