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How realistic is the science of time travel as depicted in Back to the Future?
Back to the Future just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Let’s put that in perspective for you: Back to the Future is now older than the period of time that Marty McFly traveled in that first film, where he rocketed at 88mph from 1985 back to 1955. And while the concept of using a weird, well, concept car as a time machine might seem a little quirky, it certainly didn’t hamper this flick, which is generally considered a pretty timeless classic, despite its ‘80s trappings. For the record, we consider it one of those classics, too!
And while we generally believe that you probably shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about the logistics of time travel (although we already covered a little of that in our episode about the TARDIS from Doctor Who), the specific mechanisms of time travel in Back to the Future are just too cool and appealing (not to mention iconic) to ignore. So in this episode, Hakeem and Tamara tackle it all! What are the specific rules of time travel in the Back to the Future trilogy? What’s the significance of hitting 88mph in order to go back in time? Is there a real world equivalent to the flux capacitor? And, of course, the age old question… “what the hell is a gigawatt?!?”
All this and more in the latest episode of…Does it Fly?
SUGGESTED VIEWING
At this point it’s hard to imagine any of you haven’t at least seen the original Back to the Future, one of the most beloved movies of the 1980s. But we suppose it’s possible that a few of you might not have watched the entire trilogy. Well, guess what? Those movies rule pretty hard, too and Hakeem and Tamara went through all three films to make sense of the time travel science and story rules. Get going!
There’s also Expedition: Back to the Future which is a fun capstone to the film’s legacy, the DeLorean, and more. Check it out on Max!
FURTHER READING
Do you want to delve a little deeper into the facts, concepts, and stories Hakeem and Tamara referenced in today’s episode? Here are a few recommendations!
Hakeem’s quoting Mark Twain via his friend, Professor Edward W. Kolb, has some additional scientific context in the link above!
The scientific case for time travel.
“It turns out that our speed through space squared plus our speed through time squared is equal to the speed of light squared. So all things in the universe that exist are always moving at the speed of light through spacetime. So if you move more quickly through space, you’ll move more slowly through time…so the higher the energy situation, the more slow the time travel is.”
“These are hypothetical particles that can only travel greater than the speed of light.”
(Look, we know Hakeem was pretty harsh on these hypothetical particles, but they’re pretty darn cool anyway.)
- Duration:
- 50m
- Broadcast on:
- 26 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Welcome to Does It Fly, the podcast that puts your favorite sci-fi properties, inventions, and conceits to the test. I'm your mad scientist, Hakeem Olushe. - And I'm your pop culture expert, Tamara Krenskeek. Time to dive into today's topic and see, Does It Fly? (upbeat music) - I have an announcement for you Tamara. I am not the Hakeem that you know. - You're not. - No, I have traveled from the future back here today for this particular podcast. And so that there's space time and the fabric of reality doesn't get ripped asunder. Your normal Hakeem, I sit them on vacation. So, he's up over there in Shenandoah Valley and I am here from 80 years in the future. - You look good. You look very good. Now, the funny thing is, I was gonna, I was usually like, we start these off by asking, how are you? - Yeah. - I was gonna ask, when are you? - Ooh. - Ooh. - That is a very good question. I've been asking myself that question all century. True story, it's a true story, I'll tell you why. So, there's this apocryphal quote from Mark Twain, which is, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, is what you know for sure that just ain't so. So, I was talking to this famous astro-particle physicist, only famous among us. His name is Rocky Cobb and spelled K-O-L-B. He's up in Chicago and he told me that quote, and the context was coming to these deep understandings about the nature of reality, things like Albert Einstein did. So, I started to ask myself, what is it that I know for sure that ain't so? And one thing I hit upon was the fact of how we're having this current moment and we think that this is the now, the true now of the universe, right? But it occurred to me that every conscious being has that particular thought. So, what makes our now, the actual now? And so, what I hit upon, you know, again, I may have said this to you before, but a lot of times I think of something like, oh, that's brilliant. But then only to discover that people have been having that same thought for hundreds of years, right? So. - And their own now, and their own now, right? But it's just debate on the nature of time, eternalism versus presentism, right? So, presentism is what we, I think, think of intuitively, that the current, you know, this now never existed before. And we just moved into it, right? Whereas eternalism is that, oh yeah, it all just exists, right? - And dear watchers, dear listeners, the reason we are traversing this topic is all as a tease for what we're gonna be talking about today, which is back to the future. - Back to the future. - Yes, or forward to the past. - Up, down, around. I don't know how many dimensions we're talking about. - So tell me this, when we were weed little ones, then this movie came out. How struck were you by the title of the movie? 