Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The science of time travel television

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

Daniel and Jorge talk about the science of "Umbrella Academy", "Time Traveler's Wife" and "Dark".See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, Daniel, are you enjoying all the good TV shows out there? There's definitely a lot to watch. But as a physicist, are you able to enjoy? some of these and turn your physics brain off? Mostly, except when it really challenges me with exceptional nonsense. You mean plot-wise or science-wise? Is there a difference? I mean, plots have to be scientific, otherwise they're not plots.

I think by definition, creativity is not scientific. I think by definition, plots rely on cause and effect, which is the root of all science. Are you talking about time travel? That is one of the worst offenders. It makes me wish I could travel back in time and talk to the writers before they make both choices. Wait, wait, but wouldn't that create a paradox? Like if you go back in time and prevent them from writing the show, then you wouldn't have seen the show.

That sounds pretty good to me, actually. That sounds like a good plot. How they would make your life nonsensical. My life already feels nonsensical. Then you're going to get a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes. My own review of the scientific validity of my own life. But what if you go back in time and prevent yourself from watching the show? That could sort of work, right?

Or I guess technically to make sense, you would still have to watch it, In which case, you'd be watching it over and over again and again and again. In an infinite loop. That sounds like a nightmare. Or maybe you're just watching it until you finally like it. And that would break you out of the loop. That might take forever. Hi, I'm Jorge, a cartoonist,

and the creator of Ph.D. Comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I give every science fiction show one episode to win me over. Wow, you watch the pilot of every single science fiction show out there? Is that part of your job as a physicist? Or is this just a personal vendetta? I'm not saying that I watch every show that exists,

but every science fiction show that I do watch, I really give it the benefit of doubt for an episode to prove that it makes some sense. And if it doesn't hook you in, you stop watching it. If the plot is nonsense, then the story is just not compelling because anything can happen at any time. And so why even watch? Who cares what the characters do? So your attention span is basically, what, one hour?

What if it's a slow build? Slow build is fine as long as it makes sense in the first episode. If they make a bunch of rules and then break them all already in the first episode, I'm out. I see. So you're watching Alice in Wonderland and you're like, thumbs down next. Daniel Pan's great literature. That's exactly it. Yeah, that's what it seems like.

But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeard Radio. In which we try to explain and describe the universe of which I am a great fan. Because so far, the universe seems to make some sense. There are lots of cases where the universe does something that we do not yet understand, but by application of our mental framework and our mathematical models and our sheer persistence and stubbornness, we have always been able to understand everything that we have done.

It seems to be some sort of logic behind the universe, some rules that it follows, and those rules we can uncover. And on this podcast, we do our best to explain what we do and do not know about those rules to you in our universe and in fictional universes. That's right. It is a pretty engrossing universe full of interesting plot twists and characters and amazing world building. I mean, what could be a bigger world build than the entire universe?

I guess technically the multiverse is bigger than the universe, right? So Marvel is bigger than reality. It's like multiple seasons of the universe make up the multiverse. But I feel like, Danny, you're saying that you like the universe because it makes sense, but maybe you don't like people because people don't make sense. People do make sense. Just because we don't understand it yet doesn't mean they don't make sense. I mean, are you suggesting that people don't follow some laws of physics,

that we are like exempt somehow from natural laws of the universe? I'm saying if you read the news these days, it's hard to find any sense in anything people do these days. I think that there's two kind of things out there, things we understand and things we don't yet understand. Well, understanding things is what we are here, and that's what this podcast is all about. We try to look at the universe and try to find sense of it, even if it sometimes doesn't make sense completely. We hope that one day science will unravel all of the mysteries of the universe, though there may be a fundamental limit to human capacity to understand the cosmos. After all, your dog probably doesn't understand the universe as well as we do. And so unless you assume the humans are infinitely intelligent or maximally intelligent,

it might be that the universe can't escape our understanding. Well, I feel like dogs look happier than humans a lot of the times. So maybe they figure out something we haven't. Ignorance is bliss. That's what dogs have figured out. But scientists are not the only ones trying to make sense of the universe or trying to paint a picture of the universe that make sense. There are also creative artists and writers trying to make science fiction, television and films that let us think about these awesome ideas about the universe. And I think there's an underappreciated overlap between the creative efforts of storytellers and the descriptive powers of scientists.

In the end, science is not a dry list of facts. It's an explanation of the universe. In the sense, we are telling stories. We're saying this mass moved because there was a force on it. That's a story about what happened to the mass. So science in the end is a story that humans tell to each other to explain the universe that they see around them. here's why this happened. Here's why it rained last Wednesday. Here's why you don't have anything to eat for dinner tonight. And in the same way, creative types are telling stories in fictional universes, wondering what stories can exist and what human experiences might be like in other universes where the rules are different. But I feel, Daniel, isn't that sort of anti-scientific to go into science expecting things to make sense? Shouldn't you as a scientist go into it with a completely open mind to maybe the possibility, the universe, does it make sense?

I think if you're going to take a scientific approach, you have to assume that science works. And it might fail at some point, but so far it's been pretty successful. There are a lot of really interesting assumptions at the foundation of science, you know, that empiricism works so we can test theories. That scientific laws don't change with time so we can do an experiment now and a hundred years from now and get the same answer. One of those might one day fail. And that would be a fascinating philosophical discovery. Yeah, that would be quite the plot twist. I wonder if then you would give it a negative review to the universe.

