So, there’s this movie called Primer, and I remember watching it back when I was in college. I remember I had a brand new roommate, I was just starting acting school at Cal State Fullerton, and I remember that my financial aid finally came in and we sprung for cable TV. It was cable TV with a free introductory period of all the premium channels, and one of those premium channels was the Sundance Channel.
At the Sundance film festival that year, the beginning of 2004, I think, Primer won the Grand Jury Prize, and I remember watching the Sundance Channel coverage of the festival and that movie had all the buzz. It was sci-fi, it was weird, and it was so up my alley. So, as soon as it was available to rent, I watched it.
It’s about time travel. A pair of scientists working in their garage find out that a machine they’ve created to do something else has actually created a field in which time loops in an endlessly repeating cycle. They have particles inside that field that show random temporal displacements as they’re exiting from the field at different points in time, which is all fine and dandy…except when they realize that if you put a PERSON inside that field, someone who can choose to exit whenever they like, at a SPECIFIC time…what they’ve actually built is a time machine.
A time machine with limitations, yes, but a time machine nonetheless.
Because it creates a time LOOP, you can only ever go back in time to the point where the machine was first turned on. Meaning, if I start the machine at 11pm tonight and then enter tomorrow at 12 noon…I can only ever go back as far as 11pm. That’s because that’s when I turned on the machine. It’s a really cool concept for time travel because, well, number 1: it was inspired by some real math, and number 2: because it kind of turns the idea of time travel on its head very much in the same way that Einstein turned the universe on its head with relativity. You don’t so much travel through time as you step out of time, and while you’re out of time, time runs backwards around you.
It also neatly solves the paradox of so many other time travels because yes…there will be a period of time where there are TWO of somebody…but the time loop is a CLOSED loop. Meaning: the original person that switches on the time machine and then waits for a while to go inside, once they enter the machine, they BECOME the duplicate…the “original” person only has one destiny at that point, and that is to enter the machine. One cannot exist without the other. Then the duplicate, the one who came out of the machine, they then carry on into the future with their own life.
Naturally, in the movie, they use this time loop duplicate-creating machine to travel “back” in time and use foreknowledge of the stock market, having seen what stocks went up or down, to make money.
Anyway…guys, the reason I bring all this stuff up is because it reminds me of a physics article I was reading about new math that’s been worked out the describes very much the same thing with extreme velocities – ie- once you start going faster than light, you create a time loop where you can eventually loop around and catch up to your past self, and at the point where the to selves coexist, you could decelerate and have gone “back” in time to that point.
I don’t pretend to understand it all…but I do know that I’m working with a particle in my Starstuff book that’s enabled faster-than-light travel, and I have characters in the book that use this particle to “see” into the future because I know that anything postulating faster-than-light travel is going to have time dilation possibilities…I’m thinking this loop stuff might become very, very useful when I get to my grand finale in book 3. Still a ways to go…but I wanted to write all this down tonight so I didn’t forget it. I think Fenton might have built himself a “failsafe” outside of the nest…but he needs someone to turn it on from the outside and bring it in in order for it to work.
Anywho…hopefully that’s cryptic enough to not make sense to anyone but me…and maybe the handful of you who have seen and understood Primer. It gets very confusing, that movie…intentionally so, apparently…but I really loved it. And now I’m going to watch it tomorrow after I get my writing done.
That’s all for tonight. See? This is what writing “full-time” looks like 😛