The Science and Physics of Back To the Future

overthinkingit writes "A scientist has tried to apply serious math and physics, including the Law of Cosines, to analyze how the DeLorean in Back to the Future travels through both Time AND Space: 'in order to pull off the kind of time travel we see in the Back To The Future trilogy — the kind where the traveler is transposed in time, but remains stationary in the same relative position to where he/she left — the DeLorean would have to be an outstanding space ship, in addition to its already laudable work as a time-ship. According to Doc Brown's stopwatch, Einstein the dog travels precisely one minute into the future on this first jump, arriving, relative to their frame of reference, at the same location he left. But how far has this reference frame itself traveled during that one minute?'"

Comments

It's really quite simple

[Diss Champ]

The universe really DOES revolve around the earth in the movie universe, so no special measures are necessary beyond "simply" moving in time.

wear your space suit

[v1]

anyone that has (in the past) managed to create a time travel device and has tried it, probably thought they made a disintegration machine, because anything they sent back or forward in time was never seen again. (or before, I suppose)

Because a second/minute/year/millenia ago that spot was occupied by empty space. The earth is moving very fast through space.

I've always used that reason to concede that even if we DO make time travel possible, it will be of little practical value.

Then there's the other snag of transposition... if you say, send yourself back in time, what happens to that volume of space where you arrive? Is it destroyed? And what fills in the void where you left? Or one more expected result is it's transposed with your time's space. Thus all time travel is time swapping, something goes forward and something goes back. Now lets say you do make a time travel machine, and test it without considering the earth-travels-through-space issue... that means whatever you send out, you get a big ball of vacuum back. If it's a very brief travel, you may get a chunk of earth, high pressure ocean, or more likely, high pressure magma. Ouch... hope you got insurance. That'll turn your lab into a disaster area real quick.

There are so man "problems" with time travel, that it really doesn't matter if its possible or not. It's not useful.