Stealing Time - SciFi Time Travel

[Shock]

I saw this short film today and thought it was very well done. This is not a thread about debunking time travel or the physics involved. I have a theory on key events and am interested to hear from others what they think happened.

[digsys]

The wookie did it :-) ... as for the event chain analysis .. no idea

[donotdespisethesnake]

Quite well done. Breaks the "just world" hypothesis required for Hollywood endings.

Plotwise, the inventor went back in time, shot himself, the evil guy stole the time thing. What more to say?

Molly was the star though.

[Shock]

Plotwise, the inventor went back in time, shot himself, the evil guy stole the time thing. What more to say?

That was the obvious part of the plot, don't you find it curious that the evil guy just wanted one piece?

[sleemanj]

I found it curious that the evil guy obviously went to the house expecting to take exactly that piece, because the case they had in the car waiting for it had exactly the correct shaped cutout.

But I imagine that might just be an oversight in the plot rather than intentional.

A good short film otherwise, but it hurts my head to try and follow each instance of the inventor, I think it works out correctly, but I'm not totally sure!

Primer, Timecrimes and Triangle are other good (full length) time travel involving films.

[ebastler]

This is nicely filmed, and I enjoyed the multiple iterations in a short story. But as a general rule, I dislike any story or movie which involves travelling back in time. It's just a cheap way to conjure up the typical paradoxes -- bringing knowledge from the future back to the past, modifying the future course of events, and so on. I can't be bothered with more variations on that same theme.

I'm convinced that, if time travel ever becomes a reality, we will find that it is only possible to go forward in time. Nothing wrong with that! 

[digsys]

I found it curious that the evil guy obviously went to the house expecting to take exactly that piece, because the case they had in the car waiting for it had exactly the correct shaped cutout. But I imagine that might just be an oversight in the plot rather than intentional .....

Yup, hard to tell if it was oversight, deliberate, missing a sequence etc. Too much thinking required :-)  Hope we get an answer soon :-)

[Shock]

I found it curious that the evil guy obviously went to the house expecting to take exactly that piece, because the case they had in the car waiting for it had exactly the correct shaped cutout. But I imagine that might just be an oversight in the plot rather than intentional.

It's such a huge plot hole, my theory is it must have been intentional, he knew exactly what to steal and when to show up. He also intentionally convinced the inventor to go back one last time and somehow knew this was necessary.

A good short film otherwise, but it hurts my head to try and follow each instance of the inventor, I think it works out correctly, but I'm not totally sure!

He won't be coming back in a hurry unless someone jumps in to save him.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Plotwise, the inventor went back in time, shot himself, the evil guy stole the time thing. What more to say?

That was the obvious part of the plot, don't you find it curious that the evil guy just wanted one piece?

Ah, I see what you mean. I thought
a) that was the director showing us that evil guy did not have his own invention
b) standard movie trope to save time. Even the biggest machines have a single small portable piece that can be stolen/destroyed/replaced to disable/enable the machine.

But I think the clever bit is that through most of the movie, we are seeing future evil guy, because he is swapped right after the inventor's first jump.

I guess the evil guy could have done some more jumps, since if he controls the machine he could do anything... but I don't see the need for anything else in order to explain the timeline.

[donotdespisethesnake]

This is nicely filmed, and I enjoyed the multiple iterations in a short story. But as a general rule, I dislike any story or movie which involves travelling back in time. It's just a cheap way to conjure up the typical paradoxes -- bringing knowledge from the future back to the past, modifying the future course of events, and so on.

That's why writers like it, it breaks up the linear narrative. Personally I dislike the excessive use of flash backs, and nowadays flash forwards. Like any story-telling technique, they can be over used or used badly.

[Shock]

I'm not sure what the time rules are in this particular short film are but I think it's too much a coincidence that the evil guy turns up at that exact moment prepared to steal it. As we can see from what happened in the film and other movies, it's not always a good idea to travel back yourself until you know the consequences.

But one thing I did notice was that the case in the car had a label or note on it. My theory which I think is a reasonable explanation of how the evil guy knew but was not fully up to speed, is that a future evil guy sent the case with instructions back in time, in this future he would have discovered he was not successfully funded but likely was among the first to gain access to the time travel device.

Then what may have occurred is the evil guy did successfully steal the time machine but ultimately the inventor was left alive, so he had to physically intervene to tweak the time line again. He sent his earlier self back into a time loop and was able to leave knowing he had the inventor out of the way and no doppelgangers to worry about.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Maybe, but I think you are reading too much into it. Movies have to rely on unlikely coincidences. If the evil guy turned up at a different time, or didn't go at all, then there would be no story and no movie.

[David Hess]

This is nicely filmed, and I enjoyed the multiple iterations in a short story. But as a general rule, I dislike any story or movie which involves travelling back in time. It's just a cheap way to conjure up the typical paradoxes -- bringing knowledge from the future back to the past, modifying the future course of events, and so on. I can't be bothered with more variations on that same theme.