'Cause I was like, whoa, back to the future. - I don't know that I was struck by the title at all. I was struck by Michael J. Fox. - Listen, I was struck by Michael J. Fox from Family Matters Days. - From Family Ties, yes. - Family Ties, our family matters. - One, different one. - That's the black family, that's what Erkel and them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Family Ties, yeah, I used to watch Family Ties and Cheers. Pretty, pretty religiously. And I don't know, one of the interesting things in my life that occurred is several years ago, I think it was 2018, my bank account, my debit card got into the wrong hands and whoever someone went on a spending spree in Europe and among the things that they did. - Did they buy you a DeLorean? - No, they did not buy me a DeLorean, they should have, but there wasn't enough money in my account, maybe they were attempting to do so, but they donated $10 to the Michael J. Fox Foundation. - Oh, that's so interesting. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they were some righteous thieves. - You got like a Robin Hood thief. - Yeah, Robin, except they weren't taken from the rich. Taken from the broke. All right, so back to the future. - Back to the future. - People always ask me as time travel as possible. And here's what I say. - So is that what you're focusing on? Does the science of time travel fly? Or does the science of, what's our question for this? - The DeLorean time machine. - The DeLorean time machine. - Does it imply for time travel? - Okay. - All right, so if people ask me, is time travel real, does it really exist? I say, hold on one second. You see that? We just did it. - Huh? - Yeah. - We're now and now. We're no longer in then. We're in now. We travel to now from then. - That's what, jump. That's just. - We're still time traveling. - I'm not sure I'm buying that. - We are time-- - I think that's a good party trick, but I don't buy it as time travel. - It's true, because here's how you know it is time travel. Because, so here is the shorthand way of thinking about it. You know what the Pythagorean theorem, a squared plus b squared plus c squared? Well, it turns out that our speed through space squared plus our speed through time squared is equal to the speed of light squared. So all things in the universe that exist are always moving at the speed of light through space time. But if two entities are, so if you go more quickly through space, you go more slowly through time. Or if you're in a region of high space time curvature, like near a black hole or the surface of the earth, you go more slowly through time than someone in a less curvature situation. So to hire the energy situation, the more slowly your time travel is. So that points out clearly that you're traveling through time at some rate. - I guess where I follow from that is like, yes, I guess technically that makes sense and you would know way more about that than I would. But to like, to like a lay person, when I think about time travel, I'm thinking about like jumps in time. - Yeah, that ain't what you mean. - Yeah, that's not what I mean. And maybe what it is technically, but it's not what I mean. - Yeah, yeah. - Like I'm thinking about a jump forward or backward that is different than the normal time system we use every day. - Exactly. - That's a much better definition of the time travel that we're talking about. So here in this property, back to the future, they're very specific. And I gotta say this, for whoever came up with the DeLorean Time Machine, they were not lazy. They went into detail. They have a whole system there. So let's go through it. - All right. - Let's go through the system of the DeLorean Time Machine. First off, it's a DeLorean. Oh, by the way, I have been inside the DeLorean Time Machine. - Did you go to the one at the Peterson Auto Museum? - No, no, no, no. I had a private showing on the same day. You know, Ray J. - Why do I? - If I had one wish. - Yes, okay. - All right, Brandi's brother as people say. So I was recording in this studio in Los Angeles. And they were doing some show in another set. And also near my green room was Ray J's green room. So Ray J didn't speak to anyone, but he had his little dog there. So I hung out with his dog, I petted his dog, but Ray J was being standoffish, right? So I didn't talk to Ray J. And somebody goes, yo, the DeLorean is outside. And I go outside, sure enough, there it is. Flux capacitor at all. - Why was it there? - I have no idea, but I stole that sucker and took it to the future. And that's how I was able to come back here to talk to you today. - Oh, all right, thank you for clarifying that. I appreciate it. - All right, that was a joke. I didn't really steal the DeLorean 'cause FBI is going to show up and-- - Wait, how long ago was this? When was this? Was this recently? - Yeah, this was in the last decade or so. - Huh, okay. - When you look at the DeLorean, right? You look inside, there's all this technology. So it has a fusion reactor. Excuse me, is it a fusion reactor? - Are you talking about the flux capacitor? - No, not the flux capacitor. - Are you talking about the power source? - Yeah, the power source is actual nuclear reactor. - No, no, no, this suckers electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need. - Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium. - It has a particle accelerator, right? In order to, so here's one of the things about particle physics that is little known, and it's weird. They have to act-- - The particle physics is weird, no way. - Believe it or not. - You can create particles out of nothing but energy. So if you want to create electrons, all you need is a photon of light that has more than twice the, so you know how E equals MC square? Basically you're saying energy is equal to mass. Forget about the C square, it's a number, right? With a lot of zeros. So that means that if I have a certain amount of energy, I can have enough energy to account for an equivalent amount of mass. So if that photon has more energy than twice the mass of say an electron, because when you create particles, they're created in particle anti-particle pairs, right? So you need to create them two at a time. If it passes near a nucleus, 'cause you have to have conservation of momentum, right? Then you can take that energy, that energy will cease to exist in the electromagnetic field, right, which is what light is, and it would take that energy and convert it into a particle anti-particle, electron in its, in its, an a positron, which is an anti-particle partner. So