Did you go online and like, you know, try to go, try to lower its rotten tomato score? Somebody cancel season two of this universe. I'm not a fan. It doesn't apply to me. I don't like it. My standards are pretty low, really. I just want you to have rules and follow them. So far, the universe is satisfying that pretty basic requirement.

If it breaks that, if it turns out the universe is just random nonsense fundamentally deep down, I will admit to being disappointed. Well, we sort of figured that out, haven't we? I mean, at the quantum level, things are random, aren't they? Well, there is randomness, but there's not nonsense. Quantum mechanics does predict the future. It's deterministic about the probability distribution for the future. That is fixed in stone, just which branch of that probability is random. But that doesn't mean it's nonsense, right?

It still makes some sense. That's why quantum mechanical things like transistors in your phones are working right now. I feel like you're saying that nonsense makes sense. because that makes you sleep better at night as a scientist. I'm saying there is nuances of nonsense. I see. There's a sense of sense and nonsense. But we do like to talk about the creative efforts of writers and novelists and filmmakers

who try to paint interesting pictures about the universe. I think, like you say, sometimes take interesting ideas from science and then try to extrapolate that and see how far you can push those ideas. Yeah. And one of our earliest episodes was about the fiction of time travel, where we analyze the physics of it. And recently on our Discord server, a bunch of listeners asked if we would do another episode on more recent time travel fiction. Yeah, so today on the podcast we'll be tackling the science of time travel television. Now, is this going to have a cliffhanger at the end if it is really like television?

Well, this is episode two, right, of the time travel television series. So I hope this is going to be a third episode. Episode two, or is this a sequel? It's so hard to tell these days. Well, if time travel is possible, then does the order even really matter? If time doesn't matter, does anything matter? But the way you announced the title of the episode made me think that the television itself was traveling in time. Like, hey, can we watch TV tonight?

No, the television went back to 1950s. It's not here right now. Well, no, I said time travel television. I didn't say time traveling television. That would be maybe a good show. Yeah, that would be interesting. The Adventures of a Time Traveling Television. Yeah, but what programs does it show?

Like, does it carry? Does it bring the shows from a certain time back to different spots in time? Or is it stuck in the Middle Ages streaming nothing? Well, can the internet broadcast through time or does it need like a really long time traveling cable? Well, that is the plot of that movie. I was talking to you recently called Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. All right. Well, don't spoil it for me.

It's on my two-watch list. And maybe we will talk about it in the third edition of Time Travel Science Fiction Science Reviewed. It'll be like another sequel. But we'll go back in time and do it first. So it would be a prequel. If we technically did it first, it wouldn't be a prequel. It just be the first one. Oh, that's right.

Prequels we do afterwards, but they're slotted in time. Dang it. Yeah. And they're usually not better. Yeah. We'll call the time travel menace. So today we'll be talking about the science fiction of time travel in a couple of interesting television shows that have been out recently. And I guess we'll give it a, what kind of rating do we give it, Daniel?

Four hour glasses. Four time traveling televisions. For physics thumbs up. That sounds good because between us, we have four thumbs. I mean, I haven't seen you recently, but last I remember, you had two thumbs. Yes, but I'm not a physicist. A podcast thumbed. And these shows we were reviewing are the ones.

requested by folks on our Discord server. So if you'd like to interact with us, ask questions, and suggest topics for future episodes, please don't be shy, jump over to Discord and join the conversation. You can find the link on our website at www.d Danielanhorpe.com. All right, well, let's maybe start talking

just generally about time travel. Daniel, what do physicists think of time travel? Is it possible? There's not actually a 100% agreement on this question. Most physicists think time travel is probably impossible because it violates something really simple and basic that we think is part of all science, and that is causality, that the past causes the future, that the future is determined by the past plus some quantum mechanical randomness

and that it doesn't go the other direction. And so if causality is a thing, then the past can't be a function of the future. You can't change the past from the future. It's really pretty basic if you believe in causality. Right. Well, although I think, you know, technically time travel is possible. We're all traveling through time right now, right? I think maybe we need to maybe specify a little bit what you mean by time travel because we're technically traveling time right now, right? Yeah, sure. So sort of normal physics, we have three-dimensional space, X, Y, and Z. And then we have this weird fourth dimension time. And while in space we can move backwards and forwards, you can go to the same spot over and over again. In time, for

reasons we don't really understand you can sort of only slide in the forward direction so technically the whole universe's value of time the location of now is changing all the time right sliding forward so we are moving forwards in time we're not being stationary in time so in that sense we are traveling in time but from that perspective all tv is time travel tv so i think more specifically we're considering alternative views where you can somehow move around the timeline or change the timeline or jump back and forth. Right. Like you can skip a long time, like suddenly be here in one time and then the next be a few thousand years in the future or a few thousand years in the past, right? Skipping around time. Maybe. And I get why this is an attractive idea. People

are being creative and trying to imagine crazy ways the universe might be. But I'm not sure they're always doing the necessary work to make sure that their fictional universe actually hangs together. It's actually self-consistent. Right. Now, when you say a lot of this is think time travel is impossible or time skipping is impossible. Is that really true though? Like isn't it possible to skip through time and still be consistent and still respect causality? So there are a couple possible wrinkles like obviously you can skip forward in time without breaking causality. Right. Like I can maybe disappear and appear a thousand years in the future and that wouldn't break any logical rules, right? Well, how would you be appearing a thousand years in the future? You know,

what is the mechanism for your appearance there? That moment when you appear has to be caused by the moments before that. Like in quantum mechanics, the future is determined by the past. There's this evolution of the wave function of the universe and things don't just appear, right? Information in the universe is not just arbitrarily created or destroyed. It's a function of the past. So for things to just disappear for a thousand years and then appear, it doesn't really make sense. I don't know. Could in my future appearance be caused by my present state? You could cook something up like Jorge goes into a black hole like thing where you imagine he's no longer really part of the universe and that black hole evaporates in a thousand years and you or the information that is equivalent to you somehow comes out of it. And so maybe technically you can imagine that's not really part of our universe anymore, but really it still is.

