12:01

12:11 PM

13 Going on 30

Adjustment Bureau, the

All you Zombies

Army of Darkness

Back to the Future

Bearing an Hourglass

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

By his Bootstraps

Cat who Walks Through Walls, the

Click

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a

Contact

Dead Zone

Deja vu

Doctor Who

Don Juan

Donnie Darko

Edge of Tomorrow

End of Eternity, the

Ender Quadrilogy, the

Event 16

Flight of the Navigator

For All Time

Freejack

Frequency

From Time to Time

Groundhog Day

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Hot Tub Time Machine

Interstellar

Jacket, the

Kate & Leopold

Kid, the

Knowing

Lake House, the

Last Action Hero, the

Looper

Matrix

Matrix 4, the

Matrix Reloaded

Matrix Revolutions, the

Men in Black III

Millenium

Next

Number of the Beast, the

One, the

Passengers

Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Paycheck

Philadelphia Experiment, the

Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes - the New Movie

Planet of the Apes - the original Movie and its Sequels

Premonition

Primer

Race Through Time *Man Who Used to be Me, the

Riverworld

Somewhere in Time

Sound of Thunder

Source Code

Space Between us ,the

Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek Generations

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek: First Contact

Stargate Continuum

Terminator

Time After Time

Time and Again

Time Bandits

Time Changer

Time Line - the Movie

Time Line - the Novel

Time Machine, the - the Movie

Time Machine, the - the Novel

Time Traveler's Wife

Timecop

Timerider: the Adventures of Lyle Swann

Timescape

Tomorrowland

Twelve Monkeys

Willows Way

X-Men: Days of Future Past

12:01

C

No

Infinity Loop

Yes

See:

>12:01

12:11> PM

C

No

Infinity Loop

Yes

See:

12:11> PM

13 Going on 30

C

No, making a birthday wish

On her 13th birthday, a girl makes a Birthday Wish and wakes up the next day as a 30-year-old woman…

Can the transformation be regarded as a "meeting with self"?

Does that even count as time travel? Or even time travel to the future? Or is this a Rip Van Winkle case? Since technically our protagonist actually slept 17 years old, I think the correct definition is the latter…

See:

13 Going on 30

Adjustment Bureau, the

A promising young politician finds out that his future (and the future of all mankind) is actually pre-determined by some mysterious plan of a bureaucratic entity called the Adjustment Bureau, and it cannot be change it. But as is customary in a bureaucracy, sometimes there are flaws in the plan…

B, C

No, doors and hats are used a shortcuts.

A mysterious master plan

Bureaucracy

Fate or free will?

Technically, time is not linear.

No

No

In some cases, knowing the future makes the change possible…

Technically there is no time travel, and if so, only to the future, even thought the Freebee Paradox works.

And what do> the Adjustment Bureau agents do when there are no handles on the doors? ...

See:

Adjustment Bureau, the

All you Zombies

(image 14e, source: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec18.html)

"Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York's number on it didn't go off, a hundred other things didn't go as planned - all arranged by the likes of me. But not the Mistake of '72; that one is not our fault - and can't be undone; there's no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn't, now and forever amen. But there won't be another like it; an order dated '1992' takes precedence any year." (Quote from the story)

This story, which has already received many favorable mentions here, describes a very complex and fascinating time loop exciting (those of you who haven’t read it, hurry up or move to the next section); A time traveler, adopted during infancy from an orphanage by a foster family, takes to the past her baby girl born out of wedlock, and leave her on the doorstep of the orphanage where she grew up, and so on and so on ...

Besides being a fascinating time travel story, All you Zombies is also an incredibly solipsistic story: "I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?" the end of the story states, and also, You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark." So how can a person, who is bohis own father and mother, relate to himself other than solipsistically?

Oh, yes, solipsism is a metaphysical concept according to which all reality is nothing but the creation of the mind, and there is nothing in this world except that which our minds perceive.

And here, as in By his bootstraps, we encounter the eternal question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" though in a more extreme and less deterministic way. And incidentally, just like in the other stories, Heinlein answer to the question is "It does not really matter, because the egg and chicken are one."

Robert Heinlein, short story

Yes

"…a U. S. F. F. Coordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, Mod. II - a beauty, no moving parts, weight twenty–three kilos fully charged, and shaped to pass as a suitcase". (Quote from the story).

Infinity Loop

Yes

Yes

See:

All you Zombies

Army of Darkness

A supermarket employee is sent back in time by a specific book to the 14th century.

C

A sequel to the Evil Dead films.

See:

Army of Darkness

Back to the Future

Whenever the link between time travel and the cinema is discussed, there is no doubt that one of the first titles that come up (if not the first) is "Back to the Future".

It all begins when Marty McFly, and ordinary high school slacker, travels back to the past and accidentally prevents his parents from meeting. Knowing that if his parents don't meet he will not be born (etc'…), he will do anything to set things right…

Since the three Movies in the series are a single, though confused, continuum, let's try to make some sense out of Doc Emmett Brown’s, Marty Mc Fly’s and Co.’s travels through time:

(image 24e, mine)

And how do you resolve the paradoxes?

Third Movie	Second Movie	First Movie	The Paradox
		1. Marty travels back to the past and accidentally prevents his parents from meeting. 2. Marty makes sure that his parents meet so that he can be born.	Grandmother/Grandfather Paradox
		George and Lorraine met at the Dance and not following the accident in which he was run over by her father's car (which in itself does not change the result that Marty was born).	Consistency (reality isn't changed but causality is violated)
	1. Biff kills George 2. Marty's parents never met. Lorraine is married to Biff…		Inconsistency – time travel changes reality, creating a logical contradiction
1. The inventor sends the specifications of the time machine to himself… 2. Older Biff gives younger Biff the sports Almanac…		Guitarist Marvin Berry calls his cousin, Chuck Berry, and lets him listen to Marty's rendition of "Johnny be Good"	The Freebie Paradox

(Image 32e, source unknown )

C

Yes

Take a modified Delorean automobile, connect it to a lightning rod, charge the flux capacitor, get it up to 88 miles per hour, set the timer and Voila! - Time travel.

You may travel back and forth, you may change everything, but there is a time limits, and bewares of the "Grandfather Paradox".

According to Doc Brown, there is actually only one main "timeline", according to which everything must align see the red line in image ** below). His timeline starts in 1885 and ends in 2015, while Marty's timeline starts in 1866 and ends in 2015. Neither has traveled in time beyond "his timeline".

By the way, the creators of the Andromeda series agree with this, as shown in the following quote from the episode the Unconquerable Man (Ep. 10, Season 3)>: "Some theories of> time travel assert that there is one fixed timeline which, once fixed, can never be> changed>." (From the Script)

There is a meeting between the "Younger Self" and the "Older self" (and vice versa), but it does not cause any problems, except for the Transfer of Information dilemma, but nothing really catastrophic happened, in spite of Doc Brown's dire warnings against such encounters, unlike the case of Timecop (I complained enough about that…) where the encounter had catastrophic (not to mention disgusting) consequences…

Every time the travelers return from their trips, they return a few hors only after they’ve left (that way they don’t have to excuse an absence which was too long).

See:

Back to the Future

Bearing an Hourglass

Death, Fate, War, Nature, Good, Evil and Time are reincarnated as flesh and blood Humans, all, incidentally, belonging to the same dynasty (I mentioned all the names in order to stay in context, but here I refer only to the second novel in the Incarnations of Immortality series).

Norton is the Human who agrees to play the role of the incarnation of Time, and as soon as he steps into his new role, he begins to live backwards (from the future to the past, from the big crunch into a black hole to the Big Bang and vice versa, i.e. his past is everybody else's future), but he gets himself into a life and death struggle with the Devil, armed with nothing but an hourglass, and time is running out…

Among other things, the Devil tries to convince Norton that he, Norton, can travel through time at will without leaving Earth, while the Devil can get to any place in the Universe in which evil exists (See the famous quote from the Usual Suspects…)

See Neal Geiman's the Sandman.

B

Yes, an Hourglass

The hero lives going backwards it time; going back to the past with knowledge from the future in order to change it (or undo changes to it).

See:

Bearing an Hourglass

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Two evil robot versions of Bill and Ted are sent back in time to kill them. Rings a bell?

C

Yes, a public phone box

No

Yes

See:

Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Two teenagers will not graduate from high school unless they pull on A on their history project. A time traveler visits them to help because their success on this report is vital as it ensures they will stay together to create a Utopian future. As Bill and Ted travel through time, they encounter historical figures including Socrates, Joan of Arc, and Billy the Kid.

C

Yes, a public phone box

No

Yes

See:

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

By his Bootstraps

Baron Munchausen, a well known fabricator of fantastic stories, tells about the time he found itself bogged in a swamp, and the only way out was to pull himself "By his Bootstraps". This story was the inspiration for the title of Heinlein's story "By his Bootstraps", about which Carl Sagan commented: "time travel stories – for example, the three remarkable efforts by Heinlein, All You Zombies, By his Bootstraps and The Door IntoSummer – force the reader into contemplations of the nature of causality and the arrow of time" (Broca’s Brain, P. 168)

The story begins with the protagonist restating Immanuel Kant's philosophical principal that "Time travel may be imagined and its necessities may be formulated under any and all theories of time, formulae which resolve the paradoxes of each theory. Nevertheless, we know certain things about the empirical nature of time which preclude the possibility of the conceivable proposition. Duration is an attribute of consciousness and not of the plenum. It has no Ding an Sich…" but then he finds himself unwittingly caught in an infinite time loop and he tries desperately to break out of it. But since all the characters, both the ones who tried to convince him to cross the time gate and the ones who tried to dissuade him, were himself, on the one hand he did exercise his free will all along,, but on the other hand he encountered a deterministic universe which wouldn't let him get out of the loop.

Heinlein returns to the dilemma of "the egg and the chicken" and also to the dilemma of "the meeting with self"; if "I" meets "self ", how do "I" know who "self" is? The answer, at least according to this story, is that the only link between all the different "I" is the continuity of memory…

Robert Heinlein, short story

Yes>, a Time Gate

Infinity Loop

"Time flows along side by side on each side of the Gate, but some thousands of years apart - just how many thousands I don't know. But for the next couple of hours that Gate is open. You can walk into the future just by stepping through that circle."

)Quote from the story)

Yes

Yes, go back through the Gate

See:

By his Bootstraps

Cat who Walks Through Walls, the

Just like in 666, the journey through time begins with a bang (liberally) – an assassination attempt involving a mistaken identity.

Just like in 666, there are encounters with characters from the past (science's, science fiction's, and Heinlein's) – such as Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw.

Just like in 666, this story features a (more or less) intelligent computer.