suppose there is some type of particle that is really useful for time travel. In this case, a tachyon, which is a hypothesized particle. You can make a particle accelerator and take energy and create your own tachions, and then use those tachions for your time travel. And so this nuclear, this reactor that it has, creates energy and it powers this particle accelerator, which injects particles into the flux capacitor, and then it also has these capacitors that get charged, because you hear the doc say 1.21 gigawatts. Although we call them gigawatts. He called them jigga, which is what Jay-Z calls himself. - Okay, you know, I mean. - Another, one of my favorite rap groups is The Roots, okay. And they have this. - Oh, it's so good. - So good, right? They have this one song where the guest rapper says, Jules, he says jowls of energy. It's really pronounced Jules. - Yes, right. - But when I was a kid in Mississippi, whenever we saw the word Jules, we also called it jowls. (laughing) - There were no practitioners around, but the point is, is that power, there's 1.21 gigawatts, which is billions of watts. - Yeah. - Power is energy per unit time. So you don't have to have a lot of power. Excuse me, you don't have to have a lot of energy to get a lot of power, right? So if I make the timeframe over which I move that energy really tiny, so say I have one watt of energy, excuse me, one jule of energy, if I expend that jule in a billionth of a second, that's one gigawatt, or I can have a billion Jules and expend it over one second, that's equivalently a gigawatt. It's energy per unit time. So a lot of energy over a long time, or a small amount of energy over a lot of time. Let's go, wait a minute, a small amount of energy over a super short-- - Wait a minute, wait. Say that again, do that again. We do go back in time. (vocalizing) Okay, say that again. - All right, if I have a small amount of energy, if I discharge it incredibly quickly, then I can get out a big power, a large wattage, okay? And what does that, when we want to do that experimentally, we use capacitors. So that energy gets stored in these vacuum capacitors. - Hold on, Dr. O, what is a capacitor? - A capacitor is something that stores energy. So they can come in different geometrical configurations. The simplest is, suppose I have a battery. - Yeah, so is the capacitor a battery? - In a way, in a way. - In a way. - The difference, the difference in a battery, 'cause when I used to-- - But it's different in a battery. - Energy, I think, battery. - Right, yeah, exactly. So suppose I have a battery, like a nine-volt battery, has these, the two leads or both at the top, right? If I take a piece of conductive metal and connect it to it, then the voltage is gonna be the same all along those two guys, right? Now, suppose on those two wires, I connect two metal plates. When I bring those plates together, because of the voltage difference between them, an electric field is going to exist between those two plates. And energy is gonna be stored in the form of electric charges on those plates, right? So if I have a nine-volt battery, the distance, right, the capacitance, as it's called, depends on how close these plates are, right? That's one thing. So the closer you get them, the more charge you're gonna store on them. But the thing about it is, is that you can discharge those capacitors in a very short period of time. Imagine old photography, where they wanted a flash bulb, poof, a big blast of light, right? So it's a big blast over a really short time period. Capacitors do that for us today. Whenever you need a big voltage from something, power up some capacitors and poof, unload it, unload it over a very short time frame and get that big burst of energy through. So that's what's happening. So what happens is, is you have the flux capacitor creating tachions with this big burst of energy. And what happens also, is you have these belts around the car that creates this electromagnetic shell around the vehicle. And when you pump tachions into that electromagnetic shell, it becomes a temporal shell. And so a portal is open, and the reason why the vehicle has to move at 88 miles per hour, is because the portal is open for a flash. And if you're moving too slow, you won't make it through. And if you're, you know, and it'll close on you, right? - Right, that I understand, but why does it have to be specifically in it? Why couldn't it, 'cause like for the layperson, for me, it would seem like, okay, you need a minimum speed. But why couldn't it be like 100 miles an hour, or-- - Well, if you go too fast, right? Then you will somehow slam into the damn thing, something that's said when I read about it. So I don't get that point either, but it's a range. It's not a, at least 88. It's at least 88, but no more than some other number, 'cause you have to get the DeLorean through the portal. - Through the portal. - You can't hit the portal too quick, and you can't linger too long, right? To successfully do it. But if you look at the equipment that's inside of this thing, right, you don't just have the flux capacitor, you have the nuclear reactor, you have the capacitor banks, you have the accelerator, you have the coolant system, right? Because reactors are known to overheat, so if anything goes wrong, yeah, cool, that sucker off really fast, you have the vent fans in the back, right? So it is a lot of thought that went into this thing. And then they created the actual hardware and put it all in the car. Like Doc, it was 1955 when Doc thought of all this. Doc is dope. - Doc is awesome. I mean, it was 1955, but then it also took, you know, another, 'cause back to the future, sort of like our sort of touchstone year is 1985. That's when it starts. That's when, you know, the time that they keep coming back to. So it took him that long. He had the idea, but then he had to like, find all the things and actually get it to work. - All that said, is time travel possible? I remember before we started, you were asking me something about the particular type of travel and timelines, right? You were saying-- - Yeah, well, we were both talking about this idea that there are, at least