ANOTHER DAY IN PARADOX
Wormholes, parallel universes, the space-time continuum… Could any of the time-travel scenarios we see in film actually happen? Top physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili does the maths on some classic movies to tell Total Film what might be possible - and what’s definitely not…
WORDS RICHARD EDWARDS
Time travel in movies always throws up big questions. Could you interfere with your own history? Do parallel universes exist? Is a DeLorean really the best car to build a time machine out of? Frankly, they are mysteries that could blow the average human mind, so Total Film has tracked down someone who really knows what he’s talking about to find out which movies get the science right - and wrong.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili is a top theoretical physicist, as well as being the host of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, and many a science documentary on BBC Four. He’s also watched plenty of time-travel films.
“I’m not one of these people who storms out of a cinema if the science is wrong,” he tells Total Film. “I appreciate it when they take some notice of the science, and you can always tell when movies have talked to a science consultant and listened to them. But there are other science-fiction films where it’s just fun and not meant to be taken seriously. If it’s a good story, I can enjoy it. But if it’s an awful story as well as being a bad science premise like, I dunno, Hot Tub Time Machine, that’s just a waste of my life!”
PLANET OF THE APES 1968
TIME-TRAVEL JOURNEY Cigar-chewing astronaut George Taylor and his brave crew leave Earth on the Icarus, a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light. By the time they land, 2,000 years have passed on Earth - and the planet is ruled by damn dirty apes.
JIM’S VERDICT “There’s nothing violating the laws of physics there. Einstein has two theories of relativity and the Planet Of The Apes scenario is special relativity. That’s your E=mc2, where time is the fourth dimension, nothing travels faster than light, and time slows down if you travel close to the speed of light - it’s called time dilation. Less time elapses for you, more time elapses on Earth, and when you come back to Earth, a lot more time has gone by. Travelling close to the speed of light and slowing time down is no big deal, we do that all the time in particle accelerators - it’s just that we haven’t built any spacecraft that can travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Essentially [in Planet Of The Apes] they’ve travelled into the future, though whether you can call it actual time travel is debatable - some people say that if you want to travel into the future, the future has to already be there waiting for you.”