Not all time travel stories are like that.  In some, the past is immutable but unknown.  You go back and kill your grandfather but then discover he was not your real grandfather.  You go back to kill Hitler and the gun jams.  Or you go back to kill Hitler and discover that you were behind one of the failed assassination attempts, which of course fails again.  Or maybe you find that things are much worse after killing Hitler so you deliberately take his place to prevent an even greater disaster.  You travel back in time to take advantage of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and discover that you caused it.

There are a whole multitude of plots combining this with the collapse of the wave function from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which have not been done which is too bad.  Or if you know through time travel exactly when you die, then you become immortal until that point allowing quantum miracles ... unless you interpreted it wrong; maybe you had an unknown identical twin.

I'm convinced that, if time travel ever becomes a reality, we will find that it is only possible to go forward in time. Nothing wrong with that! 

We already have that technology.  I use it every day to travel forward in time at 1 second per second.

[SiliconWizard]

I'm convinced that, if time travel ever becomes a reality, we will find that it is only possible to go forward in time. Nothing wrong with that! 

Yes, obviously this prevents all the issues that would be associated with going backwards, including all the paradoxes, the possibility of parallel realities, etc.

Not to say that there wouldn't be any potential paradox associated to going forward faster than real time, one of them being to find yourself in a world you're not ready for. This could possiblity "disrupt" the future as much as going backwards would. I guess.

[ruffy91]

We already have that technology.  I use it every day to travel forward in time at 1 second per second.

Not exactly. If you move it is >1s/s.

[SiliconWizard]

And that said, whereas transferring matter physically to the future or back to the past may never be possible (never say never  ), and/or would create intractable paradoxes, observing the past is pretty easy. We do it all the time. Everything we look at forms an image that is actually from the past. From a very short time when things are close, to a very long time ago when they are far away...

Assuming we could put camera systems very far away from the Earth that would be so good that we could see people on the surface of the Earth with them, you could see yourself in real time from years ago... or see ancient civilizations live, etc. Now that would be fun.

[David Hess]

And that said, whereas transferring matter physically to the future or back to the past may never be possible (never say never  ), and/or would create intractable paradoxes, observing the past is pretty easy.

What about normal matter traveling back in time being equivalent to antimatter?

I like the thought that the odd results we see with things like the double slit experiment and the collapse of the wave-function is a product of normal matter traveling back in time as antimatter.  Photons are their own antiparticle so it works for them also.

This also explains why the fundamental particles have the same characteristics.  Electrons all have the same mass because there is only one moving back and forth in time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality#Quantum_physics

[duak]

Fun little movie.  I'm kind of bummed out that Howard died by his own hand.  At some point in the loop he would have realized that he was going to die shortly.   Ever since I read Heinlein's  "By his Bootstraps" to my sons they/ve been interested in time travel and time loops.  They got a kick out of Stealing Time & we talked about it for a while.

As long as James isn't connected directly with the homicide, other than finding Howard's body, he should be able to get away with it.  The cel log will show Howard called him beforehand but there's no proof that James saw anything.  Molly saw James walk through the house, but she won't talk.  Some neighbours will confirm that Howard was behaving erratically and babbling about a time machine.  it'll be a mystery as to how the gun got to the table with Howard's prints clearly on it and forensics will show he didn't shoot himself at point blank range.  Police will suspect James knows more but isn't telling them.

On the physics of this: I've always been more interested or at least better at the hands on stuff vs theory. ie., auto mechanics rather than quantum mechanics.  If particles can move back in time, what about information?  Entropy or bit rot clearly happens going forward in time.  How might this affect time travel?  If something goes back in time, does its informaton content change?  Can entropy be undone and information spontaneously coalesce while moving back in time?

Cheers,

[SiliconWizard]

What about normal matter traveling back in time being equivalent to antimatter?

That's an interesting point. Not saying that I have a full grasp of what antimatter really is though beyond the mere definition. What I know so far is that antimatter is very hard to produce artificially. It is also thought at this point of knowledge that there is very little antimatter in the universe compared to the amount of normal matter. So I don't know how practical the idea of fiddling with it would be.

With your idea, would that somehow mean that in order to travel back in time, we would have to find a way to somehow transform normal matter into antimatter, without, of course, compromising the "physical" integrity of the object in question, at least not in an irreversible way? Would antimatter "materialize back" into normal matter at some point so that the object could have a material existence in the past after having traveled?

[David Hess]

What about normal matter traveling back in time being equivalent to antimatter?

That's an interesting point. Not saying that I have a full grasp of what antimatter really is though beyond the mere definition. What I know so far is that antimatter is very hard to produce artificially. It is also thought at this point of knowledge that there is very little antimatter in the universe compared to the amount of normal matter. So I don't know how practical the idea of fiddling with it would be.

Antimatter is all around us as virtual particles.

With your idea, would that somehow mean that in order to travel back in time, we would have to find a way to somehow transform normal matter into antimatter, without, of course, compromising the "physical" integrity of the object in question, at least not in an irreversible way? Would antimatter "materialize back" into normal matter at some point so that the object could have a material existence in the past after having traveled?

The point is that normal matter traveling backwards in time *is* antimatter.  I knew at one time but now I have forgotten why this idea does or does not work.