in pop culture, there are different ideas about how one travels through time and that, you know, cools different kinds of stories and ideas about it, right? So you've got sort of your, what back to the future is, which is one consistent timeline, a singular timeline where the grandfather paradox essentially is in play, which is if you go back in time and you kill your grandfather, you are never born. So you go back in time, you change something, it affects things on that same timeline. Then you've got the way things play out in the Avengers franchise, where there's actually very funny scene that references a whole bunch of time travel movies. And the idea of that is that it's actually a branched reality, that if you go through time and then you go back and you do something different, there's a different branch that comes off, but this one still continues to exist and there are many, many branches in parallel universes. - Yeah, that's right, your past is actually your future because it was your future, right? So there is an out for that in real physics. So there is the physics of the very tiny quantum mechanics, the way it describes things is such that take a coin, it can be either head or tails, right? When you flip it, it's kind of both simultaneously, right? So when particles are not observed, they are in all their possible state simultaneously. And some of those states can be over here and over there, right? And we call this superposition. And so some businesses say, oh, it's called the many worlds interpretation. I think Everett is a person who came up with around 1975 or something like that. Don't quote me, look it up. But the idea here is, is that the way we normally interpret things, so we know that this is real. The superposition thing is real. If I measure that coin, even though I can never say beforehand that it's gonna be head or tails, I can look at the equations and say, I predict it's gonna be 50% heads, 50% tails. And then when I go measure, it turns out to be both 50% heads and 50% tails, just like the mathematics said. So it is in this flipping state, this superposition state. So particles that could be either here or there or Schrodinger's cat in the box, both alive and dead, they're actually real. But when you make a measurement, you only can ever actually see one state at a time. So the mini world's interpretation is that, oh, when you made the observation, only thing you discovered is what world you're in. Every outcome actually occurred, right? So there is this branch reality. So there's this one famous science communicator, physicist Sean Carroll, who wrote a book a couple of years ago. - I know Sean. - You know Sean, where he takes it seriously, right? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - You know he's a true believer, I think. No, I'm a Copenhagen guy or it's an unknown. All that's it. - Yeah. - What's your take on, does the DeLorean, the way it is set up in this movie, the science of the DeLorean, being this time machine, the way that they have set everything up, does it fly? I mean, we know the car flies, 'cause we have to do that later on. So like the literal answer to that is yes, the DeLorean time machine does actually fly in the movie. - Right, right. Science of the DeLorean time machine flies. - As expected, people know the time, the DeLorean time machine is dope. So of course, it don't fly. (upbeat music) (laughing) - No, you can't depend on tacky-ons. - And everything. - tacky-ons don't exist. Tacky-ons are cool, but they don't exist. So let me talk a little bit about tacky-ons, all right? What they are. These are hypothetical particles that can only travel greater than the speed of light. Nothing in our regular universe can reach the speed of light, going faster and faster. They can't reach the speed of light going slower and slower. - Oh, that's interesting. - Yeah, yeah, they can never reach the speed of light, but they don't exist, right? They use them in other sci-fi properties, most famously Star Trek, I think, but Star Trek and Back to the Future use them the most, but they don't exist. So how could you have a technology based on something that does not exist? Come on, man, you put all that thought into it. - But part of the question is, like, it doesn't exist now. Like, could it exist? You don't think so. - Well, here we go. Remember that thing I was talking about, about energy and creating different particles? Well, we have ways of testing these. If you put enough energy into a tiny enough volume, every particle that exists, whether it's the particle like photons of light or electrons or quarks, they're all musical notes in a quantum field. So what do I mean about that? Buy that. A musical note, all the electrons are identical. You can't tell one from the other. They can have different energies, but otherwise you can't tell them apart, all right? And that's a necessary condition for our technologies to work. There's these different statistics that, you know, Bose-Einstein statistics, for example, and narrow when the particles are distinguishable and when they're indistinguishable. And our technologies depend on this. So they're indistinguishable. What that means is it is not the actual thing, right? So if I take a musical note, a B-sharp. Every B-sharp is a B-sharp. The real thing is the vibrations in the air or the instrument that made it, right? So the musical note tells you that there is a medium vibrating, right? In the same way, the particle tells you that there is an excitation of a medium. And those medium are known as quantum fields. So if a tachyon exists, that means that the tachyon field exists, which means that an experiment like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, it rungs space-time hard enough to create Higgs particles out of the Higgs field that just permeates all of reality everywhere. They would be able to excite the existence of these tachions. And they're unseen. I don't know the energy level they're supposed to exist at, but if they were there, you could experimentally verify them. The fact that no one is even attempting that tells you something. But the engineering of Back to the Future is so amazing, but