And why does the cat (Schr>צdinger's?) go through walls? Simple, because doesn't know it can't…

See here

Robert Heinlein, Novel, 1985

Yes

In this Novel by Robert Heinlein (1985), Dr. Richard Ames (alias) sits in a restaurant while all of a sudden s stranger approaches him with a mysterious message and gets shot in front of him. His escape takes him to a journey between dimensions (universes) inhabited by many of Heinlein's other heroes, including Jubal Harshaw, Lazarus Long and an intelligent computer named Mike.

?

?

See:

Cat who Walks Through Walls, the

Click

C

Yes, a Remote Control

A Universal Remote Control with a mind of its own

See:

Click

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a

As mentioned above, it is not always necessary to have a tool, a machine or other means to go back in time, as evidenced by Mark Twain's (1835-1910) classic novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", written in 1889. Our Yank travels back in time from late 19th-century Connecticut in the US to King Arthur's court in 9th century BC England. After a short adjustment period, where he gets to know the people involved, he uses his knowledge of the past to take over and even deposes the famous wizard Merlin from power, exploiting the fact that the (ignorant) masses do not know the difference between magic and science. When he returns to his time (just as he left it), he passes the diary he wrote while in the past to the writer, whom he meets in a bar ...

Twain did not set out to write a time travel story, or a profound philosophical statement like H G Wells (qv). His intention was to make a poignant social statement about his own time, a time when many technological innovations began to enter everyday use. Twain was well aware of the influence of technology on society, especially a society undergoing changes too fast without adequate preparation. His view was that only a society where people enjoy freedom of thought can make the most out of technology. He was the first to use a typewriter (his "Tom Sawyer" was the first novel in America written entirely on a typewriter) and a telephone (his home was one of the first in which an internal switchboard was installed), he invested in the typesetting machine which preceded the Linotype (and lost), etc'. They say that if he were alive today, he probably would have been written online interactive novels (pay per view, of course...)

Also note that time travel is actually the tool that allows the Yank to achieve a common fantasy – in his own "world", the Yank was a foreman in a munitions factory (though he boasts of being in charge of a thousand workers ...) but when he traveled to the past, he reached the status of almost a viceroy, which probably would have been impossible to achieve in his own time, mainly because of his character.

Mark Twain, Novel, 1989

No, a head injury due to an accident

Get clobbered on the head in a bar fight

The Yankee travels both in space and in time (from 19th century America to 9th century Britain). Could Twain’s concept of time have been closer to Einstein’s than to H G Wells’s?

The trip back in time is actually the tool that enables the Yankee to fulfil a common fantasy – Instead of a foreman in a munitions factory, he became almost a Viceroy in King Arthur’s Court.

No

Yes

See:

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a

Contact

One of the most notable (and most serious) attempts to deal with time travel is of course by one of the great skeptics, Carl Sagan. In his novel "Contact", Sagan presented in 1985 a theoretical model of a black hole/wormhole humans can travel through, and a team of scientists from Cal Tech, led by Kip Thorne, studied the model first from the mathematical angle and then from the physical angle, and discovered that the known laws of physics present no obstacle before the construction of the model, much to Sagan’s delight. This, as you may recall, is how "Contact" was born, an extension and elaboration of a draft script written by Sagan, together with Ann Druyan. Fortunately, he was not required to explain the specification machine (Kip Thorne did that for him), only to mention that it was sent by Aliens from a multi-dimensional universe...

Carl Sagan, Novel, 1985, and Movie adaptation

Yes

Specification by unknown Aliens

According to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, every trip in space is also a trip in time, and vice versa.>

Does the "meeting" with the father count?

If Sagan’s theories underlying the novel are correct, it is probable that every trip through will indeed end up at the moment of departure (or as close to it as possible, as in Back to the Future "a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court"). That just might solve some of the paradoxes of time travel, but then of course we would be faced with a completely different dilemma - how do we prove to the skeptics that we didtravel through time?

The Movie also tries to portray time/space travel as believably as possible in terms of the laws of physics.

And how many hours exactly did the camera record?

See:

Contact

Dead Zone

Steven King, Novel and TV adaptation

No, a Brain Disorder (as a Result of an Accident)

The touch of a hand

The Hero can see both the past and the future. Seeing the future makes changing it possible.

Yes

Yes

One of the few novels by the King of Horror dealing with time travel.

See:

Dead Zone

Deja vu

C

Yes, based on the principles of Data Transmission (see Time Line); The arrival of the Data to the correct destination in the right time is never guaranteed.

Unclear, looking like a washing machine drum; It has a portable unit allowing for real-time viewing of the past (do not view and drive!) The traveler enters the machine as naked as possible, not because only organic matter can go through, but in order to lighten the load; since the machine jams the electrical circuits in the body, which may cause heart failure, the traveler has to be revived after the trip, and just to be on the safe side, the instructions for this are clearly written on his chest.

A> wormhole creates a link to a moment in time exactly four days, six hours, three minutes, forty-five seconds, and fourteen-point-five nanoseconds in the past.

the fact that the scientists were arguing about how time actually worked, each supporting a different theory and none of them completely certain of the details of his (or her) position.>

The goal is to observe and collect information; Nevertheless, the changes the Traveler makes do not disrupt the time line, may because after all, it is only four days; Small loops are created, but not an infinity loop.

No, thought the traveler is warned that he might find himself standing over his own body (which was not actually shown in the Movie - what about the body that was left in the car?)

In Stargate, for instance, the writers went out of their way to prevent such encounters, and a situation such as this would have never occurred.

The traveler gets killed in the past and pops up again in the future (How? it is unclear...)

See:

Deja vu

Doctor Who

C

Yes, the TARDIS

There is only one Doctor

The Doctor in his eighth incarnation and the penultimate known showdown with the Master.

See:

Doctor Who

Don Juan

Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan (1968), A Separate Reality (1971), Journey to Ixtlan (1972), Tales of Power (1974), The Second Ring of Power (1977), The Eagle's Gift (1981), The Fire From Within (1984), The Power of Silence (1988), The Art of Dreaming (1993), Magical Passes (1998), The Wheel of Time (1998), The Active Side of Infinity (1998>(

No,> the power of the Mind

Mind altering drugs.

Parallel Universes

Yes

Yes

Castaneda describes a transition between one state of consciousness to another, or if you will, a parallel universe, using the power of the mind plus psychotropic chemicals (see also Altered States).

See:

Don Juan

Donnie Darko

Two intersecting time lines

A science fiction movie, but without spaceships, monsters and Aliens (Frank does not count, since we eventually find out exactly who he is);

A Cult Movie without all the buzz (in contrast with the Rocky Horror Picture Show);

A psychological drama but without the tiresome philosophizing (not by the supportive literature teacher, not by the supportive science teacher, and not even by the pesky psychiatrist)..

C

Yes, a Wormhole

A wormhole allows for traveling 28 days back in time.

Note the science teacher's lecture about wormholes and the Einstein-Rosen bridge, just before he gives Donnie Roberta Anne Sparrow's book:

DR. MONNITOFF So... according to Hawking... wormholes might be able to provide a short cut for jumping between two distant regions of space-time.

DONNIE So... in order to travel back in time, you'd have to have a big spaceship or something that can travel faster than the speed of light --

DR. MONNITOFF Theoretically.

DONNIE -- and be able to find one of these wormholes.

DR. MONNITOFF A wormhole with an Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is, theoretically... a wormhole in space controlled by man.

DONNIE So... that's it?

DR. MONNITOFF The basic principles of time travel are there. (beat) So you have the vessel and the portal. And the vessel can be anything. Most likely a spacecraft.

DONNIE Like a DeLorean.

DR. MONNITOFF (smiling) A metal craft of any kind.

(Quote from the Movie).

No

The two time lines converge.

For a (very) detailed analysis of the Movie click here.

Incidentally, the Director's Cut features prominently a book entitled "the Philosophy of Time Travel" written by "Roberta Anne Sparrow" (no, don't bother to look for it the libraries; it only exists in the Donnie Darko universe…)

To view the book click here.

See:

Donnie Darko

Edge of Tomorrow

C

Infinity Loop

No

Yes

See:

Edge of Tomorrow

End of Eternity, the

How do you adjust language (e g grammatical tenses) to a reality in which time is not linear?

Isaac Asimov, Novel

???

Time is not Linear.

See:

End of Eternity, the

Ender Quadrilogy, the

Orson Scott Card

Yes

Faster then light Spaceships

Faster then light travel causes (according to Einstein' Theory of Relativity) the Twins Paradox.

No

No

Ender's decision to stop wandering and settle in Lusitania is effectively a self-imposed death sentence.

See:

Ender Quadrilogy, the

Event 16

Matt, a young inventor on the cusp of a breakthrough creation in his garage workshop, is about to lose his girlfriend due to his obsession...

C

See:

Event 16

Flight of the Navigator

In 1978, a boy winds up 8 years into the future, and discovers an alien spaceship brought him there.

C

Yes, an Alien Spaceship

No

Yes, but 8 years too late

See:

Flight of the Navigator

For All Time

The story of a man who finds the love of his life in the past, and has to decide whether to abandon everything and stay with his love forever.

C

Yes, an antique watch

An antique watch allows the traveler to get off the train during the time-slip, whereupon he finds himself back in the 1890s.

No

Based upon the Twilight Zone episode Stop at Willoughby by Rod Serling, which was based on the story Bid Time> Return by Richard Matheson, adapted 20 years earlier into the Movie Somewhere in Time.

See:

For All Time

Freejack

Time travel has been invented, and the rich use it to snatch people from history a moment before their death in order to use the bodies as hosts for their own minds after death.

Naturally, the technology that allows the transfer of consciousness from body to body has also been invented…

C, B

Yes

The technology allowing for time travel to the past and the to future is allegedly a futuristic one (in this case, at least, it was kept secret and did not leak to past), but as we know, time travel to the future is less problematic than time travel to the past in every aspect.

No

No

People from the future do not remain in the past, but the >"Time Traveler>" decided to stay in the future and not try to go back to his own time;

Loosely adapted from "Immortality Inc." by Robert Sheckly

See:

Freejack

Frequency

C

No, a freak Natural Occurrence>

A> peak in solar flare activity allows for a connection (and time travel) between the fireman who perished in a fire and his sun the police officer, through an old radio belonging to the fireman.

Neither the father nor the son

Yes

Every time the policeman makes a change in the past, he finds out he has two sets of memories - one from before the change and one from the other. Aren't the two sets of memories supposed to cancel each other out?

From now on we should add solar flare activity to the list of events to remember when embarking on a trip through time…

See:

Frequency

From Time to Time

25 year after the events of Time and Again (in which the protagonist decided to stay in the 1880's, and a short time before the author's demise, a sequel was published. This time, our Hero's mission is to get to 1912 New York (=to the future?) and protect a man who set out for an ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic, carrying secret documents that can prevent the outbreak of World War 1. There is only one small problem; the man is aboard the Titanic…

Jack Finney, Novel, 1995

No, Mind Training

Time as a River: you cannot stop it by accidentally throwing in a twig, but it can be done deliberately.