As far as the movie, I see a slight problem.  If he traveled back in time 5 minutes but did not maintain his spacial relationship with Earth, then he not only missed his neighborhood, but he missed the planet and ended up somewhere outside geosynchronous orbit.  He potentially traveled to a point almost 200,000 miles away.

[SiliconWizard]

@David Hess:

I think you lost me a bit here.

I'm mostly basing my meager knowledge of antimatter on the definitions and CERN's work and practical experiments: https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem

I barely understand what a virtual particle is, but "Antimatter is all around us as virtual particles" sounds like going a bit overboard to me. That said, again, advanced quantum physics theory looks a bit like black magic to me sometimes, so...

[duak]

Well, I for one am pleased there isn't too much real (non-virtual) antimatter laying around.  Look at the trouble caused by the particles in CMEs to satellites and terrestrial power systems.

As David points out, the Earth's motion over the 5 minute jump really should have deposited the traveller in space somewhere.  Considering just Earth's orbital velocity of 18 miles/second, given the time of day, Howard could have materialized inside the Earth.  To rescue the story, Howard must have understood General Relativity enough to displace the traveller in Space-time but can't fully or accurately compensate for relative motion during the jump.  Or maybe Earth's frame dragging is really strong perhaps even dramatically strong.

Here's a technical question: Following the vacuum lady materialization, Howard uses her phone to call James since he left his on the table in the lab.  Breaking away from the story and assuming Howard is always carrying his phone, would he be able to call himself?  There would be two completely identical phones on the same system in the same cell.  I imagine he could place a call, but would the infrastructure be able to complete the call to an identical phone?

[David Hess]

Here's a technical question: Following the vacuum lady materialization, Howard uses her phone to call James since he left his on the table in the lab.  Breaking away from the story and assuming Howard is always carrying his phone, would he be able to call himself?  There would be two completely identical phones on the same system in the same cell.  I imagine he could place a call, but would the infrastructure be able to complete the call to an identical phone?

It depends on exactly how the phone system works.  In the past, you could clone your phone and all would ring for an incoming call but I think only one could be active at a time.

As David points out, the Earth's motion over the 5 minute jump really should have deposited the traveller in space somewhere.  Considering just Earth's orbital velocity of 18 miles/second, given the time of day, Howard could have materialized inside the Earth.  To rescue the story, Howard must have understood General Relativity enough to displace the traveller in Space-time but can't fully or accurately compensate for relative motion during the jump.  Or maybe Earth's frame dragging is really strong perhaps even dramatically strong.

The same problems apply to teleportation including materializing in an atmosphere.  Where did the air go?  If it is inside of whoever traveled in time (or teleported, see below), then wouldn't they get an air embolism or at least sick?

His invention might be even more useful as a teleporter but it will destroy civilization.  If you can teleport an object to a specific point, you get a short war which lasts until civilizations bombs itself back to a pre-teleport level of technology.

Larry Niven wrote essays called "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" and "Exercise In Speculation The Theory and Practice of Teleportation" which discuss various problems and solutions.

"Timemaster" by Robert L. Forward presents a more realistic view of time travel following what I suggested earlier but without the antimatter aspect.   Brrr, cold!

[coppercone2]

in battlestar galactica the teleportation seems to displace air in a explosion fashion

as if the ship is shrunk down and rematerialized, or that at least some kind of energy displaces matter mechanically prior to the object being moved.

So the laws of acceleration would need to be different I guess, in the dimension of the teleportation point, if the ship 'appears in a blink, since things would get crushed

or maybe they teleport a small antimatter charge right before the ship is moved, who knows

maybe its like a sphere that is drawn around the object being teleported (terminator) that expands from a single point (your travel coordinate) and displaces all matter at the exit, and maybe its all nice by design where the object cannot be transformed if regular matter is there (maybe it exists as some kind of metastable different matter until its only in 1 point in space (maybe like strings)

I kind of imagined like the object is unfolded into a '2d' version (in 4d space) and 'stretched' in space along a linear axis, but if the 'stretch' (governed by universal constants of some sort) does not interact with matter or recoils back if the 'exit' is not clean. so a dimensional property we do not perceive normally is elongated and 'sprung' like a rubberband being released from one hand to the other, where we are not effected. but, if the area is not completely clean, there is not the conditions for the hand to release, so it gets elongated and snaps back rather then being displaced. a dimensions where 3d is flat

so the 'rip force' would be nonlinear in such a way that some kind of property like 'charge' (before arc break down) does not build up to overcome some kind of inertia like property.

[David Hess]

in battlestar galactica the teleportation seems to displace air in a explosion fashion

The episode where a Raptor misses and jumps into a planet indicates otherwise.

Teleporting into space largely avoids this problem because it is an extreme vacuum.  Even the parts you can see like nebula are practically a vacuum.  (1) The essay I mentioned from Niven specifically discusses this.

Galactica jumping into an atmosphere is a different matter.

(1) Sorry Star Trek 2, the Enterprise cannot hide in the Mutara Nebula.  But the White Star can definitely hide in Jupiter's atmosphere.