the engineering relies on faulty science and the causal loops that you brought in, right? Like you can't go back and kill your own parent and make you not exist. That's a causal paradox. - Well, that is the basic. Okay, so that is actually the basis of many, many time travel stories, right? And paradox. And so that's where we get into like the question of like, does the story fly in Back to the Future? So when you look at time travel movies, I mean, these are some of the questions that come up. I mean, one of my very favorite and first movies that really made an impression and made me fall in love with the sci-fi genre was The Terminator, which time travel movie. And I don't want to get too deeply into that because I want to save that if you ever do an episode on Terminator, but all I will say is there's a huge paradox in that movie. And this comes up in many time travel movies. And it becomes this question of like, are we going to suspend disbelief? Are we not? What are we going to do here? So as far as Back to the Future goes, I think that there are a number of things that they set up to help the viewer gain entree into this world. And also I need to give a shout out to Robert Zemeckis, the director and Bob Gale, who originally came up with the story for the film. And he was actually inspired by, he found an old yearbook of his dad. And he was looking through it and he was like, I wonder if I was like been in high school at the same time as my dad. I wonder if we would have been friends, like would we have been cool with each other? And that is actually what inspired, that was the seed for the idea for this. - That is interesting. That's an interesting question too. - Do you think you would have been friends with your dad? - I don't know what he was like as a kid. I knew he was like as a grown up, but yeah, that's a good question. I don't know 'cause he was so damn country and I wasn't. In the country they used to always like, trick me with stuff here. Might just be for Simmons. It's ripe, but it wouldn't. - Wait, but you've told me before that you were a practical joker, so it sounds like maybe you would get a lot. - I know, right? - Right. - I'm starting to know too much about it. - And what am I talking about? All my friends were hella country anyway. - I'm like, are you not country? You've talked to me about like eating raccoons and crabs. - Well, you know, I showed up in the country at around puberty, right? Middle school. And so to them, I was an idiot, you know? Like literally everybody could drive cars, they could rebuild, you know, they could, they worked on, you know, you had to do stuff, you know? And as a city kid you sat around watching TV and riding a skateboard, so. - Yeah, no, it's an interesting question. And so that's, you know, that was the seed of the movie. Once things get kind of rolling in this film, I think part of what they do is they set up a pretty clear set of rules. Like Doc explains how it works. He explains how the DeLorean works. You know that like you need to reach a certain speed. You know you need a power source. You know he's very clear about like don't interfere with anything in the past. And so the fact that like they set up all of the conditions necessary for the DeLorean to work, as well as how they kind of manipulate through, I think really helps on ramp us into this world. - Yeah, I'm with you on that one. I, but you know the challenge for me that I wanna hear from you does it stick throughout? Does, you know, is it consistent? Is it a consistent world? - It's actually pretty consistent. So I'm gonna show you something very nerdy, which knowing you, you'll appreciate it. So as I was watching all of them, I actually went, I don't know if you'd see this. And I made a chart for myself for like literally, and maybe we'll do a screenshot of this and insert it, but I literally like went through and like, okay, so back to the future number one. It starts in 1985. Then you original Marty, Marty McFly, Michael Epox's character and Doc Rango back to 1955. You know, and you just get to watch. I mean watching Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd together is just a hoot. And they spend most of the time in 1955. That's where Marty runs into Leah Thompson who plays his mother who has like develops a crush on him and you know, make him ensues. And then they come back to 1985. But then like in 1985 when he comes back, he sees alternate Marty go back to 1955. And so, you know, that like makes you go, huh. And then of course there's the very end where Doc takes him, the end of the movie, which at that time they had no idea that there was going to be a sequel. Doc takes him to 2015 as sort of a funny tag. Like, oh my God, your kids are a mess. You gotta come. - I love your notes. So if we were in school together, I would definitely be your friend because I'd take horrible notes and it looks like you're a pretty good note taker there. - Well, I'm also like, I'm a kinesthetic learner, so I need to like write things, and I'm visual. So like I need to write things down. Like you say something to me, I don't remember a damn thing you said. - Same. - But like. - Same, yeah, yeah. And you know, when I would study, when I would take exams, I could actually look at the last time I saw it in my mind's eye. