Inventing Time Travel

What’s new with you? I hope you got the right balance of fun and rest during the holidays and new year! Me? I spent quite a few days of my Christmas break inventing time travel.

I know what you’re thinking -- is he writing this email from the future? So far I’ve only managed to figure out how to go forward one hour into the future... and it takes a whole hour to get there!

I can only defend my lack of success because I spent most of the time working on a story concept for time travel. My latest feature script tells of a couple that get transported back into their 11-year-old selves and must find a way back to the present, eventually having to decide if they want to choose the same path in life, or go in separate directions.

I love researching these kinds of topics to help inform my scripts, as well as procrastinate. Because I wanted to find a new way to present time travel, I started by looking at past examples, such as my original inspiration, BACK TO THE FUTURE. When that film came out, I spent hours afterwards rambling to my friends about the thrilling explosions of imagination rattling through my brain, until they realized all the time I wasted they could never get back. I continued obsessing about it for so long, that I eventually, over the course of the next several decades, wrote this email.

Time travel offers several obvious advantages. I could right wrongs before they happen or possibly prevent the horrors of history, but more importantly, I could tackle one of my biggest struggles - how to make the right decision. I have so much difficulty making simple decisions, such as which shirt to wear, or what to eat for dinner. When I worked in Atlanta, my roommate would marvel at the literal hours I would stand in front of the fridge, unable to just pick something. Problem comes from the running script in my brain that tells me the wrong decision will lead to some unimaginable catastrophe.

I know that seems crazy, but think about it -- what if I wear the blue shirt, and then two days later, I want to wear that same blue shirt. I would have to face the horror of horrors that it’s no longer available, crumbled up in the laundry basket. Welcome to adventure land of insanity, open all year long inside my brain, where you get to skip the lines and ride that rollercoaster all day and night until you cry yourself to sleep.

My intellectual side tells me that no one really cares what I wear. Many people have confirmed this truth by succinctly and repeatedly saying it aloud. In fact, why does it even matter, since all of my clothes look basically alike. Plus, it’s my actions that people will remember when I die, not the pattern I wore that one Wednesday. If I real think about it, I used to walk around Michigan Avenue dressed as a Shopping Fairy, so what am I even doing to myself with this nonsense?

Once I recognize the mind-tricking garbage of it all, I can throw something on and start my day. But, this need to control my destiny runs deep. On some level, I know I cling to the hope that I somehow can figure out how to affect the outcomes in my life - that I can choose where every decision will lead and take sole power over my destiny.

Time travel sounds like a dream superpower. I heard somewhere (a phrase I use to avoid researching what follows in too much detail) that we can only perceive time linearly as humans, whereas all time may exist all at once in infinity, and therefore it’s possible in theory to bounce around to almost any moment in time. If we figured out how to move around those points... think about it!

I have placed my time travel film in the Chicago area, so naturally, I want to take advantage of the unique possibilities of the location. When it comes to science fiction, what better local spot to set the discovery of time travel than Fermilab.

After all, the work at Fermilab in particle acceleration helped discover the top quark, one of the known elemental particles of matter in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The team at Fermilab also contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson (the “God Particle”) in 2012. These sorts of exciting discoveries will make a better understanding of the universe possible, as well as help predict the ideal Wednesday shirt for maximum enlightenment.

If we understand how we exist in the most elemental way in space, we may discover how time works. Clearly, I’m not a scientist. I’m only using these ideas peripherally as a way to have fun and tell a fantastical story. So relax, scientists.

In BACK TO THE FUTURE, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale got around the time travel by simply saying “The Flux Capacitor is what makes time travel possible.” This made up series of words flux + capacitor was a brilliant way to take two familiar words, and put them together to make something new. They didn’t even bother to explain how it works, which in some ways should be a lesson to me to not try to explain it. However, I don’t learn lessons easily, and I also love complicating everything in my life, including this sentence, for no other reason than to distract myself from the unbearable pain of making decisions.

For me, part of the excitement is imagining what’s possible. Now, let’s take our casual discussion of particle physics to the next step by introducing the tachyon particle. This hypothetical particle travels faster than light, thus defying causality according to the theory of relativity. As a result, the particle appears to travel backwards in time. When I read about a particle that could defy time, I immediately wanted to figure out a way to ride those particles like a DeLorean, so using the particle accelerator and other crazy equipment at Fermilab to somehow play a role in the story was an easy decision to make.

In reality, translating all the particles of our body into time-traveling particles, and then somehow reconfiguring them in the targeting time and place in the time-space continuum still seems in my gut like... well, that’s just not how it would work, right? A particle scientist could probably spend hours and hours showing exactly why none of these ideas make sense, but to me, it’s more interesting and fun to pose such a theory closer to the science, as opposed just throwing together two words together like “the discovery of the brand new Sargon’s particle makes time travel possible”. Plus, audiences question much more these days, and they probably would immediately shout at the screen, “aw come on, he’s just making it up.”