For you to reappear in the future, there has to be a cause of that. And that cause has to immediately proceed it. You know, the universe we think is local, the way like something. that happens here can't affect something that's happening super far away. Things now can affect the immediate future, which then affects the immediate future, but you can't just like skip forward and say something that's happening now can affect the deep future without affecting the intermediate time points. Right. Things have to be sort of connected to each other in physics. But isn't there also the idea of like a wormhole? Couldn't a wormhole take you into the future? Yeah. So here are the

weird little cracks that might allow time travel to happen. According to our understanding of general relativity, you can do things like build wormholes where you have places in space that do exactly that. You can connect distance places in space. You can have a place here, which is somehow weirdly connected to a place somewhere else. It's not like a literal tube. It's like that location is now just connected to this location. So that, for example, if you create a ripple here, it also gets created over there. You should think of it as like a non-simple weaving of the fabric of space. If you imagine space is like a bunch of places in space that are all connected to the neighboring places like pixels on a screen, this would be like a weird connection between

two little dots. And so if wormholes are a thing and general relativity says they can be, it is possible to turn them into time machines by taking one end of it, making it go really fast. And then like the time dilation effects give you a wormhole which connects two different points in time, not just two different points in space. So it is possible then, as far as we know, to travel into the future. A wormhole would allow you to travel into the future or also into the past. There's another wrinkle in general relativity that allows this. They're called closed time-like curves.

We have a whole episode about how those work. And briefly, they involve how general relativity bends your light cone in the presence of great masses. And we think that if you made, for example, an infinitely long spinning cylinder of dust, you might create the circumstances that allow you to go through a loop in time. where you go back in time and then loop back to the present state and you're stuck in this loop forever. These are theoretical. Nobody's ever observed these. And most physicists think that they probably represent the breakdown of general relativity, not an actual prediction for what would be possible in our universe. I think probably quantum effects prevent these things from actually

happening. But as far as we know, then you're saying that you could also have a wormhole that takes you back into the past. So time travel is technically possible backwards and forward. I think that's true with a couple of legalistic caveats, right? According to our best current theory of physics, those things are not disallowed. But we also strongly suspect that our best current theory of physics is wrong about exactly those aspects of the universe. So we don't really know. It's definitely a question mark. Definitely not disallowed is all we need now to have an interesting, interesting conversation here.

All right, well, let's get into the science fiction of time travel of several popular shows. that are being played right now on the internet and on broadcast TV. But first, let's take a quick break. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment

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online, looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months you can have this much credit card debt when it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it. And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're talking about the science of time travel television,

not time traveling television, more about television that's about time travel. Because it's a popular topic, right, for a lot of shows? It is a popular topic. You see it a lot these days, maybe almost too much. Oh, too much. Wow. Is it possible to have too much of anything in our current culture?

I don't know. I've definitely had too much ice cream some days. Impossible, impossible. But there are a lot of interesting shows that deal with time travel, and so we'll tackle them one by one. And let's start with the first one here, the Umbrella Academy, which streams on Netflix. Yeah, this is a really fun show. Have you seen it? I have. I was actually a big fan of the comics, you know, to 10, 15 years ago, way, way back in the day.

So the current TV show is a TV show based on a comic book, which was written by a punk rock artist. So there's multiple nested creative loops there. I love when one genre inspires another. And so is the TV show a fair representation of the ideas in the comic book? They definitely did more. You know, they had to add more storyline and more drama to it. But I would say the general feel of it is pretty close. Yeah.

Well, it's an interesting universe because the rules are definitely very flexible and lots of stuff happens. That's never really explained. You know, you have the creation of these kids with special powers through some mysterious process, which I don't know, maybe it's going to get explained sometime in. and deep in season seven we're sort of left as a background mystery for the whole show, which is fine, I love that. It makes me curious about the universe

that the show takes place in, so that's fun. Yeah, the show definitely throws a lot at you, like, in this world, in this story, the characters have superpowers and there's time travel, and there's like a talking monkey, and there's an AI robot also. It's like,

what else can you throw into a sci-fi show? Yeah, there's a ghost, right? There's a ghost. That's right. There's a ghost. it goes, yes. Oh man, this show has it all. Yeah, it does feel sort of like a smoothie of culture. You know, they just threw everything into the blender and they're like, what happens when we have all of these characters here at once?

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty wild. I like the second season more than the first one, I think. But the plot is that there are these kids that are mysteriously born with superpowers throughout the world, right? And then one eccentric billionaire somehow manages to collect seven or eight of them and adopts them. And gives them very creative names, Like number four, number five, number six.