No, because he goes back to a past in which he was not yet born (which is fine as long as he doesn’t kill anybody…)

The traveler chooses to stay in the past even though he is able to return to his own "time" any time.

Since in every time travel story dealing with this ill-fated voyage of the Titanic (starting with the Time Tunnel) all the attempts to prevent the catastrophe fail, it is clear that the protagonist of this Novel will have to resort to more drastic measures…

See:

From Time to Time

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is a holiday celebrated on February 2 in the United States and Canada. According to folklore, if it is cloudy when a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day, it will leave the burrow, signifying that winter-like weather will soon end. If it is sunny, the groundhog will supposedly see its shadow and retreat back into its burrow, and the winter weather will continue for six more weeks. It is also known as was Candlemas day.

C

No, it's all in the mind

NA

An Infinity Loop

No

Yes

Incidentally, February 2nd (1957) is actor Brent Spiner (Data)'s birthday.

See:

Groundhog Day

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Hermione is the one who decides to travel back in time in order to rescue Buckbeack; Harry joins her in order to save Sirius.

J. K. Rowling, Novel and Movie adaptation

Yes, the Time-Turner

An Hourglass sets the length of the trip (an hour for each turn).

It seems that in the Wizarding World, the use time travel and time machines also has its problems, or to quote Dumbledore, "Hasn't your experience with the Time-Turner taught you anything, Harry? The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed... Professor Trelawney, bless her, is living proof of that..." (From the Novel).

The Traveler must not be seen (emphasis on "see", not on "meet"), therefore Harry and Hermione do their best to avoid meeting with themselves, in spite of the warning signs. When the meeting finally occurs, their originals just leave via the Time Turner to do what they, the duplicates, have just finished doing, and Dumbledore admits them to the room as it is vacated. The only problem is that the returning duo missed the landing spot by a few meters, which leaves poor Ron confused and bewildered (not to worry, everything turns out all right in the end).

Yes

Even though time travel is hardly the main theme if the book (and the Movie), Rawling uses the same familiar clich>יs when dealing with the paradoxes of time travel.

See:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Hot Tub Time Machine

Four friends spend a crazy, drunken night in a hot tub at a ski resort only to travel back in time to 1986. They are each presented with an opportunity to alter their futures

C

Yes, a hot tub

See:

Hot Tub Time Machine

Interstellar

C

Yes

Black holes - excellent movie that is "unnatural" but not who created them and how;

Space travel versus time travel - speed is probably not super-light but pretty close;

How do you go through a worm hole not once but twice without "spaghetti"? See: "Super Massive Wormhole";

Do the "Twin Paradox" and "Grandpa Paradox" work here? In my opinion, yes, and there was also a way around the ban on "meeting with himself", one of the most severe prohibitions of time travel;

Relativity vs. Quantum Theory - "The Theory of Everything" (Steven Hawking had something to say on the subject);

Multi-Dimension (Tesraket) - Five dimensions are mentioned;

The film's scientifiadvisor is the theoretical physics expert Kip Thorn, who in 1973, along with his colleagues Charles Meisner and John Wheeler, suggested using a wormhole to move from one place to another in 1983, helping Carl Sagan develop a hole A worm for the movie "Contact," and in 1988, in a joint article with his research student Mike Morris, first raised the prospect of felonious wormholes in general relativity.

Not with himself, but with his aging daughter

No

See:

Interstellar

Jacket, the

A Persian Gulf War veteran who lost his memories to amnesia. When he is accused of a heinous killing, he realizes he must find a way to prove his innocence. Desperate to unearth clues about his past, he seeks a controversial treatment that allows him to go back in time—which turns out to be a heart-rending decision when he realizes he's destined for tragedy.

C

No, it’s all in the mind

See:

Jacket, the

Kate & Leopold

A Duke time travels from 1876 to the present and falls in love with a career woman in New York.

C

See:

Kate & Leopold

Kid, the

A 40 year old image consultant finds himself being visited by his 10 year old self.

C

The encounter between the man and the Kid causes no problem

See:

Kid, the

Knowing

C

No

Deciphering an encoded list of all the disasters that occurred in the world, found in a "Time Capsule" prepared by schoolchildren in the 50'ies.

of knowing the future is not accompanied by the ability to change it

No

No

Technically, this is Time Travel to the future.

See:

Knowing

Lake House, the

Time travel romance where two people living in the same house at a lake at different times are able to exchange letters through its mailbox and fall in love.

C

No

Contact is made via letters left in a mail box.

See:

Lake House, the

Last Action Hero, the

C

Yes, the ticket

A magical Movie Ticket, a gift of the great Magician, Houdini, opens a doorway (=a wormhole?) between the Real World and the Movie World.

Parallel Universes - Movie Universe and "Real" Universe

Does the encounter between Jack Slater and Schwarzenegger at the Movie premier count?...

Yes, each to his own world.

See:

Last Action Hero, the

Looper

In the not too distant future, the journey was invented in time (unclear how and how) and immediately outlawed, then criminal organizations took over and turned it into a means of removing unwanted corpses by sending them to the past. Who are sent from the future, bound and beaten, and only have to be shot like fish in a barrel and rid of their bodies, which effectively prevents any possibility of seizing the murderers. Where police and law enforcement probably do not exist. "- The older version of the Looper is sent from the future for past elimination. So far, is that clear?

Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an outstanding "looper", passing the time between elimination and elimination in recreation in luxury clubs and drug use, until one day he was trying to help a good friend who refused to "close the loop" and had to flee his life because of The Mafia. 30 years in the future, older Joe (Bruce Willis) has fled the past to escape his "closing loop." The two meet, and the adult tries in vain to warn the young man of what is expected of him (quite clich>יd part of the time travel fiction), but it turns out there is only one real way to break the loop ...

But which genre exactly does the movie belong to? Really unclear, and probably on purpose. On the one hand, this is a dark action-packed movie and violence; On the other hand, there is a movie movie here, but almost no futuristic technology (not 2042 nor 2072), except for the computer screens, which we have already seen elaborate on in many movies, and the flying motorcycles, and by the way, that 10 percent of the population has telepathic powers At one level or another for some unclear reason (which is to explain the telekinetics stunts seen in the movie) The distant future according to Ryan Johnson is violent and unruly, and there is a big gap between those who have and those who do not. The city in general seems more neglected and gloomy than futuristic However, it is hard to say that this is exactly a dystopian description.

If so, is this a movie about time travel? Here, too, the answer is unclear. The paradoxes exist, but no one wants to talk about them and try not to understand their full implications, especially of the "grandfather paradox" - according to the boss of the Loopers (played by Jeff Daniels), "The Journey While Frying the Mind!" (time travel fries your brain!) The "encounter with self" does not cause any problems (except for the above), but it is quite clear that two versions of the same person cannot be extended at the same time, and the younger version's name causes the immediate cancellation of the adult (not It is clear exactly what happens in the opposite case). The machine used to launch the Loopers at a moment only appears after about half an hour of film, and it turns out that it can be operated from the outside as well as from the inside and is somewhat similar to a washing machine drum (see films such as Deja vu and Time Line). By the way, whoever goes back to the past stays in the past - the journey is only one way ...

A notable example of the problem of dealing with the paradoxes of time travel in the film is the sub-plot dealing with "The Rainfall", a mysterious and fearful character who allegedly took over the mafia in the future and activated the "loafers". According to information from Elder Joe, one of three children born that day in the same hospital is the one who will grow up to become the "Rain Man" after witnessing his mother's murder by "Looper." Is the only way to prevent the monster's formation from killing And maybe the right way is to save the mother and give her a good education and love that will prevent him from becoming a monster? Notice that the two ways will be one result - the abolition of the "loafers" (and in fact the "rainfall"), Because after all, his mother will be alive ....) and you have the grandfather paradox in his incarnation.

And another example, if you will, is the recurring recommendations that young Joe makes to learn Chinese rather than French (probably based on future knowledge, the so-called "knowledge paradox" ...)

C

Yes

The machine> (seen briefly about 30 minutes into the Movie) is similar to a washing machine drum (see Movies like Deja Vu and Time Line). It can be operated both from outside and inside. The traveler is equipped with a timer informing him when the intended victim is sent from the future.

"Time travel fries your brain>"

Two versions of the same person can not survive for long simultaneously, and the death of the younger version results in the immediate cancellation of the oldest (what happens in the opposite case not exactly clear).

Paradoxes exist, but no one wants to talk about them or try to fully understand their implications, especially the "grandfather paradox".

If you go back to the past you stay in the past – this is a one way only journey...

The Meeting With Self does not cause any problems (except the transferring of knowledge dilemmas and the cliche warnings).

No

One of many loops is demonstrated in the sub-plot dealing with the >"Rainmaker>", the mysterious and dreaded figure who allegedly took over the Mob in future and created the Loopers. According to the information obtained by the older Joe, one of three children born on the same day in the same hospital was destined to grow up and become the Rainmaker, after witnessing the murder of his mother by a Looper. Is killing all three children the only way to prevent the creation of the Monster? Or maybe the right way is to actually save the mother and allow her to give the child a good upbringing and love that will prevent his transformation into the Monster? Note that both courses of action should have one inevitable result - eliminating the existence of the Loopers…

Joseph Gordon-Levitt was born in 1981, which makes him 30 years old, the age Bruce Willis (born in 1955, 57 years old) was when he began to star in the legendary TV Series "Moonlighting" (1985-1989). It is interesting to compare a photo of him from that time with today’s photo of Gordon-Levitt. The truth? Not much of a resemblance…

See:

Looper

Matrix

N

C

No

Taking a red pill or a blue pill.

A computer hacker learns from mysterious rebels about the true nature of his reality and his role in the war against its controllers.

No

No

See:

Matrix

Matrix 4, the

C

Taking a red pill or a blue pill.

No

No

See:

Matrix 4, the

Matrix Reloaded

C

Neo and his allies race against time before the machines discover the city of Zion and destroy it. While seeking the truth about the Matrix, Neo must save Trinity from a dark fate within his dreams.

No

No

See:

Matrix Reloaded

Matrix Revolutions, the

C

The human city of Zion defends itself against the massive invasion of the machines as Neo fights to end the war at another front while also opposing the rogue Agent Smith.

No

No

See:

Matrix Revolutions, the

Men in Black III

Three went back in time (careful, spoilers):

1. Boris the Animal - confronted his younger self, both were killed in the past>.

2. Agent J - met his younger self>.

3. > Agent K – disappeared in the past, it is unclear where, he did not meet his younger self and did not use the same Device as the other two (why>?)

C

Yes

A manual Alien device equipped wsith a dial that can be set to the desired time. A fre fall from a high altitude creates enough momentum before braking at the destination.