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah, I could look at the page. - Like I can tell you like, oh, the answer to that is on like the lower right part of the page and it's a green highlighter. So I did this whole like chart because I had the same question. Like, is this consistent? Does it work? Now, we were talking before about the idea of different kinds of time travel and different theories of like branched worlds, many worlds, parallel universes, one straight timeline. And back to the future is very clear that it's a straight timeline. However, there are several places where there are some loops. And so I was kind of like, how does that break the world building? But the other cool thing that kind of permeates these movies, if you're listening and paying attention, which on my like rewatch, I was paying very close attention, is that one of the rules is that when you, even if you loop, when you come back, it eliminates that other branch. So the other branch goes away. So, and they're very clear about that. They say it several times. So it's not a branch timeline. So because of that, even though there are the loops, the loops then cease to exist. And it also, there's another thing that assists this, which is that it doesn't happen instantly. Like we've been a lot of this conversation talking about how quickly things do or do not happen and time versus energy and things like that. But one of the motifs that they use or one of the devices that they store telling devices that they use, which I appreciate is the image in the first movie, it's the image in the second movie, it's newspaper headlines. And in the third movie, it's a thing about a tombstone. And for each of those, you see things slowly fading in and out over existence. And so it helps us, the viewer, the audience, follow the story logic as they're going through. But it also establishes the fact that this is not an instantaneous thing. Like, we folks who are who are fans of time travel and things like that may be familiar with the idea of the butterfly effect, which is the idea that you touch a butterfly's wings in one part of the world and it changes its course. And then that flies off and it has a million different little changes in the rest of the world. And suddenly there's a huge catastrophe on the other side of the world because of the little brush that you did. They make it pretty clear that that's not a piece of this universe they've built and that these little changes don't create these big, big changes and that the changes need sort of time to take place. And that is why as you go through the first movie and you first see, you see each of the siblings disappear and then Marty's the last to disappear. So there's time to write these things, there's time to negotiate and move through these worlds. And I think the fact that they establish that helps to actually make the story fly. - Yeah, that is so dope. - Yeah, so they have a lot of like what quantum computers need right now to have this Eric where they clean up, they clean up these loose ends, not instantly, but over these short time scales. - That is, I had no idea about that, but that is a perfect analogy. - And then the other thing that I do love though is that in doing so, one of the things, I don't, I read about this somewhere and I've been thinking about it a lot. There was a blog post that I read and I wish, and I apologize 'cause I can't remember the name of the person who posted it if I remember we'll put it in the notes. But this idea that, so at the end of the first movie, right, you have Marty going, having this night in the middle of it, you have, you know, he goes to 1955, some things reset. So when he comes back to his own reality, this is original Marty McFly, in 1985, he walks into a different reality. His parents are happy, his dad is successful. They have a different level of success as far as, you know, financial things and whatever, that's another message we could tip it, we could pick that, anyway. But that's what equals happiness, but that's another conversation. Don't get me wrong, I like mine, mine's fine. But that said, that aside, you then have a Marty who, in the next two movies, is still, in many ways, looking for validation, is still trying to prove himself, is still, you know, he's still that guy who, if you say, hey, chicken or anything, they're up immediately like it's ironed up, like that's a thing. And what is so interesting to me is this idea that even though Marty has now come back to 1985 in this new version, it still are Marty from original 1985. So he's in this reality, but that Marty has not grown up in this well-adjusted family. He has not grown up feeling comfortable and successful, so he's like three years around. - Few layers deep, I love that. - Oh yeah, I went down the rabbit hole on this. And I'm gonna try and find the person who talked about this, 'cause I was really fascinated by this idea, and I think it really, and so I was keeping that in mind as I was watching the movies because I think that really tracks and this very human idea that we are the sum of our experiences, and we're gonna, until we have a different experience, we're gonna take that through with us. And that when you ask me about consistency, do things take consistent, they do. And it's not until the very final movie when Marty has some big realizations about having control over his own future, that he finally makes that change. And I love that, and of course I love the final message of it, which is when Doc says to him, "Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one." - Oh, I love that, yeah, yeah. - Or is it? Or is it? Because there are these debates happening in philosophy and physics about do we have free will, and, you know. - That's a whole other question, and we could spend hours talking about that. - And they do, and people do, yeah, and people do. So what is your, I'm beginning to get a feeling here. I'm getting a feeling on what your take is, but I wanna hear it right from the time traveler's mouth. - As far as the story world goes, and back to the future, it absolutely flies. (upbeat music) - Does it fly supersonically? Or does it fly kind of like, you know. (laughing) What kind of flying are we doing? - I think we're doing some smooth flying, and there's always a little bit of fire. - Oh, yeah. Oh, the fire trail, that, you know. When I first started going into the world of hotels instead of motels, I began to notice that what's separated after a certain level were details, were tiny little details. And I think that, you know, when it comes to the time machine, the trail of fire, the fact that it covered an ice at the end, you know, all these tiny little details really make the experience much more than, remember the old time machine movie? It didn't do anything different. It just was like, there. - Yeah, there you go. - Well, so here's a fun behind the scenes tidbit. So a really close friend of mine worked on, there's actually a series called Expedition Back to the Future. And so my