The science of time travel television

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Speaker 1: Hey, Daniel, are you enjoying all the good TV shows out there? There's definitely a lot to watch. But as a physicists, are you able to enjoy some of these and turn your physics brain off mostly except when it really challenges me with exceptional nonsense? You mean plot wise or science wise? Is there a difference? I mean plots have to be scientific, otherwise they're not plots. I think by definition, creativity is not scientific. I think by definition, plots rely on cause and effect, which is the root of all science. Are you talking about time trouble? That is one of the worst offenders. It makes me wish I could travel back in time and talk to the writers before they make both choices. Wait, wait, what wouldn't that create a paradox? Like if you go back in time and prevent them from writing the show, then you wouldn't have seen the show. That sounds pretty good to me. Actually, that sounds like a good plot. Yeah, they would make your life nonsensical. My life already feels nonsensible. Then you're going to get a low rating on rotten tweatoes my own review of the scientific validity of my own life. But what if you go back in time and prevent yourself from watching the show. That could sort of work, right, or I guess technically to make sense, you would still have to watch it, in which case you'll be watching it over and over again and again and again in an infinite loop that sounds like a nightmare. I mean, you just watch it until you finally like it, and I would break you out of the loop that might take forever. I am poor Hamming cartoonists and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at U C Irvine, and I give every science fiction show one episode to win me over. Wow, you have you watch every pilot of every single science we can show out there? Is that part of your job as a physicist or is this just a personal vendetta. I'm not saying that I watch every show that exists, but every science fiction show that I do watch, I really give it the benefit of doubt for an episode to prove that it makes some sense, and if it doesn't hook you in, you stop watching it. If the plot is nonsense, then the story is just not compelling because anything can happen at any time, and so why even watch who cares what the characters do. So your attention span is basically what one hour. What if it's a slow bill. Slow bill is fine as long as it makes sense in the first episode. If they make a bunch of rules and then break them already in the first episode, I'm out. I see. So you're watching Alice in Wonderland. You're like stoves down next Daniel Pan's great literature. That's exactly, but it seems like But anyways, Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of My Heart Radio in which we try to explain and describe the universe, of which I am a great fan because so far the universe seems to make some sense. There are lots of cases where the universe does something that we do not yet understand, but by application of our mental framework and our mathematical models, and our sheer persistence and stubbornness, we have always been able to understand everything that we observe. It seems to be some sort of logic behind the universe, some rules that it follows, and those rules we can uncover. And on this podcast we do our best to explain what we do and do not know about those rules to you in our universe and in fictional universes. That's right. It is a pretty engrossing universe, full of interesting plot twists and characters and amazing world building. I mean, what could be a bigger world built than the entire universe? I guess technically the multiverse is bigger than the universe, right, so Marvel is bigger than reality. It's like multiple seasons of the universe make up the multiverse. But I feel like Danny, you're saying that you like the universe because it makes sense, but maybe you don't like people because people don't know. People do make sense. Just because we don't understand it yet doesn't mean they don't make sense. I mean, are you suggesting that people don't follow some laws of physics, that we are like exempt somehow from natural laws of the universe. I'm saying, if you read the news these days, it's hard to find any sense and anything people do these days. I think that there's two kind of things out there, things we understand and things we don't yet understand. Well, understanding things is what we are here, and that's what this podcast is all about. We try to look at the universe and try to find sense of it, even if it sometimes doesn't make sense completely. We hope that one day science will unravel all of the mysteries of the universe, but there may be a fundamental limit to human capacity to understand the cosmos. After all, your dog probably doesn't understand the universe as well as we do, and so unless you assume the humans are infinitely intelligent or maximally intelligent, it might be that the universe can't escape our understanding. Well, I feel like dogs look happier than humans a lot of the times, so maybe they figure out something we haven't. Ignorance is bliss, that's what dogs have figured out. But scientists are not the only ones trying to make sense of the universe or try to paint a picture of the universe that makes sense. There are also creative artists and writers trying to make science fiction television and films that let us think about these awesome ideas about the universe. And I think there's an underappreciated overlap between the creative efforts of storytellers and the descriptive powers of scientists. In the end, science is not a dry list of facts. It's an explanation of the universe in the sense we aren't telling stories. We're saying this mass mood because there was a force on it. That's a story about what happened to the mass. So science, in the end is a story that humans tell to each other to explain the universe that they see around them. Here's why this happened, Here's why it reigned last Wednesday, Here's why you don't have anything to eat for dinner tonight. And in the same way, creative types are telling stories in fictional universes, wondering what stories can exist and what human experiences might be like in other universes where the rules are different. But I feel Daniel, isn't that sort of anti scientific to go into science and expecting things to make sense? Shoulding you, as a scientist, go into it with a completely open mind to maybe the possibility the universe doesn't make sense. I think if you're going to take a scientific approach, you have to assume that science works, and it might fail at some point, but so far it's been pretty successful. There are a lot of really interesting assumptions at the foundation of science. You know that empiricism works, that we can test theories that scientific laws don't change with times, so we can do an experiment now and a hundred years from now we get the same answer. One of those might one day fail and that would be a fascinating philosophical discovery. Yeah, that'd be quite the plot twist. I wonder if then you would give it a negative review. To the universe. You go online and like, you know, try to get try to lowerd ron Tomato score. Somebody cancel season two of this universe. I'm not a fan. It doesn't apply to me. I don't like it. My standards are pretty low, really, I just want you to have rules and follow them. So far, the universe is satisfying that pretty basic requirement. If it breaks that, if it turns out the universe is just random nonsense fundamentally, deep down, I will admit to being disappointed. But we've we've sort of feared that out happen. We I mean, at the quantum level, things are random, aren't they. Well, there is randomness, but