Yeah, numbering their children. Who would do that? My dad did. What? What number are you? I'm number two. I'm the best number. You sometimes introduce it to people saying,

this is my number one, this is my number two, it's my number three. Well, I sometimes meet Italians whose names are like Primo and Ultimo. And I'm like, hmm, that's interesting. First kid, last kid. Is that where those names come from? Or maybe they're just the ultimate. I'm a kid. But you probably do it all the time too, right? You say, this is my oldest child. This is my youngest child, right? I only have two, so I just introduced them by their names. But I remember

my younger brother making a big deal about being called the youngest brother and not the little brother. For him, that was a big distinction. Wait, which one did he want to be? He wanted to be the younger brother. He thought little brother was like diminutive somehow. Sounds like you have some fun family dynamics there. Definitely. Anyway, in this story, it's kid number five who's of interest to us because he's not a ghost, he's not an AI robot, he's not super strong, but he possesses the ability to move through time and space. So he can sort of teleport from spot to spot, and he can also jump forwards or backwards in time.

Pretty powerful stuff. Yeah, well, it sort of starts that he can teleport in space, right? And then he starts to experiment with jumping in time, more and more, like bigger time jumps, and then one day he jumps too far or too much, and he gets stuck in the future? or the past. Well, he jumps forward finding like this post-apocalyptic future,

you know, like the future earth where a lot of people have died and he's basically alone and he gets stuck there. He lives there for decades until he finds his way back to what's, I guess, the present in the main narrative of the show. Right. He gets stuck because he somehow couldn't jump back or something and then he actually ages out there in the post-apocalyptic future. He becomes an old man.

But then somehow when he jumps back into the present time, he's back to being a kid. And there's something cool there about how it's inherent. So he doesn't really understand how it works and he's not great at controlling it, which makes sense to me. If this is something like biological, then every skill we have is something we have to develop and practice. You know, even the way you learn to walk, you're pretty clumsy when you're one and two. And then by the time you're 35, you can run and jump and do all this stuff without thinking about it.

So for a kid with these abilities, it makes sense that they would still be exploring it and still sort of getting grips on how to do it. And so he jumps back into the present. time and then he tries to warn everyone that there's going to be an apocalypse right because he lived in the apocalypse and so he's trying to stop the apocalypse yeah so that's the driving narrative of the show he has seen the future and it is terrible and he's trying to figure out what he can do to avert it right and he's a pretty funny character because he's like an old man stuck in the body of a 12 year old yeah and i never really understood that part like if he comes back in time why is

his mind still 60 years old or whatever but his body has become 12 again that never really made sense to me. Yeah, they never explained that, nor do they explain the talking monkey or the robot. It's kind of a show that charges ahead. It does, though, you know, there have to be explanations for you to buy in. They want you to care, for example, that he can avert this apocalypse. So you have to know something about what the rules are of averting the apocalypse. So you can have a sense for, is he succeeding or is he failing? Or can he just snap his fingers at the end of the season and get it done in a second? Right. So he's trying to prevent the Apocalypse, which means this is the kind of science fiction universe or time travel science

fiction universe where you can change what happens in the universe, right? Yeah, it's like a single timeline world where you can go back in time and change the future. So it's got these sort of causal loops in it. He goes into the future, he learns something, he takes that information back into the present again and then changes the future. So the future that he experienced, he hopes never happens. That's kind of the driving narrative of the short. where a lot of these shows, it's like, can you change the future? Can you invert the apocalypse

that somebody experienced in the future? Yeah, they certainly leave the audience wondering, and when I'm watching, I'm wondering, like, is it technically possible or is it just something that we don't know if he's going to be able to accomplish? Like, is it even feasible in his universe to change the future? Or is this one of those setups like in Harry Potter, where the time loops are part of the timeline from the beginning? And so everything is inevitable. And so I get a little confused watching these like what kind of universe are we in? What are the rules here so I can know whether to care? Like are they trying for something that's impossible or what do they have to accomplish in order to achieve their goals? It gets me a little confused sometimes. Right. And in this

universe, there's also like a like a time bureau like a big somehow bureaucracy that somehow has the job of making sure that the timeline stay intact. Yeah, they call it the commission and it's a bunch of like bureaucrats in an office somewhere who are responsible for maintaining the like natural order of time, whatever that means. There's a mysterious organization that has like a plan for how they want the future to go and their agents appear in moments to craft that future. And those agents don't have the same inherent capabilities that kid number five does. They transport through time using some mechanical device, this briefcase they use to go from

point to point on the timeline. Right, right. And the head of this agency is a person with a fish bowl for a head with a talking goldfish in it, right? Also never explained. This is the kind of show we're talking about here, folks. There's a character whose head is a fishbowl and there's a goldfish in it that talks. And Daniel's complaining about the time travel.

I did like the fishbowl head. That was pretty funny. You give the thumbs up for that. Yeah, that was creative. And the fact that this was all from the brains of a punk rocker, you know, maybe that does explain a lot. I'm not sure sort of what substances this creator was on when they came up with all these visions. Oh, that's a hefty. there, Daniel. Are you saying you can't be creative without chemical support?