friend Lee Farber directed it, and Bob Gale was, from all the movies, was one of the EPs on it. And the whole setup of it was that they worked with Josh Gates, who's a familiar. - I know Josh Gates, I did a show with him, yeah. - Okay, so Josh Gates went, met up with Christopher Lloyd, and they had a mission to find the DeLorean. So this goes all the way back to what we were talking about, thinking to deliver it to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for charitable purposes. And so I think it's four, I think it's four episodes. And in this whole thing, they are tracking down the DeLorean. - There wasn't just one car, there was seven. Seven? - There were seven. - There was like, you know, the sort of... - Like actual vehicles? - Yeah, yeah, but they used for different things. So there was the A car, which is the one I mentioned before, that's at the Peterson Museum. There was the B car, which was actually half a car, and they used that for interior shots. There was one that was obviously made to look up like The Old West for the third movie, and a couple of others. So they all serve different purposes in production. But the other really cool thing that Lee told me, in which they talk about in the series, is that originally the time travel chamber, it was not going to be a DeLorean, it was going to be a refrigerator. - Wow, I heard a hot tub of machine, but a refrigerator? - It was originally gonna be a chamber built from a refrigerator, and it was gonna be hauled around on the back of a truck. And Robert's Mac has decided, wait a minute, he came in one day and actually suggested that it would be a car so that the whole thing would be mobile. - So speaking of Josh Gates and this quest they went on, are you familiar with this experiment? I heard about this first in the 90s, where like tomorrow, I'm gonna hand you an envelope addressed to some random person in America that you don't know. And the one stipulation is you have to give it, you have to get it to that person, not immediately, but you have to give it to someone that you know personally. And the question is, how many handoffs on average does it take to get to the person? And the answer was six, six degrees of separation, right? So why didn't they just take that approach to finding a DeLorean? - I don't know, I don't know. - Put DeLorean on the envelope, DeLorean time machine on the envelope, just hand it to someone, and then follow the letter. - Maybe there's a follow-up series here, I don't know, you're currently no Josh, so you should talk to him. - I don't know him like that. We just spent the day together, you know. It was for the UFOs, declassified live. - Oh, nice, nice. - Nick Pope, Josh Gates, yeah. - Well that, so swinging back around to like our third, does it fly for the feels? My question, like clearly it's a movie we both love. So I think like it's, we don't really need to talk about like, does it why? Like we love this movie, it's an awesome movie, it's one of the best, I think, franchises out there. That said, I'm sort of looking at the larger question of, I don't know, maybe the idea of just going back in time to sort of explore your history fly, is that an ability you would want to have in modern life. - Wow. - Does that like larger idea fly? - They weren't thinking about the feels. We're in an era where people speak their mind, and if they don't like something, they say, hey, why that like that? I don't like that. - Right. Here's the thing, scientist, at least in the market of physics and astronomers, they started complaining about how scientists are portrayed in media, and this stereotype of the eccentric wild hair, scientists, they're sensitive about it, right? - And they're like, yeah, but you know what, man, I mean, in my world of scientists, I'm like, there's some truth there. - Well, look, here's the reality. There's the truth of the crazy mad scientist, like Duck Brown, and then there's a million other things. And like, quite frankly, I do a lot of work advocating for women in STEM. That's what's part of the work that I do. That's what I do with sirens. You know, my science-oriented creative team, among other things, and like-- - Wait, man, don't sirens lead you to your death? - So the, we are naming-- - You're a siren? - The name, so it's sirens, S-C-I-R-E-N-S. It's a play on screen sirens for science. - Ah, still leading people to their death. Sirens, that's what they do, right? - We'll put out the siren call for scientific knowledge and literacy. - Oh, that kind of siren, okay, all right. - I mean, it's the idea of leading people somewhere. Like, we're not leading your death, we're leading you to knowledge and imagination. - Leading you to illumination and-- - That way is of thinking about the future. - Okay, okay, all right. - That's the theory right now. - Right. - So-- - What are we talking about? - We were talking about, you asked a question of going back into the past, too. So I tell you, Tamara, I don't know if you've ever read my memoir, A Quantum Life, My Unlikely Journey Through Space and Time, available. - I think a copy, dude. Send me a copy. - I had a life of a lot of danger, a youth of a lot of danger. And so when I was coming up, they used to say, and it was placed in a demographic context. If you were a black young man, if you survived to the age of 26, your life expectancy suddenly jumped, right? - Just applied, yeah. - Yeah. And so when I turned 26, I would just celebrate it because I was at Death's Door on so many occasions based on my lifestyle. You know, there was a variation, but, you know, I was stereotypical in how I lived, my family and I, right? And so I made it out. And I don't mean made it out the hood. I mean, I made it out of putting myself in danger and being unawares of how to engage with the community and this sort of, I mean, the economy and this sort of thing. And so I don't want to change anything. 