there's not nonsense. Quantum mechanics does predict the future. It's deterministic about the probability distribution for the future that is fixed in stone, just which branch of that probability is random. But that doesn't mean it's nonsense, right, it still makes some sense. That's why quantum mechanical things like transistors in your phones are working. Right now, I feel like you're saying that nonsense makes sense because that makes you a sleep better at night. As a scientist, I'm saying there's nuances of nonsense. I see, there's the there's a sense of sense and nonsense. But we do like to talk about the creative efforts of writers and novelists and filmmakers who try to paint interesting pictures about the universe who I think, like you said, it's sometimes take interesting ideas from science and then try to extrapolate that and see how far you can push those ideas. Yeah, and one of our earliest episodes was about the fiction of time travel, where we analyze the physics of it, and recently on our discord server, a bunch of listeners asked if we would do another episode on more recent time travel fiction. Yeah, so to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling the science of time travel television. Now, is this going to have a cliffhanger at the end if it is really like television? Well, this is episode two right of the time travel television series. So I hope this is going to be a third episode, episode two? Or is this a sequel? It's so hard to tell these days. Well, if time travel is possible, then does the order even really matter? If time doesn't matter, does anything matter? But the way you announced the title of the episode made me think that the television itself was traveling in time, Like, hey, can we watch TV tonight? Now? The television went back to nineteen fifties. It's not here right now. Well, no, I said time travel television. I didn't say time traveling television. That would be maybe a good show. That would be time travel television, The Adventures of a time traveling Television. Yeah, but what programs does it show? Like? Does it carry does it bring the shows from a certain time back to different spots in time? Or is it stuck in the middle ages streaming another? Well, can the Internet broadcast through time or does it need like a really long time traveling cable. M Well, that is the plot of that movie I was talking to you recently called Beyond the Infinite two minutes. All right, well, don't spoil it for me. It's on my two watch list and maybe we will talk about it in the third edition of Time Travel Science Fiction Science Reviewed. It will be like another sequel. We'll go back in time and do it first, so we are prequel. We technically did it first. It wouldn't be a prequel, it just be the first one. Oh that's right. Prequels you do afterwards that they're slotted in time doing it. Yes, yes, and they're usually not better. Yeah, we'll call the time travel menace. So today we'll be talking about the science fiction of time travel and a couple of interesting television shows that have been out recently. And I guess we'll give it. What kind of rating do we give it? Daniel for our glasses for time traveling televisions for physics thumbs up. That sounds good because between us we have four thumbs. I mean, I haven't seen you recently, but last I remember you had two thumbs. Yes, but I'm not a physicist. A podcast and these shows we're reviewing are the ones requested by folks on our discord, sir, So if you'd like to interact with us, ask questions, and suggest topics for future episodes, please don't be shy. Jump over to discord and join the conversation. You can find the link on our website at www dot Daniel and Jorge dot com. All right, well, let's maybe start talking just generally about time travel. Daniel, What I physicists think of time trouble? Is it possible? There's not actually agreement on this question. Most physicists think time travel is probably impossible because it violates something really simple and basic that we think is part of all science, and that is causality. That the past causes the future, that the future is determined by the past plus some quantum mechanical randomness, and that it doesn't go the other direction. And so if causality is a thing, then the past can't be a function of the future. You can't change the past from the future. It's really pretty basic if you believe in causality. Right. Well, although I think you know, technically time travel is possible. We're all traveling through time right now, right, I think maybe we need to maybe a specify a little bit. What do you mean by time travel because we were technically traveling time right now? Right? Yeah? Sure, so sort of normal physics, we have three dimensional space x, y, and z, and then we have this weird fourth dimension time. And while in space we can move backwards and forwards. You can go to the same spot over and over again in time for reasons we don't really understand, you can sort of only slide into forward direction. So technically the whole universe versus value of time, the location of now is changing all the time rights sliding forward, So we are moving forwards in time. We're not being stationary in time. So in that sense, we are traveling in time. But from that perspective, all TV is time travel TV. So I think more specifically, we're considering alternative views where you can somehow move around the timeline or change the timeline, or jump back and forth. Right like you can skip along time, like suddenly be here and one time and then the next a few thousand years in the future, or a few thousand years in the past. Right skipping around time maybe should be called time skipping maybe. And I get why this is an attractive idea. People are being creative and trying to imagine crazy ways the universe might be, But I'm not sure they're always doing the necessary work to make sure that their fictional universe actually hangs together, is actually self consistent. Right now, when you say a lot of physics think time travel is impossible or time skipping isn't possible. Is that really true though, Like, isn't it possible to skip through time and still be consistent and still respect causality. So there are a couple possible wrinkles, Like obviously you can skip forward in time without breaking causality, right, Like I can maybe disappear and appear a thousand years in the future and that wouldn't break any logical rules. Right, Well, how you be appearing a thousand years in the future, you know, what is the mechanism for your appearance there? That moment when you appear has to be caused by the moments before that. Like in quantum mechanics, the future is determined by the past. There's this evolution of the wave function of the universe, and things don't just appear, right. Information in the universe is not just arbitrarily created or destroyed. It's a function of the past. So for things to just disappear for a thousand years and then appear, it doesn't really make sense. I don't know it could in my future appearance be caused by my presence state. You could cook something up, like Jorge goes into a black hole like thing where you imagine he's no longer really part of the universe, and then that black hole evaporates in a thousand years and you or the information that is equivalent to you somehow comes out of it. And so maybe technically you can imagine that's not really part of our universe anymore. But really it still is. For you to reappear in the future, there has to be a cause of that, and that cause has to immediately proceeded. You know, the universe we think is local the way, like something that happens here can't affect something that's happening super far away. Things now can affect the immediate future, which