Well, I've tried to leave it broad. You know, just said substances. Maybe they just need breakfast. I don't know. But I'm trying to leave it broad. Yes. So then how would you rate the time travel in this show? Thumbs up? Thumbs up. I guess it depends on the standard. It's definitely a fun, freewheeling show and creatively sort of very open world. Sort of anything can happen. I do get a little confused about whether I should care about what happens. Like, is it inevitable? Does it not matter what they do? they're going to end up in the same future. Do they have to worry about things like paradoxes? Because if you can go back in time and change the past and the future that created the past

changing you no longer exists, they actually try to address that in the show. Whenever you come near like another version of yourself, you suffer from this condition called paradox psychosis, which is sort of like plot armor to prevent you from like really talking to yourself in the past too much. So I would give it sort of like half thumbs up. It's definitely fun to watch, but it's not really. like rigorously thought out time travel. Yeah, I guess without spoiling it too much,

it is possible in this universe to change the future, right? And so that's what they're talking about. Like if you go back and shoot your grandfather, that's going to create a paradox and that's going to somehow drive you crazy. I'm not sure that's my interpretation at the end of the first season at least,

but I suppose we can't get too much into the details without spoiling it for everybody. All right. Well, this show has a half a thumb up or a half a thumb down or half a thumb up and a half a thumb down. One thumb knuckle up. up, yes.

One thumb, knuckle up. All right. Not two half thumbs up. So just a quarter of the possible rating you could give it. I think that's fair, but it's definitely fun to watch. Yeah, I mean, yeah, totally. If you like superheroes, robots, stalking monkeys, talking fish, and time travel. Also, the civil rights movement.

That's a big part of season two. It's got it all. History. I really did enjoy that it touched on big moments in history, you know, the JFK assassination. that kind of stuff makes it feel like it's revealing some deep truth that we might not have understood about the universe. So there's a little bit of the aura of the power of science there, which I did enjoy. All right, but you're still giving it just one half a thumb.

I'm not changing my review. Maybe you go back in time and watch it again. All right, well, the next show we're going to talk about is called the Time Traveler's Wife. And this is a TV show, which is based on a movie, which is based on a book. Yes, and I originally read the book. and really enjoyed it. It was very creative. It's totally different kind of time travel fiction

from anything I'd ever read before. So I was constantly guessing about what was going to happen next and being pleasantly surprised by sort of unpredictable consequences of the rules that the author did lay out for her universe. Yeah, it's a pretty interesting book.

And it's actually part of a kind of a recent genre called speculative fiction, where it's sort of like anything can happen and it's sort of science fictiony, maybe a little fantasy, but they don't like to say science fiction. I think it might just be political. It's people who like to think of themselves as writing literature, and they don't like to think of themselves as writing science fiction,

which is sort of a genre in itself. So to me, it's like science fiction for people who don't want to say they're reading and writing science fiction. Right. Basically, writers who don't want to be labeled as nerds, I think is what you're saying. Exactly. Like, you can write a love story, but you might not want it categorized as a romance novel, sort of the same idea. Well, I think maybe the decision goes a little bit deeper in that, you know, there are things in speculative fiction like time travel or sometimes cloning or things like that. But they're not trying to base it in the world on science, right? That's why it's not science fiction. It's more like speculative fiction in that, you know, there's a reason science fiction is called science fiction

is because a lot of the writers in science fiction try to find a scientific basis for it or at least make things in that world based on science. But speculative fiction, I feel like they don't even try. Just like, what if there's a love story that has time travel in it? I guess so I've always categorized science fiction into hard science fiction and soft science fiction hard meaning that there really are rules to the universe that makes some sense and they try to give you an explanation for everything that happens and soft meaning like you know we just sort of swallow it and move on so i'm not sure what the distinction there is between soft science fiction and spec fiction right this is more like it's jelly fiction maybe jelly science fiction yeah anyway there's a lot of great stuff in speculative

fiction for example the book the city and the city by chinameaville is officially a speculative fiction book, but it's really a fantastic novel. All right. Well, the time travelist wife has an interesting plot, which is that there's this man who has a genetic condition that makes him travel through time, but sort of randomly, right? He can't control it. Yeah, unlike kid number five in the umbrella academy, he has no control over it. He sometimes gets some warning. There's like a gusting wind or he feels a little bit nauseous. And then he just sort of like disappears and appears in another point in time. Right. And they don't even try to explain this, right? Maybe that's

the difference between speculative fiction and science fiction like there's no effort at all to explain what could be happening to him or what if the basis is biological or aliens or some kind of you know like a some sort of machine right there's no clue not even an attempt to explain it i think there's a small effort made they suggest that it's genetic right because later on when he tries to have kids his children also have the same effect and so they imagine that it's a genetic thing which suggests that it's biological in that sense it might be similar to the umbrella Academy, kid number five is created biologically with this power. And so in the same sense, it's like a product of his physiology.

As much as I hate to say, anything is definitely not aliens. I know. Maybe you should invent your own genre. Science fiction aliens for Daniel. That's about 50% of science fiction anyway. That's good. Keeps he busy reading. But in this story, he can't change the past or the future, right?

Or can he? He can't. Yeah. It's interesting because he knows things. about the past and the future, he like zaps forward and backwards in his own life. He appears, for example, to his wife when she's really young and he knows things about their future together because he's been there. But he doesn't seem to be able to change the timeline.

And that part isn't really very well explained, though I was imagining it was sort of again the Harry Potter structure where you had this timeline with branches and connections on it, but it's sort of always been that way. The timeline itself doesn't ever change, just has these sort of loops and paths in it. So every time you encounter one of these branches, the same thing happens because it's always the same conditions. Right. And so did this start when he was little or at some point when he was an adult?