1. Time travel is possible (although it was outlawed and the inventor pf the Device was sent to a Maximum Security prison on the moon).

2. There are endless possible futures and each action may lead you to any one of them, but not necessarily to the desired destination.

3. The purpose of the trip is to change an event which happened - meaning the change is possible (as long as you can go back in time to the moment before the event took place...)

Yes, with his younger self

Yes

It seems to me that in both previous Movies in the series, there was no reference to time travel or to space travel, and it is unclear which distances did the ships that brought the Aliens travel, how fast they flew (FTL?) and how.

In addition, there are problems of continuity - It is unclear what happened to the Coroner, J's love interest in the _ Movie), and to K's childhood sweetheart (reunited with him in the - Movie).

It is unclear what was changed by the fact that K killed Boris instead of arresting him (except for the prevention of his escape from prison).

Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger are added to the list of celebrities who are actually Aliens living among us in disguise.

See:

Men in Black III

Millenium

Investigating a fatal jetliner crash, an NTSB official encounters an unusual chain-smoking time traveler posing as a stewardess on fatefully doomed planes. Their interactions are intertwined with a lost future-tech object that he recovered from the plane wreck, which she recovers- then she disappears in a flash of light before his eyes. Traveling back from the far future, the time travelers 'steal' people already destined to die, such as in plane crashes, in order to restock humankind in their own desolate future..

John Varley, Novel (1983) and Movie adaptation

Futuristic Alien technology

See:

Millenium

Next

A failed magician uses his skill to hide a real ability. This ability may be enough for him to fool the audience in his shows, and perhaps even to win the heart of the girl he loves, but is that enough in order to thwart a deadly terrorist plot, when both the government and the terrorists are after him?

C

No, it’s all in the mind

None

1. The protagonist has the ability to see into the future, but only two minutes ahead and only when it comes to his own life, except for one case.

2. Paraphrasing Heizenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, "The future changes every time you look at it. Because you looked at it. That changes everything." (From the script).

No

Yes

Can that count as time travel? Technically, this is Time Travel to the future

See:

Next

Number of the Beast, the

Robert Heinlein, Novel

Yes

The Burroughs Continua Device can be attached to any sealed-off vehicle (you learn from experience), equipped with the appropriate safety mechanisms. It turns every car into a multi-purpose vehicle, capable of traveling in the four dimensions…

"This car operates in several modes. As a roadable it is fast, comfortable, easy to handle, rather hard to park, and is usually parked with wings back as they are now, the hypersonic configuration. If we intended to drive it in the air, the wings would usually be extended for maximum lift. When operated by the Burroughs Continua Device, wing rake does not matter, but the chief pilot may choose to anticipate where he will arrive and rake accordingly…"

(Quote from the Novel).

The destination is created by the common imagination of the four travelers. In other words, any scenario existing in all their imaginations becomes real for them (just as they become real for characters in other scenarios).

According to the "six-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry", a space-time continuum used to require three space dimensions but only one time dimension; But than it was discovered that this one dimension is actually three dimensions condensed into one, which gives us 6 dimensions altogether. Theoretically, than, there could be as many as n dimensions, which allows for travel between six-sixty-six universes, or perhaps it is six raised to its sixth power, and the result in turn raised to its sixth power (see Drake's formula)…

There are those who would do anything to keep this information secret (by killing the inventor of the Time Machine before he builds it - but than again, he has already built it…)

Every extra-temporal spacecraft is also a time machine.

"Simultaneous location of two masses"

According to the "the Quantum mechanics of fairy tales", all time travel paradoxes are meaningless and therefore the question is irrelevant.

1. Cliches:

a. The team of a Sci-Fi mission:

1. The (mad) scientist;

2. The beautiful daughter/assistant;

3. The helper (who joins in order to save the scientist from himself or from the forces of evil controlling him, or in order to help him to finalize his plans to save mankind);

4. The one who happens to be in the wrong place in the wrong time and joins it against his will (until his true intentions are exposed).

b. Aliens (green, not gray) abduct humans to be used as guinea pigs in their efforts to become more human-like.

c. The parallel universes have names "the universe without H", "Mars 10", "the universe in which there is not United States and the USSR is in control" (a popular theme of alternate history), "the inverted world", "Oz" etc'…

2. Heinlein interacts with every major work of Sci Fi of the past (if I've missed a name, it's only because I can't identify the clue leading to it), and mainly with Burroughs's Mars stories (which apparently were a great influence on him).

3. Are we dealing here (and also in "the Cat…") with plain time travel, or with traveling to parallel universes? Is there a difference?

4. Calculating the relative changes in the trajectories of the planets, the revolution on the axis, the revolution around the Sun, etc'...

See:

Number of the Beast, the

One, the

C

Yes

Yes

See:

One, the

Passengers

C

A Generation Ship

No

See:

Passengers

Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus

There is the philosophical question of whether a person may be punished today for acts committed in the distant past and considered acceptable at the time.

Orson Scott Card, Novel, 1996

Yes

A machine called the "Tempoview" was designed to view and record the events of the past, but it can also be used to send people to the past (See Deja Vu).

From viewing to direct intervention – if Columbus is prevented from discovering America, it shall be spared the ruin and destruction caused by the discovery.

The problem:

Can the past be changed with information brought from the future, without destroying the future (thus undoing the need for the change)? And according to Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, doesn't viewing mean changing?

No

Not all of the travelers made it back, but the two time lines converged and Columbus found redemption.

See:

Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Paycheck

Philip K. Dick, short story and Movie adaptation

Yes

"...a Laser-enhanced lens. (He claimed the lens was) powerful enough to see around the curvature of the universe. (He believed) if you could see around a curve that went on forever you would end up back where you started, looking at yourself.

Except you're not looking at yourself now, in the present.

No, you are not. You're looking at the future."

(Quote from the Script).

You cannot travel in time, but you can watch the past and use the information gained from watching.

"Look, if we know anything, we know that time travel's not possible. Einstein proved that, right?

Time travel, yes. Einstein was very clear that he believed time viewing theoretically could be accomplished..." (Quote from the Script).

Seeing the future turns it unavoidably into a self fulfilling prophecy because it enables me to see myself in the future;

Correcting history and not changing it.

No

No

"The inventor of the time machine goes back in the time in order to destroy the machine he built lest it falls into the wrong> hands."

See:

Paycheck

Philadelphia Experiment, the

In 1943, an anti-radar experiment accidentally sends two sailors forward in time to 1984.

C

What is the connection between the stealth system and time travel?

See:

Philadelphia Experiment, the

Planet of the Apes

Pierre Boulle (who wrote "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in 1952) wrote this novel in 1963. Note that the first Sputnik was launched in 1957, Telstar (the first private object to be launched into space) was launched in 1962, the space race was just beginning and no one dared to dream of manned space flights.

The original French, by the way, uses the word "Singe" both for Ape and Monkey, as the French language does not differentiate between the two – a very substantial differentiation in this case.

The main events of the book are placed in a frame story, in which Jinn and Phillys, a couple out on a pleasure cruise in a spaceship, find a message in a bottle floating in space. The message inside the bottle is the log of a man, Ulysse M>יrou, who believes that he may be the last human left alive in the entire universe, but has written down his story in hopes that someone else, somewhere, will find it.

The message's writer, our protagonist, begins by explaining that he was friends with Professor Antelle, a genius scientist on Earth, who invented a sophisticated spaceship which could travel at nearly the speed of light. The protagonist, the professor, and a physician named Levain fly off in this ship to explore outer space. They travel to the nearest star system which the professor theorized might be capable of life, the red sun Betelgeuse, which would take themabout 350 years to reach. Due to time dilation, however, the trip only seems two years long to the professor and him.

They arrive at the distant solar system and find that it contains an Earth-like planet, which they christen Soror, "because of its resemblance to our Earth." They land on the planet and discover that they can breathe the air, drink the water, and eat the local vegetation. They soon encounter other human beings on the planet, although these others act as primitive as chimpanzees and destroy the clothing of the professor and the protagonist. The protagonist and the professor live with the primitive humans for a few days, hoping to civilize them and learn their language.

At the end of this time, they are startled to see a hunting party in the forest, consisting of gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees using guns and machines. The apes wear human clothing identical to that of 20th century Earth, with the exception that they wear gloves instead of shoes on their prehensile feet. The hunting party shoots several of the humans for sport, including Levain, and captures others, including the protagonist.

Ulysse is taken off to the apes' city, which looks exactly the same as a human city from 20th century Earth, with the exception that some smaller furniture exists for the use of the chimpanzees. While most of the humans captured by the hunting party are sold for manual labor, the protagonist winds up in a research facility, which is doing experiments on human intelligence. The apes perform experiments on the humans similar to Pavlov's conditioning experiments on dogs, and the protagonist proves his intelligence by failing to be conditioned, speaking and drawing figures of geometry.

He is taken in by one of the researchers, Zira, a female chimpanzee, who begins to teach him the apes' language. He learns from her all about the ape planet. Eventually, he is freed from his cage, meets Zira's fianc>י, Cornelius, a respected young scientist. With Cornelius' help, he goes to make a speech in front of the ape President and several representatives, and is given specially tailored clothing. He tours the city and learns about the apes' civilization and history. The apes have a very ancient society, but their origins are lost in time. Their technology and culture have progressed slowly through the centuries because each generation, for the most part, imitates those of the past, a recognized ape-like characteristic. The society is divided up between the violent gorillas, pedantic orangutans, and intellectual chimpanzees.

Although the protagonists' chimpanzee patrons Zira and Cornelius are assured of his sentience, the society's leading orangutan scientists believe that he is faking his understanding of language, because their philosophy will not allow for the possibility of sentient human beings.

The protagonist falls in love with a primitive human female, Nova, whom he met in the forest at the beginning of his visit to the planet. He impregnates her. This proves that he is the same species as the primitive humans, which lowers his standing in the eyes of many of the apes. However, their derision turns to fear with a discovery in a distant archaeological dig and analysis of memory in some human brains. Evidence is uncovered which fills in the missing history of the apes. In the distant past, the planet was ruled by human beings, who built a technological society, and enslaved apes to perform their manual labor. Over time the humans became more and more dependent upon the apes, until eventually they were so lazy and degenerate that they were overthrown by their ape servants and fell into the primitive state in which our protagonist found them.

While some of the apes reject this evidence, others take it as a sign that the humans are a threat and must be exterminated. In particular is an old orangutan scientist, Dr. Zaius. The protagonist gets wind of this, and escapes from the planet with his wife and newly-born son, returning to Earth in the professor's spaceship.