then affects the immediate future. But you can't just like skip forward and say something that's happening now can affect the deep future without affecting the intermediate time points. Right, things have to be sort of connected to each other in physics. But isn't there also the idea of like a wormhole. Couldn't a wormhole take you into the future. Yeah, so here the weird little cracks that might allow time travel to happen. According to our understanding of general relativity, you can do things like build wormholes where you have places in space that do exactly that. You can connect distance places in space. You can have a place here which is somehow usually connected to a place somewhere else. It's not like a literal tube. It's like that location is now just connected to this location, so that, for example, if you create a ripple here, it also gets created over there. You should think of it as like a non simple weaving of the fabric of space. If you imagine space is like a bunch of places in space that are all connected to the neighboring places, like pixels on the screen, this would be like a weird connection between two little dots. And so if wormholes are a thing, and general relativity says they can be, it is possible to turn them into time machines by taking one end of it, making it go really fast, and then like the time dilation effects, give you a wormhole which connects two different points in time, not just two different points in space. M So it is possible then, as far as we know, to travel into the future, and wormhole would allow you to travel into the future are also into the past. There's another wrinkle in general relativity that allows this. They're called closed time like curves. We have a whole episode of about how those work, and briefly they involved how general relativity bends your light code in the presence of great masses, and we think that if you've made, for example, an infinitely long spinning cylinder of dust, you might create the circumstances that allow you to go through a loop in time where you go back in time and then loop back to the present state, and you're stuck in this loop forever. These are theoretical. Nobody's ever observed these, and most physicists think that they probably represent the breakdown of general relativity, not an actual prediction for what would be possible in our universe. I think probably quantum effects prevent these things from actually happening. But as far as we know, then you're saying that you could also have a wormhole that takes you back into the past, So time travel is technically possible backboards and forwards. I think that's true with a couple of legalistic caveats. Right, according to our best current theory of physics, those things are not disallowed. But we also strongly suspect that our best current theory of physics is wrong about exactly those aspects of the universe, so we don't really know. It's definitely a question mark. Definitely not disallowed. Is all we need now to have an interesting, interesting conversation here. All right, Well, let's get into the science fiction of time travel of several popular shows that are being played right now on the internet and on broadcast TV. But first, let's take a quick break. Alright, we're talking about the science of time travel television, not time traveling television, more about the television that's about time travel, because it's a popular topic, right for a lot of shows. It is a popular topic. You see a lot these days. Maybe almost too much? Oh too much? Wow? Is it possible to have too much of anything in our current culture? I don't know. I've definitely had too much ice cream some days. Impossible, impossible. But there are a lot of interesting shows that deal with time travel, uh, and so we'll tackle them one by one, and let's start with the first one here, the Umbrella Academy, which streams on Netflix. Yeah, this is a really fun show. Have you seen it? I have. I was actually a big fan of the comics, you know, to ten fifteen years ago, way way back in the day. So the current TV show is a TV show based on a comic book which was written by a punk rock artist. So there's multiple nested creative loops there. I love one one genre inspires another, and so it's the TV show a fair representation of the ideas in the comic book. They definitely did more, you know, they had to add more storyline and more drama to it, but I'd say the general feel of it is is pretty pretty close. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting universe because the rules are definitely very flexible, and lots of stuff happens that's never really explained. You know. You have the creation of these kids with special powers through some mysterious process which I don't know. Maybe it's and to get explained sometime deep in season seven, sort of left as a background mystery for the whole show, which is fine. I love that it makes me curious about the universe that the show takes place in, so that's fun. Yeah, the show definitely throws a lot at you, Like, in this world in this story, the characters that have superpowers, and there's time travel, and there's like a talking monkey and there's a AI robot. Also, it's like what else can you throw into a sci fi show. Yeah, there's a ghost, right, there's a ghost. That's right, there's a ghost. Yes. Oh man, this this show has it all. Yeah, it does feel sort of like a smoothie of culture. You know. They're just like threw everything into the blender and they're like, what happens when we have all these characters here at once? Yeah, it's pretty wild. I like the second season more than the first one, I think. But the plot is that there are these kids that are mysteriously born with superpowers throughout the world, right, and then one eccentric billionaire somehow manages to collect it's seven or eight of them, and it tops them m and gives very creative names like number four, number five, number six, numbering their children. Who would do that? My dad did, what what number are you? I'm number two? I'm the best number. Do you sometimes introduce it to people are saying, this is my number one, this is my number two, it's my number three. Well, I sometimes meet Italians whose names are like Primo and Ultimo, and I'm like, that's interesting. First kid, last kid? Is that where those names come from? Oran, They're just the ultimate kid. But you probably do it all the time too, right, you say, this is my oldest child, this is my youngest child. Right, I only have two, so I just introduced them by their names. But I remember my younger brother making a big deal about being called the youngest brother and not the little brother. For him, that was a big distinction. Wait, which one did he want to be? He wanted to be the younger brother. He thought little brother was like diminutive. Somehow sounds like you have some fun family dynamics there, definitely anyway in this story, it's kid number five who's of interest to us because he's not a ghost, he's not an AI robot, he's not super strong, but he possesses the ability to move through time and space, so he can sort of teleport from spot to spot, and he can also jump forwards or backwards in time. Pretty powerful stuff. Yeah, well, it's the sort of starts that he can teleport in space, right, and then he starts experiment with jumping in time more and more each like bigger time jumps. And then one day he jumps too far or too much and he gets stuck in the in the future or the past. Well, he jumps forward finding like this post apocalyptic future, you know, like the future Earth, where a lot of people have died and he's basically alone, and he gets stuck there. He lives there for decades until he finds his way back to what's I guess the present. In the main narrative