Like has he always been hopping around in time and is he growing along the way? He's growing along the way and he's getting older. And so the fascinating sort of narrative structure of this book is that it's told from the point of view, not of him, but of his wife. Like what's it like to be married to? someone like this where you meet him when he's really old because he zaps backwards in time when you're 12 and you meet your future husband when he's 60 or whatever or you meet him later on in life and he doesn't know you yet because he hasn't experienced that so sort of like scrambles their

whole relationship and makes it really tricky and complicated he's definitely moving forward through his life though he takes these occasional jumps forwards and backwards along his own timeline and then is he ever in the same point in time twice like in his can his older meet his younger self. It is possible in that universe. Yeah, there are some scenes where future and present Henry's, that's the name of the time traveler, can meet each other. I feel like it's a good statement for people out there.

Like, hey, you think your spouse is acting like a child and is never around and it's not in the same time as you? Well, check out this story. Exactly. Are you frustrated in your marriage? Well, at least be glad you're not in this one. Be glad you're not the time traveler's wife. And there's a lot of fun in it, but there's also some sadness.

You know, because this is biological, when she does get pregnant, she tends to miscarry because the baby also has this capacity, though because it's not fully formed, it can't survive jumping out of her womb into some time in the future and some time in the past. So she has a series of miscarriages. Yeah, it's kind of a, it's basically a love story. Like, what would a love story look like if one of the people was a time traveler and they couldn't control their time jumping, right? Like sometimes, like, she as a little girl meets him when he's really old,

which is kind of creepy, because he knows that she's going to be his future wife and talks to her. But then sometimes later, like, she's an adult and he's a little kid. Yeah, exactly. So she sort of falls in love with the very grown up, very mature version of him. And then later on in her life, she has to meet the immature young version of him. And she's already sort of used to the more grown up version. So they have different sort of romantic challenges than most couples do. And that's what I really enjoyed about this book.

It's not just like, hey, time travel, I'm going to go back and save the world. It's like, what does this like to live through a universe where this happens? What are the consequences for real people? What are they feeling? It was really creative in that sense. Yeah, it's an interesting premise. I don't know which one came out first, but there's a season of Doctor Who that's basically this, but taken kind of to the extreme.

It's like Dr. Hu has this woman that he's in love with, but she's also a time traveler and they basically travel all throughout the cosmos from the beginning of time to the end of time. And so they like meet up pretty extreme situations in their different timelines. Interesting, they're not traveling together? No, no.

She's like, I think he meets her later on, but then, yeah, it's all pretty headache-inducing. Sounds like you need a diagram. Yeah. But this one is more maybe literary or more speculative or more jello fiction. and it is more a bit of a serious love story, right? Exactly.

And so the focus really here is on the characters and the impact on them. And you do get the sense that there's not much they can do about it. They seem sort of resigned to life turning out this way. They're not trying to solve his condition. There's none of this like back to the future. Let's make sure we fall in love in the right way sort of situation. It's more just about the experience of living with somebody whose time is scattered.

All right. Well, how many thumbs up would you give this one? I give this one a thumb up. I mean, it's sort of soft. on the science of it. It's not that well explained. And I think there are some inconsistencies there because if you can jump into the past, why can't you change it, this sort of stuff? But I think it's very clever and creative and exactly the way I always want fiction to be, to take me to places that makes sense that I didn't anticipate. I think I know what's going on here. We're actually

rating things on whether you like them or not, not whether the science is good or not. Is that what's going on here? Is this just really like what is Daniel like? I mean, it's part of it, right. I see. So Daniel gives it a one thumb up, which is not the full two thumbs up, but it's better than half a thumb up, at least for now. All right, let's get into our last show that we're talking about here today, and this one is a doozy.

It's so complicated, Daniel had to stop watching it because it was giving him a headache. So let's see how many thumbs that one's worth. But first, let's take another quick break. A foot washed up. a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

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Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking about the science of time travel television or at least the Daniel's tastes of time travel television. And I watch a lot of science fiction. And every time a show comes on that has time travel in, I'm like, please be good, please be good, please be good. Well, in terms of the science, I feel like, and we talked about this in a previous episode too, about how there's kind of two things. Like one, time travel where you can change the future or the past, and there's time travel where you can't change the future. Like there's one set of events that happened. And even if you go back in time, you're just going to do the thing that you were supposed to do.

And I know as a scientist, you don't like the ones that break that. rule, but it sounds like that's not really related to which television shows you like. There's a loose relationship there. I mean, if they break those rules and they can just do anything at any point, then I just sort of stop caring about what happens to the characters. But also, you know, there is still room for creativity in the whole structure of a time travel story. I do sometimes see movies where I'm like, wow, I never thought of time travel that way. You know, an example is the movie Primer. Primer is a really creative time travel story that doesn't really fall into either of those two categories you described.

Maybe we'll have to talk about it when we do the time travel movie episode in the future. Wait, Primer, isn't it the one where you can't change the future? In Primer, you can change a future but within certain limits based on sort of like how far back in the past you built time machine portals. Well, the thing that always gets me about time travel in fiction or in general is that if you travel back in time, the earth is always moving because the earth is going around the sun and the sun is going around the Milky Way and the Milky Way is moving. So if you only change your time coordinate, you're going to end up floating in the middle space of your time travel, right?