Again, the trip takes several centuries, but only a relative time of a few years to the protagonist. The protagonist lands on earth, over 700 years after he had originally left it, and lands outside the city of Paris. However, once outside the ship, he discovers that Earth is now ruled by sentient apes just like the planet from which he has just fled (this is where his story on paper ends). He immediately blasts his ship off into space once more, writes his story, places it in a bottle, and launches it into space for someone to find.

The book concludes by returning to the couple who had found the bottle, who are revealed to be apes themselves. They scoff at the unlikelihood of humans having been advanced enough to build spaceships, and conclude that the story must be someone's idea of a joke.

Pierre Boule, Novel, 1963

Yes

A Spacecraft

According to the Theory of Relativity

No

No

Other novels:

Planet of the Apes by William Thomas Quick

Planet of the Apes: The Fall by William Thomas Quick

Planet of the Apes: Colony by William Thomas Quick

Planet of the Apes: Junior Novelization by John Whitman

Resistance (Planet of the Apes) by John Whitman

Force (Planet of the Apes) by John Whitman

Planet of the Apes-Man The Fugitive by George Alec Effinger

Planet of the Apes-Lord of The Apes by George Alec Effinger

Planet of the Apes-Escape to Tomorrow by George Alec Effinger

Planet of the Apes-Journey into Terror by George Alec Effinger

See:

Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes - the New Movie

C

Yes

A Spacecraft

According to Quantum Mechanics

No

The new (Tim Burton's) Planet of the Apes also illustrated the principle of quantum theory that every action leads to only one future of countless possibilities, in contrast to the original version, in which the "return to the Future" was relatively simple and, incidentally, was the only one in which the author, Pierre Boulle, was involved. In this respect, possibly, the new film is actually more true to the spirit of the original Novel.

See:

Planet of the Apes - the New Movie

Planet of the Apes - the original Movie and its Sequels

Planet of the Apes (1968) was a groundbreaking science fiction film based on Boulle's novel, and was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston. It was the vision of producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who commissioned Rod Serling to write the script, but the final version would be written by Michael Wilson. Jacobs enlisted Heston (who enlisted Schaffner) well before any production deal was made, and Heston's star status was instrumental in gaining support for the film. They gained the support of Mort Abrahams after producing a short film demo which showed that the makeups (initially created by Ben Nye, Sr., not to be confused with the design perfected by John Chambers for the actual film) could be convincing enough to not appear funny, as most "monkey suits" up to that time had. Interestingly, in the English-language films, the apes are insulted when called "monkeys," but in the original book, as mentioned above, no distinction is made because "singes" is the French word for both "apes" and "monkeys".

C

Yes

A Spacecraft

According to the Theory of Relativity

No

In space, but not in time; The astronaut reached an alternate time, not an alternate Earth.

There were four sequels to the original Movie (the only one Pierre Boulle was involved in) which substantially deviated from the story in Boulle's book:

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes by Michael Avallone

Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)

Escape from the Planet of the Apes by Jerry Pournelle

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes by John Jakes

Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)

Battle for the Planet of the Apes by David Gerrold

See:

Planet of the Apes - the original Movie and its Sequels

Premonition

C

No, it's all in the mind

The heroine lives on two timelines - one begins with the accident which killed her husband and goes backwards, and the other begins with the events preceding the accident and goes forward; the two timelines interface in several points, which are revealed during the Movie.

No, only finding the interface (or intersection) point of the two time lines will cause them to reunite.

Yes

See:

Premonition

Primer

C

Yes

The time travelers spend as much time in the time machine as they want to go back, and can only travel as far back as to when the machine was first turned on.

See:

Primer

Race Through Time *Man Who Used to be Me, the

23 years after the murder of his father, an ex-police officer working as a security guard in a facility where time travel research is being held, takes advantage of an opportunity to travel back time in order to prevent the murder. When he finds out he was too late to prevent the murder, he decides to find his younger self and together they go out after the murderer…

too young for him, don't they?

C

Yes

A> machine resembling a ray transporter (presumably disintegrating the traveler at the molecular level); The machine opens a gate connecting the present and the future, similar to the one we've seen both in Terminator and Stargate (Wormhole? Other dimensions? Parallel universes? None of those terms is mentioned in the Movie)

The time machine is still in early experimental stages and has not been tested on humans, although the project is under great political pressure to expedite the process (the research, by the way, is privatized); Arrival at the correct destination is guaranteed in 96% of the cases; The length of stay the in the past limited to 80 hours; You can return home, but the gate stays open only for 7.2 seconds, (if you miss the deadline, you may have to rely on an honest scientist to fight a corrupt corporate executive in order to get you back); You cannot upset the balance of energy in the universe and the result of the transfer of energy from time to time may be destructive; There are also concerns about the impact of staying in the past on the future and the changes that may occur.

Meeting Younger Self causes no problems (except those related to the exchange of information and the incriminating fingerprints on the murder weapon).

Yes

The interior design is a little more hi tech, but there is no difference in the fashion design, or in the exterior design (we are talking about 2023…)

Two time lines are created, one in which the younger man didn't know his partner was corrupt, and one in which the older man returns home, happily married and a father of three cute children. Incidentally, the children he finds when he returns home (see Timecop) seem a little

See:

Race Through Time *Man Who Used to be Me, the

Riverworld

In the first book, the great explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) is suddenly brought back to life on the banks of the river of time (see Sambatyon, Styx, Lethe), young, completely healthy, bald and butt naked. And he is not alone- among the many resurrected is also a prude Victorian lady, Alice Liddell Hargreaves; King John Lackland; an English speaking Neanderthal; a Jewish Holocaust survivor; a wise and intelligent Alien, and on the other hand Nazi criminal Hermann Goering, and many more... Food appears miraculously (you just have to learn to use the "food replicator"...), but with no idea about the meaning and purpose of this strange new life after death, billions of people from all over the world, and from all periods of history - and prehistory - must start all over again. Burton, once an explorer always an explorer, leads the party setting out to explore the river world, to learn to survive, and most importantly, to understand the motives of the masters of this world and the reasons for the mass resurrection, which as it turns out, is neither random nor eternal. His ultimate goal is to face the mysterious benefactors of the human race and learn the real purpose – for better or for worse - of the river world.

In the second book, Sam Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) has a dream: to build a river boat rivaling in its splendor the most luxurious boats ever to sail the waters of the mighty Mississippi. And when it is built, to sail it up the endless waterway crossing his new home world - and finally discover its hidden sources. Still, before he can make his vision come true, he has to go on a dangerous journey searching for a meteor which fell from the skies. This mission would require an alliance with bloodthirsty Viking Erik Bloodaxe, King John Lackland, legendary French swordsman Cyrano de Bergerac, Greek adventurer Odysseus, and infamous Nazi Hermann Goering, all in order reach the dark stone tower at the mouth of the river, where the omnipotent masters of the river world are waiting with their secrets...

In the third book, Sir Richard Francis Burton is again leading the party, followed by Sam Clemens, King John Lackland and Cyrano de Bergerac. Motivated by the promise of perfect answers, they plot a course across the vast polar sea, towards the awesome tower looming over it. But getting there would be only half of the war, because death in the river world has become chillingly final…

Phillip Jose Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Gods of Riverworld (1983), by Phillip Jose Farmer, the Movie adaptation

No, intervention of unknown Aliens

The dead are resurrected on the banks of the river naked, bold and young (=timeless).

Riverworld's mysterious qualities can be used for shortcuts in trips – there is no death by illness or injury, but you can commit suicide and be resurrected in a completely different time/place (AKA Suicide Express). The only problem is the lack of control over the time/place pf resurrection…

Everybody meets their Younger Selves

One Movie:

In the Movie based upon the series (or rather the first book, and not even all of it), the entire theme of the resurrection, which has a crucial importance in the books, and all of the Aliens' plans for the river world, are only revealed at the end and are only hinted at.

The leader of the party in the Movie is an American astronaut whose spacecraft crashed onto the river world (reminiscent of the "Planet of the Apes"?) Some of the original chaare mentioned by name, but without any commentary (the astronaut, apparently, does identify correctly Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Sam Clemens, in spite of an initial attempt to create an impression that he was too ignorant to do so). The Movie failed and received very negative reviews.

A mini series based on the saga was produced in 2010.

See:

Riverworld

Somewhere in Time

A young man sees an old photograph of a woman and through hypnosis travels back in time from 1980 to 1912 to meet her. Based on Matheson's 1975 novel "Bid Time Return".

C

No, hypnosis

See:

Somewhere in Time

Sound of Thunder

Ray Bradbury, short story and Movie adaptation

Yes

A machine, which disintegrates the traveler in the molecular level, and puts him back together at the destination.

The jump is to a single predetermined point; everything goes, both organic and non-organic material; Small but accumulative changes cause catastrophic "time waves" and evolutionary changes which are just as catastrophic ("the Butterfly Effect").

"Time doesn't permit that sort of mess a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future."

(From the story)

Yes

See the Butterfly Effect…

See:

Sound of Thunder

Source Code

C

Yes, the Source Code Project

What exactly is the source code? I could not understand, even after the presentation of the scholarly but highly antipathic scientist who heads the project. The project does allow repeated jumps for periods of eight minutes each. In every Jump, the traveler has to collect enough information in order to identify and isolate a terrorist among of all passengers on the train (or one of the cars, to be exact), while experiencing the train blast over and over again.

According to the scientist, there is no such thing as time travel, only a passage between parallel universes, so you can only affect the future, but not change the past (so why bother?) Incidentally, that does not explain how the test subject managed to get one of the passengers off the train, to call his father on the phone and to send a text message to the military officer from the train, and why he was so convinced he could prevent the train explosion and save all the passengers – in defiance of the warnings of the scientist, who just wanted to use the data the train explosion show off the success of project "source code". Oh, what a classic time loop...

No (well, technically yes, if “self" is the person whose face vou see in the mirror)

Yes

Note the interesting reversal of roles – contrary to popular in most Movies of this type, here the scientist is an antipath (I already said that, didn't I?...) who would do anything for the success of his project, including sacrificing his test subject, while the military officer is the one showing true camaraderie when agreeing to grant the test subject's last wish.

See:

Source Code

Space Between us ,the

"Thanks to Genesis Space Technologies, in 20 hours the Magellan 61 will travel six astronauts to Mars, not to visit but to live there. The first true citizens of Mars!"

C

A> spacecraft

Flights to Mars are about to become a matter of routine, but the human body still has its limitatons.

Yes

See:

Space Between us ,the

Star Trek (2009)

Captain Nero of the Romulan mining ship Narada attempts to exact revenge on Spock, whom he blames for the destruction of his home world and its inhabitants, including his wife and unborn child. Both his ship and Spock's ship, however, are caught in the black hole's event horizon and travel into the past.

C

No, a black hole's Event Horizon

אין

A Black Hole is used as a shortcut for unintentional time travel, in this case to the past.