of the show, right, he gets stuck because he somehow couldn't jump back or something, and then he actually ages out there in the post apocalypt the future. He becomes an old man, but then somehow when he jumps back into the present time, he's back to being a kid, and it's something cool there about how it's inherent, So he doesn't really understand how it works, and he's not great at controlling it, which makes sense to me. If this is something like biological then every skill we have is something we have to develop and practice. You know, even the way you learn to walk. You're pretty clumsy when you're one and two, and then by the time you're thirty five you can run and jump and do all this stuff without thinking about it. So for a kid with these abilities, it makes sense that they would still be exploring it and still sort of getting grips on how to do it. And so he jumps back into the present time and then he tries to warn everyone that there's going to be an apocalypse, right, because he lived in the apocalypse and so he tried he's trying to stop the apocalypse. Yeah, so that's the driving narrative of the show. He has seen the future and it is terrible, and he's trying to figure out what he can do to avert it. Right. And he's a pretty funny character because he's like an old man stuck in the body of a twelve year old. Yeah, and I never really understood that part, like if he comes back in time, why is his mind still sixty years old or whatever, but his body has become twelve again. That never really made sense to me. Yeah, they never explained that, Nor do they explain the poking monkey or the robot. It's kind of a show that charges ahead. It does, though, you know, there have to be explanations for you to buy in if they want you to care. For example, that he can avert this apocalypse, so you have to know something about what the rules are of averting the apocalypse, so you can have a sense for is he succeeding or is he failing or can he just snap his fingers At the end of the season and get it done in a second. Right, So he's trying to prevent the apocalypse, which means this is the kind of science fiction universe or time travel science fiction universe where you can change what happens in the universe. Right. Yeah, it's like a single timeline world where you can go back in time and change the future. So it's got these sort of causal loops in it. He goes into the future, he learned something, he takes that information back into the present again, and then changes the future. So the future that he experienced he hopes never happens. That's kind of the driving narrative of the show, where or a lot of these shows, it is like can you change the future? Can you avert the apocalypse that somebody experienced in the future. Yeah, They certainly leave the audience wondering, And when I'm watching, I'm wondering, like is it technically possible or is it just something that we don't know if he's going to be able to accomplish, Like is it even feasible in his universe to change the future or is this one of those setups like in Harry Potter where the time loops are part of the timeline from the beginning, and so everything is inevitable, And so I get a little confused watching these like what kind of universe are we in? What are the rules here? So I can know whether to care, Like are they trying for something that's impossible or what do they have to accomplish in order to achieve your goals? It gets me a little confused sometimes, right, And in this universe, there's also like a like a time bureau, like a big somehow bureaucracy that somehow has the job of making sure that the timeline stay intact. Yeah, they call it the Commission, And it's a bunch of like bureaucrats in an office somewhere who are responsible for maintaining the like natural order of time, whatever that means. There's a mysterious organization that has like a plan for how they want the future to go, and their agents appear in moments sort of craft that future. And those agents don't have the same inherent capabilities that Kid number five does. They transport through time using some mechanical device this briefcase that they used to go from point to point on the timeline right right, And the head of this agency is a person with a fish bowl for a head with a talking goldfish in it. Right. Also, never we're talking about here, folks, there's a character whose head is a fish bowl and there's a goldfish in it. The talks and Daniels complaining about the time trouble. I did like the fish bowl head. That was pretty funny. You give the thumbs up. Yeah, that was creative. And the fact that this was all from the brains of a punk rocker, you know, maybe that does explain a lot. I'm not sure sort of what substances this creator was on when it came up with these visions. Oh, that's a that's a hefty accusation there, Daniel. Are you saying you can't be creative about chemical support? Well, I've tried to leave it broad, you know, just said substances. Maybe they just need breakfast. I don't know, but I'm trying to leave it broad. Yes. So then, how would you rate the time travel in this show? Thumbs up, thumbs out? I guess it depends on the standard. It's definitely a fun, freewheeling show and creatively sort of very open world, sort of anything can happen. I do get a little confused about whether I should care about what happens, Like, is it inevitable? Does it not matter what they do, they're gonna end up in the same future. Do they have to worry about things like paradoxes because if you can go back in time and change the past and the future that created the past, changing you no longer exists. Um. They actually try to address that in this show. Whenever you come near like another version of yourself, you suffer from this condition called paradox psychosis, which is sort of like plot armor to prevent you from really talking to yourself in the past too much. So I would give it sort of like half thumbs up. It's definitely fun to watch, but it's not really like rigorously thought out time travel. M Yeah, I guess without spoiling it too much, it is possible in this universe to change the future, right, and so that's what they're talking about, Like if you go back and shoot your grandfather, that's going to create a paradox, and that's gonna somehow drive you crazy. I'm not sure that's my interpretation at the end of the first season at least, but I suppose we can't get too much into the details without spoiling it for everybody. All right, Well, this show has a half a thumb up or a half a half a thumb down, or half a thumb up and a half a thump down, one thumb knuckle up, yes, one thumb knuckle off, all right, not to have thumbs up. So just a quarter a quarter of the possible rating you could give it. I think that's fair. But it's definitely fun to watch. Yeah, I'm yeah, totally if you like superheroes, robots, talking monkeys, talking fish, and time table also the civil rights movement. That's a big part of season two. It's got it all history. I really did enjoy that it touched on big moments in history, you know, the jfk assassination. That kind of stuff. Makes it feel like it's revealing some truth that we might not have understood about the universe. So there's a little bit of the aura of the power of science there, which I did enjoy. All right, but you're still giving it just one half of thumb. I'm not changing my review. Maybe you go back in time and watch it again. All right. Well, the next year we're gonna talk about is called The Time Traveler's Wife, and this is a TV show which is based on a movie, which is based on a book. Yes, and I originally read the book and really enjoyed it. It was very creative. It's totally different kind of time travel fiction from anything I'd ever read before, So I was constantly guessing about what was going to happen next and being pleasantly surprised by sort of unpredictable consequences of the rules that the author did lay out for her universe. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting book. And it's actually part of a kind of a recent genre called speculative fiction, where it's sort of like anything can happen, and it's sort of science fiction an maybe a little fantasy, but they don't like to say that it's science fiction. I think it might just be political. It's people who would like to think of themselves writing literature, and they don't like to to think of themselves as writing science fiction, which is a genre in itself. So to me, it's like science fiction for people who don't want to say they're reading and writing science fiction. Right, Basically, writers who don't want to be labeled as nerds, I think is what you're saying exactly, Like you can write a love story, but you might not want to categorize as a romance novel sort of the same idea. Well, I think maybe the descision goes a little bit deeper in that, you know, there are things in speculative fiction like time travel or sometimes cloning or things like that, but they're not trying to base it in the world on science. Right, That's why it's not science fiction. It's more like speculative fiction in that, you know, there's a reason science fictween it's called science fiction is because a lot of the writers in science fiction try to find a scientific basis for it, or at least make things in that world based on science. But speculative fiction, I feel like they don't even try to. Just like, what if there's a love story that has time travel in it? I guess so. I've always categorized science fiction into hard science fiction and soft science fiction, hard meaning that there really are rules to the universe that makes some sense and they're trying to give you an explanation for everything that happens, and soft meaning like, you know, we just sort of swallow it and move on. So I'm not sure what the distinction there is between soft science fiction and spec fiction. Right, this is more like it's jelly's fiction. Maybe science fiction. Yeah, Anyway, there's a lot of great stuff in speculative fiction. For example of the book The City and the City by China Meaville is officially a speculative fiction book, but it's really a fantastic novel. Alright. Well, The Time Traveler's Wife has an interesting plot, which is that there's this man who has a genetic condition that makes him travel through time but sort of randomly, right, he can't control it. Yeah, unlike Kid number five in the Umbrella Academy, he has no control over it. He sometimes gets some warning it's like a gusting wind, and he feels a little bit nauseous, and then he just sort of like disappears and appears and another point in time. Right, And they don't even try to explain this, right, Maybe that's the difference between speculative fiction and science fiction. Like there's no effort at all to explain what could be happening to him or what if the basis is biological or aliens or some kind of you know, I mean, like some sort of machine. Right, there's no clue, not even an attempt to explain it. I think there's a small effort made. They suggest that it's genetic, right, because later on when he tries to have kids, his children also have the same effect, and so they imagine that it's a genetic thing, which suggests that it's biological. In that sense, it might be similar to the Umbrella Academy. Kid number five is created biologically with this power, and so in the same sense, it's like a product of his physiology. As much as I hate to say anything that's definitely not aliens, I know they you should invent your own genre science fiction aliens. For Danny. That's about fifty of science fiction anyway, so that's good. Keeps you busy reading. But in this story, he can't change the past or the future, right or Kenny, he can't. Yeah, it's interesting because he knows things about the past in the future, he like zaps forward and backwards in his own life. He appears, for example, to his wife when she's really young, and he knows things about their future together because he's been there. But he doesn't seem to be able to change the timeline. And that part isn't really very well explained, though I was imagining it was sort of again the Harry Potter structure where he had this timeline with branches and connections on it, but it's sort of always been that way. The timeline itself doesn't ever change, just has these sort of loops and paths in it. So every time you count one of these branches, the same thing happens because it's always the same conditions, right, And so did this start when he was little or at some point when he was an adult? Like has he always been hopping around in time? And is he growing along the way? He's growing along the way, and he's getting older. And so the fascinating sort of narrative structure of this book is that it's told from the point of view not of him, but of his wife, Like what's it like to be married to someone like this? Where you meet him when he's really old because he's apps backwards in time when you're twelve, and you meet your future husband when he's sixty or whatever, or you meet him later on in life and he doesn't know you yet because he hasn't experienced that. So it sort of like scrambles their whole relationship and makes it really tricky and complicated. He's definitely moving forward through his life that he takes these occasional jumps forwards and backwards along his own timeline, and then you see ever in the same point in time twice, like in his can his older self meets his younger self. It is possible in that universe. Yeah, there are some scenes where future and present Henry's that's the name of the time traveler can meet each other. I feel like it's a good statement for people out there, like, Hey, you think your spouse is acting like a child and it's never around and is not in the same time as you, will check out this story exactly. Are you frustrated in your marriage? Will at least be glad you're not in this one? Be god, you're not the time Traveler's wife. And there's a lot of fun, but there's also some sadness, you know, because this is biological. When she does get pregnant, she tends to miscarry because the baby also has this capacity though because it's not fully formed, it can't survive jumping out of her womb into some time in the future and some time in the past, so she has this series of miscarriages. Yeah, it's kind of a basically a love story, Like what would the love story look like if one of the people was a time traveler and they couldn't control their their time jumping right. Like sometimes like she is a little girl, meets him when he's really old, which is kind of creepy because he knows that she's going to be his future wife and talks to her. But then sometimes later like she's an adult and he's a little kid. Yeah, exactly, So she sort of falls in love with a very grown up, very mature version of him, and then later on in her life she has to meet the immature, young version of him, and she's already sort of used to the more grown up version. So they have difference of romantic challenges than most couples do. And that's what I really enjoyed about this book. It's not just like, hey, time travel I'm gonna go back and save the world. It's like, what is this like to live through universe where this happens? What are the consequences for real people they are feeling? It was really creative in that sense. Yeah, it's an interesting premise. I don't know which one came from at first, but there's a season of Doctor Who that's basically this but taken kind of to the extreme. It's like doctor who has this woman