And yet somehow in these television shows and films, when you travel back in time, you're still on Earth, sometimes even in the same place. Wouldn't that be a super complicated kind of like cosmological coordinate calculation to end up in the same place? Well, I think there's a lot of interesting issues there. Number one, if you can travel through time, then in principle you should also be able to travel through space. whatever technology is allowing you to move from an arbitrary time point to another probably also allows you to move from a space time point to another space time point. You bring up another point, which is like, would it be complicated to figure out where that is? That's actually sort of a fuzzy question theoretically because there's no absolute locations in space,

right? And so, like, how do you compare a location at one time to a location at another time? I'm not even sure really what that means. Well, we think there's no absolute space. We think that there's no absolute space. Yeah, we're talking about physics of the universe here. But you know, yeah, in an arbitrary universe, maybe there is absolute space, in which case that would make sense.

But you could like define your origin to be your head. You're at zero zero. So you jump back in time, you're still at zero zero. Or you could define the origin to be the center of the earth, right? And so you were at zero zero, you're still at zero. The fact that the earth is moving relative to other stuff out there, why should that be relevant to your time travel device? And then there's the third wrinkle, which is.

just like, well, what we're really talking about in time travel here is not you traveling back in time, but you somehow rewinding the rest of the universe backwards in time without rewinding you. So like what happens when you get in the time machine? It's not like the time machine is moving the stuff inside of it backwards in time. It's like it's somehow rewinding the universe outside of it, which is even more bonkers. So none of it makes sense. If you start to think too hard about it, it really all sort of falls apart. I mean, that's why they call it fiction. But the last show we're talking about here today is called Dark, which also streams on Netflix, right?

Basically, you only watch Netflix. Is that what's going on? Because I think the time travel is his wife. Isn't that also Netflix? No, that one's HBO. I watch HBO also, yeah. Okay. So this one's called Dark, and I never heard of this one, but you said it's pretty popular.

It's pretty popular. It's in German and with subtitles. And for a while at least, it was one of the top shows on Netflix. In Germany, yes. in the United States. And on the Discord server, a bunch of people wanted us to talk about it. There's a lot of sort of physics layering here.

Like they use the Higgs boson and nuclear power and wormholes and all sorts of like physics words to try to give the impression that the time travel in this show is like realistic or scientific. So then would you categorize it as hard science fiction or soft science fiction or jelly science fiction? I think it's soft science fiction masquerading as hard. science fiction. It's the kind of thing where they give an explanation, but if you know anything

about the words they use in the explanation, it doesn't really make any sense at all. Well, they are German, you know. They're probably very exacting about that it has to be hard science fiction. You know, like I watch shows and somebody says, wait, how's that possible? And somebody else says, well, dude, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the quantum field theory. And they go, oh, yeah, okay, thanks. That makes sense. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense to me. What are you talking about? It's sort of that kind of thing. Right, because you're a physicist. And so I wonder, like, how many shows do the same thing but for like architecture or biology? And you're like, uh, yeah, sure. That makes sense. I'll never know, right? Unless I listen to the podcast

where an architect reviews all of these TV shows. They could never build that subway station. Give it two rulers up. You have to go back in time and study architecture. Me and George Costanza. All right. Well, maybe step us through. What is the basic plot line of this show? This show is about a mysterious cave in the woods. And one of the kids, and one of the characters disappears when they go inside the cave. And it's sort of this multiple plot line mystery. You have plot lines in 2019. You have plot lines in 1953. You have plot lines in 1986. And it turns out that going into this cave, you enter a wormhole that can take you sort of backwards or forwards in time. Back to the same cave? Back to the same cave. Yeah. So it's a sort of wormhole that has an opening at the same

location on the earth, but different points in time. Wait, like you go in, it gets dark, and you keep walking, and you come out the same cave, but at a different time on Earth. Yeah, exactly. Like, how do you have to wait there in a cave? How does this work? There's a portal that you walk through. And according to the show, this was created during a sort of accident at a nuclear facility

sort of adjacent to the tunnels in this cave. So somehow this nuclear physics experiment, blame it on the scientists. created this rift in time. And so if you walk through this cave, it's sort of mysterious. They don't show it to you. The show was called Dark after all. They just sort of show you coming out of the cave at another time. Now, does it always take you to the same time,

or does it always take you the same number of years in the future or past? Or is it random? So there are these fixed endpoints to the wormhole that are 33 years apart. So 1953, 1986, 2019. And sometimes you even get glimpses of like the further future. So it seems like for some reason, this wormhole connects all these points in time that are fixed times apart. But like it's a meaning like if I go walk into the cave at any point in time, I can only come out in certain years. Yeah, exactly.

If you go in 1986, you can't come out in 1984 or 1982, but you can't come out in 1953 or in 2019. I see. But what if like two people going at the same time, wouldn't they all come out at the same instant? Well, the story is taking place at these times, right? If you go in in 1986, you come out in 1953, there's 33-year increments. Presumably, the story goes on, and if you jumped into it in 1990, you would then come out in 1957. So the 33 years apart, but the wormhole ends are not fixed in time.

It's not like the wormhole ends appear at 1986 and appear in 2019. The portals to the wormhole are also moving forwards in time. Yeah, that's what I meant. Like, there's a fixed number of years that the wormhole, jumps. Yeah, exactly. It moves you forwards or backwards a certain integer in multiples of 33. Forwards or backwards. So like if you go in, you might go 33 years in the future or 33 years in the past. Yeah, exactly. And there's this original wormhole created by this nuclear incident, which is sort of left fuzzy. But then later, there's also a group of people who are constructing devices that let them

travel forwards and backwards in time. And I think it's sort of left unclear whether they can control that gap or not, or whether it lets them just move forwards and backwards in time without going into the cave. Wait, so there's a natural time travel device and there's also artificial time travel device in this story. Yeah, it's sort of all artificial because the one in the cave is created by a nuclear incident, which definitely comes from human scientific experiments, right? But that one's sort of fixed in place. And then there's a mobile time travel device, this clockwork box that some people build so they don't have to be in the cave to travel forwards and backwards in time. They made their own cave. And who are these people then made the cave? I don't want to give any spoilers.