No

Yes

See:

Star Trek (2009)

Star Trek Generations

In Generations, the seventh in the cinematic Star Trek franchise, In the 23rd century, Captain Kirk and several hundreds of others are trapped in the Nexus, a somewhat supernatural (even magical) enclave in space and time. Several of the captives manage to escape, among them Guinan and the villain of the Movie, Soran. This in itself does not create any problem, but Soran wants to return the Nexus, and he will do anything to accomplish this goal, including the destruction of a star. Picard is sent to stop him, but he cannot prevent the firing of the missile that destroys the star. The Nexus takes over the adjacent planet. Soran and Picard are trapped and the planet is destroyed.

From within (as Kirk will observe) the Nexus appears to be little more than an amplified daydream--there is no risk and therefore no excitement, time has no meaning, there is no thrill, no fear of failure. In other words, crushing boredom. Picard gets fed up and goes to find Kirk, thought he realizes he can actually leave the Nexus any time he wants to.

And this is where things get messy. Picard returns to a time before he left; Kirk returns to a time after he left. Why do they not experience the passage of time in the same way? Is it really time travel, or making a wish and realizing it?

Kirk agrees to join Picard and together they manage to prevent the launch of the destructive missile, Soran is killed and a population of the planet is saved. The Nexus does not take it over.

How will Picard manage to enter the Nexus and get Kirk out? An infinity loop is created again… But no, time has no meaning inside the Nexus… Or does it? How can Picard enter and exit the Nexus at will without nullifying the fact that he entered the Nexus to begin with? And it was possible to go back in time in order to prevent the destruction of the star, why not go back few minutes earlier, to the space station from which the missile was launched…? Only the writers have the answers.

C

No, a freak Natural Occurrence>

Time Loop/Parallel Universes

Yes

Yes

See:

Star Trek Generations

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

In "the Voyage Home", the fourth in the Star Trek cinematic franchise, the team of the Enterprise makes its way home in a stolen Klingon Bird of Prey, facing a court martial for their actions in the previous Movie (disobeying orders, as usual), and discovers that some obscure Alien device poses a threat to Earth. Spock and McCoy come to the conclusion that the device istrying to make contact with the humpbacked whale, a species long extinct and Kirk decides the only way to solve this problem is to go back to the 20th century and bring a pair of whales to make contact with the device and ask it politely to leave, which created a lot of amusing situations.

Two main logical problems relating to time travel manifest themselves in this Movie.

1. Given that the probe has traveled from light-years away (beyond anywhere to which the Federation's fleet of faster-than-light exploratory starships has been) because it no longer hears whale song, and given that whale song is an audio frequency signal, traveling roughly a thousand feet per second (much slower than the 186,000 miles per second of light) and incapable of traveling through a vacuum, how did the Aliens who sent the probe receive the sounds of whale song in the first place?

2. The team is going to use the technique of sling-shotting around the sun to go back in time. Forgive my confusion. Although this technique is used in the Star Trek television series, and elsewhere, it makes no sense. It is a fallacious extension of the notion in relativity that as velocity approaches light speed time for that object slows, and that time for that object ceases at light speed. Thus we are given to imagine that if we exceeded light speed, we would go backward in time. But relativity also makes it clear that anything traveling at that speed would have infinite mass and absolute density, and would be reduced to a singularity.

(Image 51e, from Wikipeda)

C

No, a freak Natural Occurrence>

The Slingshot around the Sun or gravity assist

"So what you're saying is that we go back in time, find two humpback whales, bring them forward in time, and hope to hell they tell this thing what to go do with itself? Well that's crazy!" (Quote from the Movie)

No

Yes

So what's going on?

We encounter the usual problems of changes in the past by time travelers from the future. What effect will each of these changes have on the future?

Kirk has no intention of trying to save whales from extinction, since any such attempt like this will create an infinite loop (if the whales do not become extinct, the Alien device will not arrive, etc'). His sole objective is to transfer two whales from the past to the future. Trust me, this also is much more complicated than it sounds...

Scott gives an important scientific formula to Dr. Nichols, allegedly because he knew that Nichols is the original inventor (and he also knows when the invention was completed). But giving away the formula would expedite the completion of the invention, and even change the entire scientific research process leading to development of the invention (incidentally, this is not the only technological innovation to reach the 20th century from the 24th century; In comparison, imagine what would Thomas Alva Edison have done in the 19th century with a video game console from the 20th century…)

Chekhov (a Russian in 1960's America, the peak of the Cold War...) has to work hard to convince his interrogators that he is not a madman crazy or an Alien;

McCoy cures an incurable dialysis patient; what effect might that have (a suggested solution; what if she does live longer, but will be childless because of her advanced age)?

A marine biologist joins the team (and disappears for a few centuries).This is a fertile young woman, though she has no family, is but her influence on her surroundings indeed so negligible, that her sudden disappearance will cause no damage?

The Military police chases a group of suspects who mysteriously vanish from an elevator;

Kirk sells a pair of 400 old glasses (but only a 100 years old in the 20th century) given to him by Dr. McCoy, creating a mini time warp;

Most importantly, and worst of all, the mere removal of the whales (the female is pregnant) may have a long term effect over their gene pool and even speed up the process of their extinction (the butterfly effect, remember?) does the marine biologist, a world-famous expert on whales, not understand this? And what effect it will have on the time in which the song of the whales will come to an end

And how come the team is not trapped on Earth by Alien device in the time between requesting he permission to rescue Spock's body and waiting for their court martial?

And isn't a "Grandfather paradox" created here for each of the team members?

Is another trip from the future to repair the damage impossible? Please note that all problems must be solved during this trip while causing as little damage as possible to the time line.

Using the following chart, let's try to understand (by the way, in terms of categories of scenarios, we are dealing here with a first category scenario, ending with a simple N-jump):

(Image 11e, from http://www.mjyoung.net/time/index.htm)

See:

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Star Trek: First Contact

In the Movie "First Contact", the eighth in the cinematic Star Trek franchise, we learn, among other things, how at last the First Contact was made. The Borg attack the Earth, and the Enterprise is sent to patrol the demilitarized zone to make sure that the Romulans do not take advantage of the situation (which would seem logical, but wouldn't it be even more logical for the Romulans to use the time for and reinforcement?) Of course, Picard knows the real reason for his expulsion is the fear of his reaction to another encounter with the Borg after he was already imprisoned by them once) and he decides (for the umpteenth time, and with the support of the entire crew) to disobey orders and ride into battle. He manages to destroy the Borg flagship but not before an escape pod manages to leave it. The Borg create a time gate (of an undetermined nature) and fly into the past, followed by the Enterprise. When the crew discovered that the Earth was conquered and colonized by the Borg, they decide to go back to the past and make things right.

C

No, a freak Natural Occurrence>

No

Yes

Did The Enterprise and the Borg ship go back in time in a single incident, or in two separate incidents?

See: Star Trek: First Contact

Stargate Continuum

C, TV

Yes

Ba'al changed the timeline so that SG-1 or the Stargate program never existed. Three people were unaffected by the change but are unable to do anything until Ba'al and the system lords arrive.

See:

Stargate Continuum

Terminator

The Terminator saga (including the movies and the TV series) deals not only with chases, battles and action, but also with time travel. If we review the four Movies is sequence, the first thing that attracts our attention is the fact that the time gap between the present and future becomes smaller and smaller from Movie to Movie, and what was in the first Movie just one of many possibilities becomes an (almost) certain future in the last.

Some very interesting problems related to the logic of time travel arise from this review:

(Image 31e, mine)

In the TV series	In the fifth Movie	In the forth Movie	In the third Movie	In the second Movie	In the first Movie
,in the episode Self Made Man we find out that the launching system is not infallible	When John Connor, leader of the human resistance, sends Sgt. Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect Sarah Connor and safeguard the future, an unexpected turn of events creates a fractured timeline.	, no one is sent back in time	Two are sent back in time, again a deadly machine to save John Connor, now in his 20ies, and an even deadlier machine, this time s female (like that's going to help him) to eliminate him, and possibly his wife to be (what's known as a "twofer").	Two are sent back in time, thought to a later time - a deadly machine to save John Connor, a typical rebellious teenager, and protect him, and an even deadlier machine, to eliminate the first machine and John Connor.	Two are sent back in time - a deadly machine, to kill Sarah Connor before she gives birth to her son, John Connor, and Kyle Reese, to save Sarah (and father John). The time machine that sent the Terminator and him was destroyed after their departure, supposedly because the machines decided to eliminate John Connor before his birth only after they realized they lost the war. Reese took off knowing he has no chance of getting back. But if was last one to be sent, how were the Terminators in the second and the third Movie sent?	The scenario
In the TV series, in the episode **, John and Sarah were sent 8 years into the future (why not to thae past?), 8 years closer to Judgement Day, so basically John is a 24 years old man in a 16 years old body… in the episode **, Derek Reese meets his younger self with no adverse effects; in the episode Complications, Jesse brings together the older Charles Fisher and the younger Charles Fisher with no apparent adverse effects (the effect of the older Fisher's death is unclear); in the episode ** John is sent again to the future, this time to a post- Judgement Day future, and meets his soon to be father;					The person who sent Reese to the past was John Connor (who actually sent his father to the past so that he could be born…) Reese explains to Sarah that he was sent by the leader of the human survivors, the Hero of the war against the machines, her unborn son. Does he know something that we- and Sarah – don't know? Notice that Sarah herself neither confirms nor denies, but apparently she has no doubt as to the identity of her child's father, not even in the fourth Movie.	The Grandfather Paradox
		Marcus doesn't know he was in a long coma, but he knows he has to look for Connor and Reese.			The information Kyle Reese gives Sarah about the war is the information he received from John Connor who received it from Sarah…	The "Freebie" Paradox
Terminators on the one hand and resistance fighters keep coming from the future, and it turns out that Skynet people have been among us long before Skynet was even built…		The system that allows for time travel has yet to be built; At the end of the war the machines were defeated - So when was the system built and why and when did it become necessary to send Reese (of all people) to the past?			The machines tried to eliminate John Connor three times and failed; This we know because after all he managed to grow up and become the leader of the resistance against the machines and to send Kyle Reese to rescue his mother and to father him, etc'…	The Infinite Loop

C

Yes

Unclear

Sending a single traveler back in time; since only organic material can go through, the machine (a) is covered with an organic outer skin, and (b) arrives butt naked to its destination. According to the TV series, mistakes in destination dates can happen. There is only one known case of a trip to the future.

Yes, in the TV series

None of the travelers returned home (not in the Movies and not in the TV series).

See:

Terminator

Time After Time

Using a time machine, Jack the Ripper and H. G. Wells travel from 1893 London to 1979 San Francisco.