that he's in love with, but she's also a time traveler, and they basically travel all throughout the cosmos from the beginning of time to the end of time, and so they like meet up pretty extreme situations in their different timelines. Interesting, they're not traveling together. No, No, she's like I think he meets her later on. But then, yeah, it's all pretty a headache douzy. Sounds like you need a diagram. Yeah, but this one is more maybe little literary, or more speculative or more jellow fiction, and it is more a bit of a serious love story, right exactly. And so the focus really here is on the characters and the impact on them. And you do get the sense that there's not much they can do about it. They seem sort of resigned to life turning out this way. They're not trying to solve his condition. There's none of this like back to the future, let's make sure we fall in love in the right way sort of situation. It's more just about the experience of living with somebody whose time is scattered. All right, Well, how many thumbs up would you give this one? I give this one a thumb up. I mean it's sort of soft on the science of it. It's not that well explained, and I think there are some inconsistencies there, because if you can jump into the past, why can't you change it this sort of stuff. But I think it's very clever and creative and exactly the way I always want fiction to be, to take me to places that makes sense that I didn't anticipate. I think, I know what's going on here. We're we're actually rating things on whether you like them or not, not whether the science is good or not. Is that what's going on here? Is this just really like? What is Daniel like? I mean, it's part of it, right, I see. So Daniel gives it a one thumb up, which is not the full two thumbs up, but it's better than half of them up, at least for now. All right, let's get into our last year that we're talking about here today, And this one is a doozy. It's so complicated. Daniel had to stop watching it because it was giving him a take. So let's see how many thumbs that one's worth. But first, let's take another quick break. We're talking about the science of time travel television or at least the Daniel's taste of time travel television. And I watched a lot of science fiction, and every time the show comes on that hals time traveling, I'm like, please be good, Please be good, Please be good. Well, in terms of the science, I feel like when we talked about this in a previous episode two about how there's kind of two things, like one time travel where you can change the future or the past, and there's time travel where you can't change the future, like there's one set of events that happened, and even if you go back in time, you're just gonna do the thing that you were supposed to do. And uh, I know as a scientist you don't like the ones that break that rule. But it sounds like that's not really related to which television shows you like. There's a loose relationship there. I mean, if they break those rules and they can just do anything at any point, then I just sort of stopped caring about what happens to the characters. But also, you know, there is still room for creativity in the whole structure of a time travel story. I do sometimes see movies where I'm like, wow, I never thought of time travel that way. You know. An example is the movie Primer. Primer is a really creative time travel story that doesn't really fall into either of those two categories you described. Maybe we'll have to talk about it when we do the time travel movie episode in the future. Wait, Primer, isn't it the one where you can change the future? In Primary you can change the future, but within certain limits based on sort of like how far back in the past you built time machine portals. Well, the thing that always gets me about time travel in fiction or in general is that if you travel back in time, the Earth is always moving because the Earth's going around the Sun, and the Sun is going around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is moving. So if you only change your time cord in it, you're gonna end up floating in the middle space if your time trauble right. And yet somehow in these in shows and films, when you travel back in time, you're still on Earth, sometimes even in the same place. Wouldn't that be a super complicated kind of like uh, cosmological coordinate calculation to end up in the same place. Well, I think it's a lot of interesting issues. They're like number one, if you can travel through time then in principle, you should also be able to travel through space. Whatever technology is allowing you to move from an arbitrary time point to another probably also allows you to move from a space time point to another space time point. You bring up another point, which is like, would it be complicated to figure out where that is? That's actually sort of a fuzzy question theoretically, because there's no absolute locations in space, right, and so like, how do you compare a location at one time to a location at another time? Not even sure really what that means. Well, we think there's no absolute space. We think that there's no absolute space. Yeah, we're talking about physics of the universe here, but you know, yeah, in an arbitrary universe, maybe there is absolute space, in which case that would make sense. But you could like define your origin to be your head. You're at zero zero, So you jump back in time, you're still at zero zero. Where you could define the origin to be the center of the earth, right, and so you were at zero zero, is still at zero zero. The fact that the Earth is moving relative to other stuff out there, why should that be relevant to your time travel device? You know? And then there's the third wrinkle, which is like, well, what we're really talking about in time travel here is not you traveling back in time, but you somehow rewinding the rest of the universe backwards in time without rewinding you. So like what happens when you get in the time machine, it's not like the time machine is moving the stuff inside of it backwards in time. It's like it's somehow rewinding the universe outside of it, which is even more bonkers. So none of it makes sense if you start to think too hard about it. It really also falls apart. I mean, that's why they call it fiction. But the last year we're talking about here today is called Dark, which also streams on Netflix. Right, basically you only watch Netflix. Is that what's going on? Because I think the time travel is a wife? Isn't that also Netflix? That one's HBO? I watched HBO. Also, Yeah, okay, so this one's called Dark, and I've never heard of this one, but you said it's pretty popular. It's pretty popular. It's in German and with subtitles, and for a while at least it was one of the top shows on Netflix in Germany, in the United States and on the Discord server. A bunch of people wanted us to talk about it. There's a lot of sort of physics layering here, Like they use the Higgs boson and nuclear power and wormholes and all sorts of like physics words to try to give the impression that the time travel in this show is like realistic or scientific. So then would you categorize it as hard science fiction or saw science fiction or jelly science. I think it's soft science fiction masquerading as hard science fiction. It's the kind of thing where they give an explanation, but if you know anything about the words they use in the explanation, it doesn't really make any sense at all. Well, they are German, you know, they're probably very exacting about that. It has to be hard science for you know, like I watched shows and somebody says, well, wait, how is that possible? And somebody else says, well, due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the quantum field theory, and they go, oh, yeah, okay, thanks, that makes sense. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me. What are you talking about? It's sort of that kind of thing, right, because you're a physicist, and so I wonder, like, how many shows do the same thing, but for like architecture or biology, and you're like, oh, yeah, sure that makes sense. I'll never know, right unless I listen to the podcast where an architect reviews all of these TV shows. They could never build that subway station. Give it two rulers up. You'll have to go back in time and study architecture. Me and George Costanza, All right, well, maybe step us through. What is the basic plot line of this show. This show is about a mysterious cave in the woods, and one of the characters disappears when they go inside the cave, and it's sort of this multiple plot line mystery. You have plot lines in two thousand nineteen, you plot lines in nineteen fifty three, you have plot lines in six And it turns out that going into this cave, you enter a wormhole that can take you sort of backwards or forwards in time, back to the same cave, back to the same cave. Yeah, so it's a sort of wormhole that has an opening the same location on the Earth, but different points in time. Wait, like, you go in, it gets dark, and you keep walking and you come out the same cave but at a different time on Earth. Yeah, exactly, Like how do you have to wait? They're in the cave? How does this work? There's a portal that you walk through, and according to the show, this was created during a sort of accident and a nuclear facility sort of adjacent to the tunnels in this cave. So somehow this nuclear physics experiment and blame it on the scientists, created this rift in time. And so if you walk through this cave, it's sort of mysterious. They don't show it to you, and the show is called dark after all, They just sort of show you coming out of the cave at another time. Now does it always take it to the same time or does it always take you the same number of years in the future or past or or is it rents? So there are these fixed end points to the wormhole that are thirty three years apart, so in nineteen fifty three, nineteen eighty six, two thousand, nineteen, and sometimes you even get glimpses of the further future. So it seems like for some reason, this wormhole connects all these points in time that are fixed times apart. But like it's so meaning like if I go walk into the cave at any point in time, I can only come out in certain years. Yeah, exactly. If you go in nineteen eighty six, you can't come out in nineteen eighty four or nineteen eighty two, but you can't come out in nineteen fifty three or in two thousand nineteen. I see, But what did like two people going at the same time. Wouldn't they all come out at the same instant. Well, the story is taking place at these times, right, If you go in in nineteen eighty six, you come out in nineteen fifty three. There's thirty three year increments. Presumably the story goes on, and if you jumped into it in nineteen ninety you would then come out in nineteen fifty seven. So the thirty three years apart. But the wormhole ends are not fixed in time. It's not like the wormhole ends appear at nineteen eighty six and appear in two thousand nine and teen. The portals of the wormhole are also moving forwards in time. M Yeah, that's what I meant, Like there's a fixed number of years that the wormhole jumps. Yeah, exactly, it moves you forwards or backwards a certain integer and multiples of thirty three forwards or backwards. So like if you go in, you might go three three years in the future or thirty three years in the past. Yeah, exactly. And there's this original wormhole created by this nuclear incident, which is sort of left fuzzy. But then later there's also a group of people who are constructing devices that let them travel forwards and backwards in time, and I think it's sort of left unclear whether they can control that gap or not, or whether it lets them just move forwards and backwards in time without going into the cave. Right, So there's a natural time travel device, and there's also artificial time tratle device in the story. You know, it's sort of all artificial because the one in the cave is created by a nuclear incident, which definitely comes from human scientific experiments, right, but that one sort of fixed in place. And then there's a mobile time travel device, this clockwork box that some people build so they don't have to be in the cave to travel forwards and backwards in time. They made their own cave. And who are these people that made the cave. I don't want to give any spoilers, not caveman, cave man. But the funny thing is that in order to have this box that can move forwards and backwards in time. They need some sort of like extra physics, right, They don't use the wormhole to do this, so the writers needed some extra layer of physics, so they describe it as being powered by the God particle. Interesting, wait, so there's multiple technologies here that can make tried preble possible. There's one that's a wormhole, and then there's one that uses the Higgs boson. Basically, Yeah, they never say higgs boson. They call it the God particle, and they actually show it to you on the screen, like we see the God particle on TV, and it looks like this sort of frothing, swarming mass of blue and black light. It's kind of creative visually, but you know, of course it's nonsense, like the higgs boson is not the God particle first of all, and the higgs boson doesn't look anything like what they've just gribed it on TV. And the Higgs boson in no way would allow you to travel through time or create wormholes. It's just like a phrase in science that you know that I know, yes, because it is the God particle. I mean, you're saying it's not the Higgs boson so it could be some kind of particle that we have yet to discover, right, yeah, all right. If the god particle is not supposed to be the Higgs boson, if it's some crazy future thing that create wormholes and plot devices, then sure it all makes sense. Didn't physicist for a while thing neutrinos traveled back in time? No nobody ever thought new Trina's travel back in time. There was a moment when some people claim that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light, but that was doing a miscalibration of their clocks. All right, Well back to the show. So there is a cave that's a warm hole, and then there's somebody meant at a box that somebody uses particle physics to what to teleport whatever goes in into another time or teleport the whole box where you can use the box and if you set the box and you and the box moved forwards and backwards in time. It's a lot like the briefcase in the Umbrella Academy. I see, and it's this box blue And does it look like a British telephone? No, it's much smaller. It looks sort of like an old fashioned mechanical device the whole show. I wouldn't say it's steam punky, but it's more like mechanical than electrical. Like you crank it up, it goes, and then you and the box somehow travel to another time exactly, And how do they use all this time traveling? So on top of this, there's an incredibly complex plot because people are traveling forwards and backwards in time. Some of the characters in the future are actually the same as the characters in the past, but you just don't know it. And they like become their own fathers, and like it's very complicated what they become their own fathers. I mean, again, I don't want to spoil too much, but did you already spoil it? So let's get into this. How does this work? Like I go back into time and I and I have a kid with somebody who happens to be my mother. Doesn't that break all rules of biology? Yeah? And