The main premise of the movie revolves around time travel - although the plot doesn't really try to deal with some of the paradox issues, and really gets lazy at the end to resolve the overall situation, but it did get me thinking about time travel again - one of my pet mind-projects. Slipstream features the same guy as in Harrison Bergeron, which is where I remember him from, but just realized that he was also Sam in the Lord of the Rings. There were a couple of good lines, for example, after boarding a plane: "The seatbelts work like every other seatbelt, and if you can't figure out how to use them, then you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised." Touching on another pet interest - being responsible for yourself...
Online review, and my ranking.
Other movie attempts at time travel that are a little better at dealing with the related issues include Millennium with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd (that should be a hint right there...), and Freejack which featured Mick Jagger - for the first time that I noticed him in film... And of course, many of the Star Trek series episodes from all of the different versions have tried to deal with the intricacies of time travel, with varying degrees of success.
Now on to time travel. One thing that I haven't quite reconciled yet is maintaining the net overall amount of energy in the universe. If you subscribe to the notion that you can't create or destroy matter/energy, then time travel becomes problematic. If tonight at midnight I take a 10-ton block of lead into my time machine and travel back to yesterday, then there would be a net difference in matter/energy between tomorrow and yesterday along the existing time line. Tomorrow's universe would be 10-tons lighter, and yesterday's universe would be 10-tons heavier. Part of me thinks that this might create a black hole or worm hole that would try to funnel matter/energy from the now heavier yesterday back into the lighter tomorrow. Then there is the theory that there are infinite alternate universes, so the yesterday that now contains the 10-ton lead block is just the continuation of this time line in another dimension. I don't quite get this thinking - I haven't thought about it enough to understand it, but there you go.
As far as the possibility of time travel, I believe that we are very close to being able to travel forward in time already. Years ago I had heard of a hamster being frozen and revived, and now with the wonderful power of the internet, I have found supporting documentation. Apparently Dr. Paul Segall was the big researcher in this area until he passed in June of 2003, but the company he started continues his research, with reports of animals being frozen and then revived after a few hours. What does this have to do with time travel? Well, if a person were frozen for 500 years and then revived, they would have traveled forward in time - from their perspective. They would be the same "age" and have the same memories, but they would now be living in 2506. I consider that to be time travel. Now, going backward in time would seem to suggest that going fast would result in backward travel. I'm not sure... Let's say I drink a whole lot of coffee and my body speeds up to be traveling at the speed of light. At this point it would appear to me that everything had stopped and I would be moving around within this freeze-framed world. Going a little bit faster and I think it would appear as if I was going backward in time as I passed back through all of the light waves/particles - in other words it would be like looking at the frames of a movie on film in reverse order. But, I think I would only be seeing the reversal of the light reflecting on the objects in the world, the object would not actually be moving backward... Hmmm... This creates another interesting situation - we don't actually see the objects in our world, we see a time-delayed image of them generated from light reflecting off of them to our eyes. Same as looking at a star in the sky - if the star is several light-years away, what we see today happened years ago. Though we are seeing the past, it does not change the present for the objects on and around that star.
Enough, I know Joe stopped reading a while ago...
No comments:
Post a Comment