C

Yes, a time machine

See:

Time After Time

Time and Again

The beginning is quite corny - Simon Morley (the first-person narrator), a young artist working in an ad agency in Manhattan and frustrated by his job, receives one day an offer he cannot refuse - to join a top secret government project, after an initial screening process found him qualified. The thing is he has to make a decision knowing nothing about the nature of the project. After a short hesitation he says goodbye to his ordinary, comfortable life and embarks on a training process consisting mainly of mental conditioning and hypnosis, designed to make Simon see the past in living, breathing colors, and not as an old, faded and lifeless image. At the end of the process he moves into a specially prepared apartment in the Dakota building (yes, the one in front of which John Lennon was murdered), from which he is supposed to go time traveling, mainly to the specific point in the time in 1884. Until one day (page 100 in the book) he opens the door of the apartment, steps out into the street and finds itself in the past…

After the first experiment is crowned with success and the project staff is convinced that no "butterfly effect" was caused (or was it…?) Simon embarks on the fateful journey, joined by his girlfriend Kate, who has a personal interest in that point of time in1884.

The second experiment is also crowned with success, but in contrast to what you might expect, the success causes problems, and the scientists, guided (as is the Author, Finney) by the perception of the time as river, raise the question of the whether a twig dumped into the river is liable to disrupt its flow or even stop it, or is the current strong enough to carry the twig and make it disappear, and after some hesitation they decide to take the chance.

The third experiment is even more complex - Simon dares to show greater involvement both in events and in people's lives, whether it is a young girl bullied by an abusive suitor or the exposure of a corruption scandal in City Hall.

The fourth experiment is the most critical - Simon decides to do everything in order to prevent the girl's marriage to the bossy (and corrupt) suitor. Will his involvement have catastrophic results? When the project staff of the comes to the conclusion that the flow of the river can be only stopped by deliberate intervention, and it turns out that the success of the experiment was actually a failure, Simon is required to make a critical decision. He volunteers to go back and make a deliberate change in history…

Jack Finney, Novel, 1970

No, Mind Training

Time as a River: you cannot stop it by accidentally throwing in a twig, but it can be done deliberately.

No, because he goes back to a past in which he was not yet born (which is fine as long as he doesn’t kill anybody…)

The traveler chooses to stay in the past even though he is able to return to his own "time" any time.

Are we dealing here with time travel or with a parallel universes scenario? According to the novel's premise, all "times" coexist in parallel, and therefore Simon Morley's journeys can be seen as one more classic example of "opening a door" to a parallel universe.

See:

Time and Again

Time Bandits

A young boy unwittingly joins a band of dwarves as they travel through time hunting treasure

C

See:

Time Bandits

Time Changer

A Bible professor from 1890 comes forward in time to the present via a time machine and cannot believe the things that he sees.

C

See:

Time Changer

Time Line - the Movie

C

Yes

The role of the revolving mirrors is unclear; every traveler carries a remote control unit, which allows him to call for a ride home (see also> Deja Vu).

Same as the Novel.

No

Same as the Novel.

Notice the presence of the nerdy but genius boy who gives the first clue to solving the mystery ...

See:

Time Line - the Movie

Time Line - the Novel

Michael Crichton, Novel

Yes

"...quantum computers. Their advantage is unimaginably great power - so great that you can indeed describe and compress a three-dimensional living object into an electron stream. Exactly like a fax. You can then transmit the electron stream through a quantum foam wormhole and reconstruct it in another universe." (From the Novel).

The Multiverse; A wormhole opens to an accidental destination, allowing for a trip to the past. The wormhole stays open for about two hours.

Just like the quality of a fax message is degraded with every retransfer, so does the success rate in DNA reconstruction. After each journey, resulting in transcription errors that cause severe bodily defects, in addition to severe cases of transporter psychosis (incidentally, don't the electronic signals of the fax machine travel in space and not in time?)

Sound scientific basis – Richard Fineman and Hugh Everett. Instead of complicated explanations, why not go directly to the source?

 Segment 1, from Chapter **:

"And what's the multiverse?" Kate said.

"The multiverse is the world defined by quantum mechanics. It means that-"

"Quantum mechanics?" Chris said. "What's quantum mechanics?"

Gordon paused. "That's fairly difficult. But since you're historians," he said, "let me try to explain it historically."

"A hundred years ago," Gordon said, "physicists understood that energy - like light or magnetism or electricity - took the form of continuously flowing waves. We still refer to `radio waves' and `light waves.' In fact, the recognition that all forms of energy shared this wavelike nature was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century physics.

"But there was a small problem," he said. "It turned out that if you shined light on a metal plate, you got an electric current. The physicist Max Planck studied the relationship between the amount of light shining on the plate and the amount of electricity produced, and he concluded that energy wasn't a continuous wave. Instead, energy seemed to be composed of individual units, which he called quanta."

"The discovery that energy came in quanta was the start of quantum physics," Gordon said.

"A few years later, Einstein showed that you could explain the photoelectric effect by assuming that light was composed of particles, which he called photons. These photons of light struck the metal plate and knocked off electrons, producing electricity. Mathematically, the equations worked. They fit the view that light consisted of particles. Okay so far?"

"Yes...."

"And pretty soon, physicists began to realize that not only light, but all energy was composed of particles. In fact, all matter in the universe took the form of particles. Atoms were composed of heavy particles in the nucleus, light electrons buzzing around on the outside. So, according to the new thinking, everything is particles. Okay?"

"Okay... ."

"The particles are discrete units, or quanta. And the theory that describes how these particles behave is quantum theory. A major discovery of twentieth-century physics."

They were all nodding.

"Phcontinue to study these particles, and begin to realize they're very strange entities. You can't be sure where they are, you can't measure them exactly, and you can't predict what they will do. Sometimes they behave like particles, sometimes like waves. Sometimes two particles will interact with each other even though they're a million miles apart, with no connection between them. And so on. The theory is starting to seem extremely weird.

"Now, two things happen to quantum theory. The first is that it gets confirmed, over and over. It's the most proven theory in the history of science. Supermarket scanners, lasers and computer chips all rely on quantum mechanics. So there is absolutely no doubt that quantum theory is the correct mathematical description of the universe.

"But the problem is, it's only a mathematical description. It's just a set of equations. And physicists couldn't visualize the world that was implied by those equations - it was too weird, too contradictory. Einstein, for one, didn't like that. He felt it meant the theory was flawed.

But the theory kept getting confirmed, and the situation got worse and worse. Eventually, even scientists who won the Nobel Prize for contributions to quantum theory had to admit they didn't understand it.

"So, this made a very odd situation. For most of the twentieth century, there's a theory of the universe that everyone uses, and everyone agrees is correct - but nobody can tell you what it is saying about the world."

"What does all this have to do with multiple universes?" Marek said.

"I'm getting there," Gordon said.

Many physicists tried to explain the equations, Gordon said. Each explanation failed for one reason or another. Then in 1957, a physicist named Hugh Everett proposed a daring new explanation. Everett claimed that our universe - the universe we see, the universe of rocks and trees and people and galaxies out in space - was just one of an infinite number of universes, existing side by side.

Each of these universes was constantly splitting, so there was a universe where Hitler lost the war, and another where he won; a universe where Kennedy died, and another where he lived. And also a world where you brushed your teeth in the morning, and one where you didn't. And so forth, on and on and on. An infinity of worlds. Everett called this the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. His explanation was consistent with the quantum equations, but physicists found it very hard to accept. They didn't like the idea of all these worlds constantly splitting all the time. They found it unbelievable that reality could take this form.

"Most physicists still refuse to accept it," Gordon said. "Even though no one has ever shown it is wrong. Everett himself had no patience with his colleagues' objections. He insisted the theory was true, whether you liked it or not. If you disbelieved his theory, you were just being stodgy and old fashioned, exactly like the scientists who disbelieved the Copernican theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system - and which had also seemed unbelievable at the time.

"Because Everett claimed the many worlds concept was actually true. There really were multiple universes. And they were running right alongside our own. All these multiple universes were eventually referred to as a `multiverse.' "

"Wait a minute," Chris said. "Are you telling us this is true?"

"Yes," Gordon said. "It's true."

"How do you know?" Marek said.

"I'll show you," Gordon said. And he reached for a manila file that said "ITC/CTC Technology."

He took out a blank piece of paper, and began drawing. "Very simple experiment, it's been done for two hundred years. Set up two walls, one in front of the other. The first wall has a single vertical slit in it."

He showed them the drawing.

Segment 2, from Chapter**:

The night was cold and the sky filled with stars as they stepped off the airplane onto the wet runway. To the east, Marek saw the dark outlines of mesas beneath low-hanging clouds. A Land Cruiser was waiting off to one side. Soon they were driving down a highway, dense forest on both sides of the road.

"Where exactly are we?" Marek said.

"About an hour north of Albuquerque," Gordon said. "The nearest town is Black Rock. That's where our research facility is."

"Looks like the middle of nowhere," Marek said.

"Only at night. Actually, there are fifteen high-tech research companies in Black Rock. And of course, Sandia is just down the road. Los Alamos is about an hour away. Farther away, White Sands, all that."

They continued down the road for several more miles. They came to a prominent green-and-white highway sign that read ITC BLACK ROCK LABORATORY. The Land Cruiser turned right, heading up a twisting road into the forested hills.

From the back seat, Stern said, "You told us before that you can connect to other universes."

"Yes."

"Through quantum foam."

"That's right."

"But that doesn't make any sense," Stern said.

"Why? What is quantum foam?" Kate said, stifling a yawn.

"It's a remnant of the birth of the universe," Stern said. He explained that the universe had begun as a single, very dense pinpoint of matter. Then, eighteen billion years ago, it exploded outward from that pinpoint - in what was known as the big bang.

"After the explosion, the universe expanded as a sphere. Except it wasn't an absolutely perfect sphere. Inside the sphere, the universe wasn't absolutely homogeneous - which is why we now have galaxies clumped and clustered irregularly in the universe, instead of being uniformly distributed. Anyway, the point is, the expanding sphere had tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out. They're still a part of the universe."

"They are? Where?"

"At subatomic dimensions. Quantum foam is just a way of saying that at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles. But the foam is smaller than an individual atomic particle. There may or may not be wormholes in that foam."

"There are," Gordon said.

"But how could you use them for travel? You can't put a person through a hole that small. You can't put anything through it."

"Correct," Gordon said. "You also can't put a piece of paper through a telephone line. But you can send a fax."

Stern frowned. "That's entirely different."

"Why?" Gordon said. "You can transmit anything, as long as you have a way to compress and encode it. Isn't that so?"

"In theory, yes," Stern said. "But you're talking about compressing and encoding the information for an entire human being."

"That's right."

"That can't be done."

Gordon was smiling, amused now. "Why not?"

"Because the complete description of a human being - all the billions of cells, how they are interconnected, all the chemicals and molecules they contain, their biochemical state - consists of far too much information for any computer to handle."

"It's just information," Gordon said, shrugging.