that's not the smallest problem with the show? All right, let's keep going then, And there's also some very difficult to watch scenes where they do like painful experiments on humans as they're developing these time travel boxes to see if they get them to work. This is like mysterious organization that's trying to build these clockwork devices for reasons we don't really understand. Sometimes we get glimpses of a post apocalyptic future dominated by futuristic weapons and the whole world is at war, and we get a sense that maybe people are trying to prevent that future. It's very complicated, and I watched a season and a half of this and I had to start taking notes and drawing diagrams to keep tracking, like what is going on? Who is what, and what do they want? And eventually I just got so confused. I did stopped watching. Wow, it was too much for your physicist brain, or like you just lost interest. It was just too much for me. Like I can watch ten different shows at once and keep all the threads in my head, so when like episode nine comes on, I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember what's happening. I care about this again, But this one I was just lost. I even tried just watching this show by itself for a week to like try to keep track of the threads. I even started reading the wiki pages that the fans put up to explain everything, and I just couldn't even rock. It was the problem that every time you turned on the show, the previously on Dark took like an hour just to explain what happened before. It was just that I couldn't even recognize any of the characters in any of the scenes. I felt like there was stuff that was happening that was really momentous if you knew who these people were, But I just had no idea, why are we watching this? Who are these people? What does that mean that this person just shot that person? Well, what's the overarch king arc of the show? Or who are we supposed to follow? Who are we supposed to care about in this show? Is there one time traveler that you were following or a group of people that discover the cave. It's a whole interconnected family and the consequences for that family and everybody they know. One of the initial driving questions is like, what happened to this kid? Disappeared into the cave? Turns that he went back in time, etcetera, etcetera. He was living as an older version of himself the whole time. But then it morphs into this like broadened narrative about preventing this post apocalyptic future and preventing these clockwork box people from somehow taking over the world with the god particle, and so it becomes so broad and complicated that I couldn't even follow the plot. How many seasons has it been going on? For many more seasons than I've watched, and the season's happened in chronological order? Do you have to watch the whole show and from season one through forward or can you skip around? I do not recommend skipping around, And if it's not going to make sense, might as well, right, And maybe it's just me. I know a lot of people enjoy this show. A lot of folks on the Discord server are really into this show. So maybe it just took paying more attention than I was able to give it late at night when I watched TV. Or maybe you just need to speak German right right, Or maybe you're just like a dog who you know, is b beyond the human beings or just your you know, neural capacity. Yeah, exactly, I'm just a dog barking at the night sky when I watched this show at the television. Well, so it's so complicated and made a particle physicist confused and unable to follow. How many thumbs up would you give that this one. I don't give any thumbs up. Yeah, I couldn't even finish watching it unfortunately, zero thumbs up. Well, let me maybe put it a different way. What do you think of the science and this the signs consistent? Is it like the good kind of time travel where you get would that respect causality? Or is it the kind of time travel that doesn't respect causality. I think the science of the show is basically gobbledygook. I mean, when they started using the god particle to explain stuff that didn't make any sense, I was like, yeah, we're done. It insulted you personally, and so you discounted the rest of it, even though apparently it's very popular. You're like, you pushed my button, man, forget it. I give it no thumbs Yes I would. I have an abuse of the higgs boson button, and this show pressed it right. So this whole show, that this podcast episode, it's not really even the science of time travel or what you like is whether or not a show mentions the Higgs boson and cause it a god particle or not. That's really the thumbs up Earth of down Here. Yeah. Look, if somebody out there is a writer for a science fiction show, and you're tempted to use the Higgs boson to solve your plot holes. Please just don't because if you do, I'm not going to watch it. But they didn't use the god particle. It's just maybe in German it's just a mistranslation. Then maybe you're just projecting your own problems with it. Yeah, maybe it really is just the Da Vinci code. Yeah yeah, maybe really in the original German it means the goddess particle or you know, the d D particle. Okay, you know what, I'm gonna learn German and then I'll watch it in the original language to give it a fresh take that sounds fair, and also learn some architecture and maybe some biology, because I feel like if you were a biologist, this show would make you turn it off right away, Like don't they know how DNA works? You can't. You can't sorry, your own yourself with another person. If you use the god particle, maybe you can. Oh, there you go. Maybe the uses the the god dam yeahvolves every problem and it's cool and looks blue and black on the screen. Maybe you're also your wife in this episode. Maybe you are your own time traveling god particle. Wife. There you go that's dark and uses an umbrella. There'll be the ultimate show. Maybe then you'll give it a thumps up, you know what, I'll give it at least one episode. All right, Well, I think the big takeaway here is that time travel is tricky but also irresistibly fun to think about and to write stories about, because I guess we all wonder how this universe works, and we're all wondering how far can you push it? Right, Like, if time travel is possible, what would happen if you made a box that could do it or if someone had the power to do it exactly? And it's totally worthwhile, mean creative about these things because physicists don't really understand them, and it's fun to think about what the universe might be like if we could break some of these rules, like mentioning the Higgs boson, which is a big no note here, I guess on the podcast, don't break that rule. Don't mention the eggs boson if you don't know what you're talking about. That is definitely my rule. Oh man, now I'm tempted. Every time you say something could be aliens, I'm gonna be like Pep, what if it's just the Higgs boson, I mean, the God particle. Just to push your button. Did you're gonna give us thumbs down to our own podcast? No? No, that's creating a paradox or a paradoctor in philosophy. I'm gonna get paradox psychosis, You're gonna get paradox. All right, Well, regardless, we recommend these shows that you check it out yourself and see if you like it and whether the time travel in it or the lack of time travel or the lack of explanation or over explanation for the time travel appeals to you. Yeah, and as you check out these shows, serve yourself a nice scoop of ice cream with extra Higgs bosons on top. That's right, just don't call it the God ice cream. We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I Heart Ready or more podcast from my Heart Radio, Visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H