'Cause I'm like, man, if I change one tiny thing, it could go so haywire. I've, you know, I've been walking this tightrope and there was very little margin for error. And if I change one tiny thing, who knows? On all those occasions where it could have been it, it might turn out to be it. And there you go. - I don't necessarily want to go back and have the ability to change things. I would love to be able to, like, time travel back in a time bubble as an observer and just see things like, for example, like my maternal grandfather died when my mom was very young. And I've always heard stories about him. Like, well, I, sure, with the fantasy of meeting him, I've always wanted to meet him. You know, when you have that conversation, like, who are the five people living your dead? You could invite to know. Like, he was always at the table. And I would love to him. But that said, given these sort of larger circumstances of, like, how changing things could affect things, I would just love to, like, travel back in a bubble. Allah, like, Linda in the Wizard of Oz and observe and just, like, see what he was like or see what it was really like in Little House in the Prairie Times or whatever it is. So there's that piece of it. But when you get to the branching timelines for me, and this is where I'm gonna, like, go out on a limb and sound a little woo, I'm really bad at making decisions. Like, I'm very indecisive. I'm a full-on Libra, like, very stereotypical. - What do you want for dinner? - Right. There was a funny meme I saw in Instagram the other day, which was like, little did you know when you fell in love and chose your partner that it meant the next 60 years of saying to each other every night, what are you thinking about for dinner? - Exactly, exactly. - Right. - Exactly. - But I-- - I never know the answer to that question. - I'm also a perfectionist. So when you put together-- - You don't say. (laughs) - When you put together. (laughs) - Yeah, what is this recipe cooked up? What do we get here? - So when perfectionist meets not very good at decisions, at making decisions, it puts a lot of internal pressure on the decisions that I have to make. And that has been something I've battled my whole life because when you feel like every decision is so precious, then it can paralyze you from making decisions, which then just like snowballs into, it becomes harder to make decisions and the perfection-- (humming) - So tell me this, do you, like I play mind games with myself, I tell myself things in order to get the feeling, behavior that I want to achieve, you know what my rational mind, instead of being the animal, that reacts. And so, you know what I've been thinking about lately is, you know, how seriously we take things and tragically and all this sort of stuff. What is these small things that are occurring? - Right. - And then I think about deep human history, right? It was something like 25 million years ago that the Great Apes first evolved. 25 million years ago, that's how tough and enduring we are. - Yeah. - You know, we're like, the world can't throw nothing at us, other than a meteorite or like volcanoes going off, it has to be a world-ending thing to really, you know, it's gonna be okay. That's my point. I realize at a certain point, it's gonna be okay. - So the thing that makes me feel like it's gonna be okay and that takes, slightly takes off that pressure is this idea that we are living in a many worlds universe and that there are branch timelines and that, yeah, in this lifetime, I am, as you said at the very beginning, I am here in the now with you right now, but in some other reality, like-- - I'm so lucky. - Ah, it's me too. In some other reality, I made a different decision and like that Tamara is off living her best life, doing something else and that goes-- - After murdering Hakim the day you first met. - No, why am I always so dark? I am not murdering. And I'm not murdering you. - You're a siren. What do you mean? You're like a leader of the sirens. How are you not? - It's not about murder. It's about leading you along a path. - Okay, the leading, the leading, that's right. - Yes, we were focused on the leading, not the dead part, not the killing. But this idea that there are like many different paths out there and somewhere I'm out there and I made a different decision and for whatever reason, and this is where the wooping comes in, that gives me comfort. - Deep thoughts by Tamara Krenzky. - So as far as whether this flies for the fields and the idea of traveling, whether we should be able to travel back and change things, I'm gonna say that, no, that doesn't fly. That's not a good idea for our lives. As far as, you know, does this movie fly for the fields and all the things that makes me feel and think about and laugh at, hell yeah. What about you? - Hell yeah. (upbeat music) - Well Hakim, thank you for flying on this trip with me. You are welcome to be my passenger in the DeLorean anytime. Actually you would be driving 'cause I don't like driving, but I'll be your passenger. - Driving Miss Tamara. All right. - That is not what I meant. Oh my God. - Morgan Freeman is from Mississippi and Morgan Freeman is a man of high dignity. Just because you're doing the driving and wearing a little hat, there's no hierarchy there. It just happens that you don't like driving, okay? And you still, 'cause, you know, I'm from the deep south, so we do address our peers with Miss, Mr. and those, you know, even someone younger than you, you know, like whenever I meet someone, I call them Miss, Mr. especially if I'm addressing the child with respect to them, Miss, Mr. So yeah. - Aw, that's sweet. Yeah, I'm from Jersey. We're just like, yo, I'm Keith. - Yo, I know, right. The first time a kid called me by my first name. I'm like, what universe am I in? Have I, anyway, thank you all for joining us. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We appreciate you being here with us, nerding out with us, geeking out with us. We love it, we love each other. We love you, keep coming back 'cause we are. - That's right. And if you wanna know more about any of the stuff that we've talked about in this episode, check out doesitflypod.com. You, of course, can find us on TikTok @doesitfly for fun tidbits and videos. And if you've got thoughts on back to the future, then leave them in the comments. Thanks, everyone. - Thank you. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)