"Yes. Too much information."

"We compress it by using a lossless fractal algorithm."

"Even so, it's still an enormous-"

"Excuse me," Chris said. "Are you saying you compress a person?"

"No. We compress the information equivalent of a person."

"And how is that done?" Chris said.

"With compression algorithms - methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. Are you familiar with those?"

"I've got software that uses it, but that's it."

"Okay," Gordon said. "All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That's three million pieces of information - a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the picture line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction tothe computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels in the line. Then switch to gray, and make the next ten pixels gray. And so on. It doesn't store information for each individual point. It stores insfor how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was."

"Even so," Stern said, "you're not talking about a two-dimensional picture, you're talking about a three-dimensional living object, and its description requires so much data-"

"That you'd need massive parallel processing," Gordon said, nodding. "That's true."

Chris frowned. "Parallel processing is what?"

"You hook several computers together and divide the job up among them, so it gets done faster. A big parallel-processing computer would have sixteen thousand processors hooked together. For a really big one, thirty-two thousand processors. We have thirty-two billion processors hooked together."

"Billion?" Chris said.

Stern leaned forward. "That's impossible. Even if you tried to make one..." He stared at the roof of the car, calculating. "Say, allow one inch between motherboards... that makes a stack... uh... two thousand six hundred... that makes a stack half a mile high. Even reconfigured into a cube, it'd be a huge building. You'd never build it. You'd never cool it. And it'd never work anyway, because the processors would end up too far apart."

Gordon sat and smiled. He was looking at Stern, waiting.

"The only possible way to do that much processing," Stern said, "would be to use the quantum characteristics of individual electrons. But then you'd be talking about a quantum computer. And no one's ever made one."

Gordon just smiled.

"Have they?" Stern said.

No

One traveler decided to stay in the past. Does that cause any problems?

The only change that was caused is the inscription on the headstones, but since the team discovered the graves only after the return, the change is irrelevant to them>.

Note another Giant Corporation in the private ownership of a single man (See Bill Gates). Let's ask ourselves for a moment what would happen to Microsoft if Bill Gates is eliminate…

Incidentally, Crichton claims than the scientific basis for his novel was inspired by the work os theoretical physicist and string field theory researcher Michio Kaku, who claims that it is possible to send single photons through space (though not yet in time).

See:

Time Line - the Novel

Time Machine, the - the Movie

C

Yes, a Time Machine

No

The book was filmed many times (see full list on the IMDB's website), and in the newest version, made in 2002, the only curiosity is that the director was the writer's great-grandson, and even he couldn't avoid all the clichיs prevalent in time travel Movies - Jack the Ripper, no intervening and influencing, etc'.

See:

Time Machine, the - the Movie

Time Machine, the - the Novel

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) published the Time Machine in 1895, only 10 years before Einstein (1879-1955, note the long overlap between their lifetimes) published his theory of relativity.

Wells didn’t trouble himself with the scientific questions of time travel. He was more concerned with social and philosophical questions (see the story of the Eloi and the Morlock quoted as a social parable by a very creepy Gary Sinise in Mel Gibson’s Movie “ransom", with an almost identical meaning). He left the scientific questions to the scientists, from Einstein to Sagan to Hawking, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t familiar with the social theories of his time>.

For instance, he was obviously familiar with the concept of a four-dimensional universe ("Block Universe"), as indicated by the above quotes from the novel;

He knew that changes in the trajectories and the relative position around the sun of Earth and the other planets occur over time;

He described the end of the world, including the greenhouse effect and its destructive implications, very accurately according to the scientific theory popular to this very day (according to the “big crunch" version);

H G Wells, Novel, 1895

Yes, a Time Machine

Unspecified shape, unclear specification and physical principles – None of those details are mentioned in the Novel.

A three-dimensional universe in which time is simply a fourth dimension; The machine travels in time and not in space; Which means that whoever is present when the machine is in motion, sees it before his eyes the whole time (which does not explain how it disappeared suddenly from that very space or how it appeared there in the first place; The explanation for the fact that the machine physically moved in space during its final voyage in is that the Morlock moved it).

"There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives." (From the Novel).

‘But,' said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, `if Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?" (From the Novel).

"But the great difficulty is this," interrupted the Psychologist. "You CAN move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time." (From the Novel).

No

Traveling only to the future (in this case, is Returning to the Point of Origin also Traveling to the Past?)

Comments>:

1. Did young Einstein read the novel? Is it possible that the two have met or spoken or made some other kind of contact? Except for the fact that Wells sent Einstein a copy of the novel, there is no knowledge any further contact between them>.

2. Jules Verne (1828-1905) criticized Wells’s theories about both space travel and time travel; He did not believe that time travel was possible, and did not write a time travel novel. In 1863, though, he wrote a novel entitled >"Paris in the 20th Century", which was futuristic but did not deal with time travel, and was only published in 1994 because it was considered to be too pessimistic.

3.> I did find someone who claims that Einstein stole his ideas from Wells (just for the fun of it…)

4. At the end of the journey the Traveler finds in his pocket the unidentified flowers (allegedly given to him by Veena), and they are supposed to be the only proof that he did travel in time>.

And if all this is not enough, here is another quote from the novel:

'... I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest>.'

So, was it all just a dream?

Jules Verne, apparently, didn’t live long enough to know Einstein's theory of relativity.

See:

Time Machine, the - the Novel

Time Traveler's Wife

So Henry and Claire have marital problems, his mother committed suicide, her mother is ill, how do we make their lives even more complicated? Oh, yes, let's make Henry a time traveler…

Audrey Niffenegger, Novel, 2004, and Movie adaptation

No, a Brain Disorder

A> brain defect, both congenital and hereditary.

1. The> brain defect allows the traveler to jump uncontrollably from time to time (both in the past and in the future).

2. It is unclear wherever the traveler can travel to points in time outside of his wife's time line.

3. The travelcannot change things that already happened (especially his mother’s accident).

4. The traveler cannot take his cloths with him (the reason for this is not given)..

An interesting twist to the Twins Paradox; Though technically Henry and Claire are not twins (Their "real" ages are 20 and 28), they are destined to be separeted and reunited again and again at different ages, which doed not stop their love from growing stronger and stronger with every encounter

There is a "meeting with self".

Yes

The interesting point here, incidentally, is not time travel as such, but the way Niffenegger presents what Clair knows and what Henry knows after each trip and the changes in knowledge caused by each trip.

See:

Time Traveler's Wife

Timecop

In the first Timecop Movie we learn that time travel technology does exist, but it is under strict state control, and there is a Time Police charged with preventing the fall of the technology into the wrong hands (which in itself is neither exceptional in Sci Fi, nor original). Against this background a battle is waged between two, one who traveled back time in order to change the future, and one who traveled back time in order to prevent the change (which can only create an infinity loop).

C, TV

Yes

In 2007, time travel is a reality and it's fallen into criminal hands. The US Government has formed the Time Enforcement Commission, a top secret agency responsible for policing the temporal stream.

They do so using a time sled, which is mounted on rails much like an amusement park ride, it accelerates towards a wall and just as it appears the sled would crash through it, the time sled time warped into another reality.

Any chosen destination in the past can be reached; Changes and intervention are strictly forbidden.

No, however, in the first movie, the Hero returns home to find a son who was actually fathered by his "Other Self".**

The demonstration of "two bodies can not occupy the same space at the same time" is utterly ridiculous. The meeting with itself ends in an unpleasant squashing. Interestingly, though, it is the "bad" who gets squashed, and not the "good". Why? Who determines who will be squashed? Do the forces of the nature differentiate between good and evil?

The Movie may not be a bad action Movie, but the way it deals with the dilemmas of time travel leave a lot to be desired (and that's putting it mildly, starting with the squashy encounter mentioned above and leading to the scene with the child.**

The second Movie deals with the mainly philosophical issue of whether violating temporal prohibitions is permissible in order to eliminate Hitler before he starts WW2.

In the TV series no serious attempt was made to deal with the dilemmas and the paradoxes and it rehashed all the clich>יs common in time travel Movies.

See:

Timecop

Timerider: the Adventures of Lyle Swann

C

Yes

The machine can be seen in the Movie (molecular disintegration?)

Sending a single traveler back in time

No

Yes

An interesting resolution to the Grandfather Paradox – the loop created when the woman who shelters Lyle asks him about the pendant and he tells her that his Great-Grandmother stole it from an unknown man as a souvenir of an unforgettable night, right before she steals the pendant from him. He doesn't know she's actually his Great-Grandmother and she doesn't know that he is the unknown man…

Note that the test subject was supposed to be a monkey (remember "Space Cowboys"?) and it is unclear how they upgraded from launching a monkey to launching a rescue helicopter; It is unclear when, if at all, did Lyle Swann realize that he had indeed gone back in time…

See:

Timerider: the Adventures of Lyle Swann

Timescape

Ben Wilson and daughter Hillary are visited by a strange group of travelers looking for lodging. The travelers are from the future, intending to witness an impending catastrophe

C

See:

Timescape

Tomorrowland

C

Yes

Yes

See:

Tomorrowland

Twelve Monkeys

After a deadly virus wipes out most of the world's population and the few survivors are forced to live underground, a reluctant volunteer prisoner is sent from the future to gather the information that will allow scientists to study the virus and the reasons for the disaster (not to prevent it, God forbid). The problem is that he is mistakenly sent to the wrong year, and is promptly arrested and locked up in a mental institution…

C

Yes

Unclear specification, but it is able to send people to the past, to supervise them and to retrieve them, even if the desired target date is not always achieved.

There is a clear start and finish point for every time line.

The goal of each trip is to observe and collect data and information, not to make any changes whatsoever (so why bother?)

There is a meeting between "Younger Self" and the "Older self" but it does not cause a catastrophic change - They are both at the airport together when the virus is released, the Older one is killed and the Younger one survives – probably due to an immunity to the virus, etc'…

The meetings with the Doctor, however, cause a severe Transfer of Information Dilemma, the information she gives him and the information he gives her causes a fatal mistake and a belated identification of the true perpetrator of the catastrophe.

The operators can return the traveler at any time using a tracking device installed, of all places, in his teeth. The traveler cannot go back on his own.

Based on Chris Marker (Jacopo Berenzin)'s short Movie La Jetee

And see the "Freebee" Paradox"…

See:

Twelve Monkeys

Willows Way

Grieving over the death of his son, Jacob Lazar connects with an Alien visitor stranded on Earth. But Jacob tests their bond when he seizes the being's magical staff with the intent of traveling back in time and saving his son's life. This very act changes the Alien's assessment of mankind's motivations and forces Jacob to choose between bringing back his son and saving humanity's future.

C

An Alien magical staff

See:

Willows Way

X-Men: Days of Future Past

C

Return to the past

No

Yes

See:

X-Men: Days of Future Past