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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-what-about-the-hula-hoops? dept.

(*Spoiler alert: This post refers to key elements of the movie.)

If we can walk backwards and forwards in space, why not in time?

Scientists, especially theoretical physicists, like to play such games — controlling time with pencil and paper. Going forward in time, traveling to the future, is actually OK, according to the Theory of Relativity. All we need is a super-fast spaceship, traveling close to the speed of light. A technological, and not a conceptual obstacle.

Going back in time is more complicated. Much more. Remarkably, closed-time loops are not just the stuff of sci-fi stories. (Why a closed-time loop? Most people don't want to go back in time and be stuck there. A short visit to the past should suffice.) In 1949, the brilliant Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel found a solution of Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity where it is possible, at least theoretically, to travel in a circle in time as we can in space, returning back to the starting point. The movie brilliantly plays with this notion, not least since 13.7's own Adam Frank worked as a scientific consultant.

In practice, Gödel's solution and any of its modern versions are a very, very long shot. There are issues with how to keep such spacetimes from collapsing upon themselves, not to mention weird time paradoxes like the Grandfather Paradox: If you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he marries, would you exist? However, in a Marvel universe it is possible. When Dr. Strange discovers that he has this power, we see a disturbingly beautiful image of an apple being eaten and reassembled again and again, a small patch of space where a closed-time loop is possible.


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  • (Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:45AM

    by art guerrilla (3082) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:45AM (#437621)

    don't have anything against cucumber, but was not liking him as khan in into the darkness star trek movie... too restrained, too tight, not loose and free-wheeling like ricardo was... not sure what the community consensus was on that, but obviously ricardo montelban was absolutely pitch perfect for the original khan, and i found cucumberpatch lacking in many ways, NOT just that he wasn't ricardo montelban (who is?), but that he didn't have the germ of what khan would 'become' (a la the movie/teevee timeline), the khan we loved to hate...

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:45PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:45PM (#437716) Journal

    Everything that made Cumberbatch a brilliant Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Strange is what's working against him as Khan. Khan is exceedingly charismatic and passionate, which makes him all the better megalomanic. Also the plot of JJTrek into Fail is just weird. So the Federation goes out and grabs the Botany Bay because they want Khan, and Khan and the rest of the enhanced humans just allow this to happen? Why do they need Khan, specifically, anyway? His magic space blood? lol