Not cavemen. Not cavemen. But the funny thing is that in order to have this box that can move forwards and backwards in time, they need some sort of like extra physics, right? They don't use the wormhole to do this. So the writers need some like extra layer physics. So they describe it as being powered by the god particle. Interesting. Wait, so there's multiple technologies here that can make time trouble possible. There's one that's a wormhole. And then there's one that uses the Higgs boson, basically. Yeah, they never say Higgs boson. They call it the God particle and they actually show it to you on the screen.

Like, we see the God particle on TV. And it looks like this sort of frothing, swarming mass of blue and black light. It's kind of creative visually. But, you know, of course, it's nonsense. Like the Higgs boson is not the god particle, first of all. And the Higgs boson doesn't look anything like what they've described it on TV. And the Higgs boson in no way would allow. you to travel through time or create wormholes.

It's just like a phrase in science. That you know of. That I know of, yes. Because it is the god particle. I mean, you're saying it's not the Higgs boson. So it could be some kind of particle that we have yet to discover, right? Yeah, all right. If the god particle is not supposed to be the Higgs boson, if it's some crazy future thing

that create wormholes and plot devices, then sure, it all makes sense. Didn't physicists for a while think neutrinos traveled back in time? No. nobody ever thought neutrinos traveled back in time. There was a moment when some people claimed that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light, but that was due to a miscalibration of their clocks. All right, well, back to the show.

So there's a cave that's a warm hole and then there's somebody invented a box that somehow uses particle physics to, what, to teleport whatever goes into another time or teleport the whole box? You can use the box, and if you set the box and you and the box move forwards and backwards in time. It's a lot like the briefcase in the Umbrella Academy.

I see. And is this box blue? And does it look like a British telephone booth? No. No, it's much smaller. It looks sort of like an old-fashioned mechanical device. The whole show, I wouldn't say it's steampunky, but it's more like mechanical than electrical. Like you crank it up, it goes tick, tick, tick, and then you and the box somehow travel to another time.

Exactly. And how did they use all this time travel in? So on top of this, there's an incredibly complex plot because people are traveling forwards and backwards in time. Some of the characters in the future are actually the same as the characters in the past, but you just don't know it. And they, like, become their own fathers. And, like, it's very complicated. What?

They become their own fathers? I mean, again, I don't want to spoil too much. But you already spoil it. So let's get into this. How does this work? Like, I go back in time and I have a kid with somebody who happens to be my mother? Doesn't that break all rules of biology? Yeah.

And that's not the smallest problem with the show. All right. Let's keep going then. And there's also some very difficult to watch scenes where they do like painful experiments on humans as they're developing these time travel boxes to see if they get them to work. This is like mysterious organization that's trying to build these clockwork devices for reasons we don't really understand. So sometimes we get glimpses of a post-apocalyptic future dominated by futuristic weapons and the whole world is at war. And we get a sense that maybe people are trying to prevent that future. future. It's very complicated. And I watched a season and a half of this. And I had to start taking notes and drawing diagrams to keep track of like what is going on. Who is what and what

do they want? And eventually I just got so confused I just stopped watching. Wow. It was too much for your physicist's brain. Or like you just lost interest. It was just too much for me. Like I can watch 10 different shows at once and keep all the threads in my head. So when like episode nine comes on, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember what's happening. I care about this again. But this one, I was just lost. I even tried just watching this show by itself for a week to, like, try to keep track of the threads. I even started reading the wiki pages that the fans put up to explain everything, and I just

couldn't even grok it. Was the problem that every time you turn on the show, the previously on Dark, took like an hour just to explain what had happened before? It was just that I couldn't even recognize any of the characters in any of the scenes. I felt like there was stuff that was happening that was really momentous if you knew who these people were. But I just had no idea. Why are we watching this?

Who are these people? What does that mean that this person just shot that person? Well, what's the overarching arc of the show, or who are we supposed to follow? Who are we supposed to care about in this show? Is there one time traveler that you were following or a group of people that discover the cave? It's a whole interconnected family

and the consequences for that family and everybody they know. One of the initial driving questions is like, what happened to this kid disappeared to the cave? Turns out he went back in time, et cetera, et cetera. He was living as an older version of himself the whole time. But then it morphs into this, like, broader narrative about preventing this post-apocalyptic future and preventing these clockwork box people from somehow taking over the world with the God particle.

And so it becomes so broad and complicated that I couldn't even follow the plot. And how many seasons has it been going on for? Many more seasons than I've watched. And the seasons happen in chronological order? Do you have to watch the whole show from season one forward or can you skip around? I do not recommend skipping around. And if it's not going to make sense, it might as well, right? And maybe it's just me.

I know a lot of people enjoy this show. A lot of folks on the Discord server are really into this show. So maybe it just took paying more attention than I was able to give it late at night when I watch TV. Or maybe you just need to speak German. Right, right. Or maybe you're just like a dog who, you know, this is beyond the human beings or just your, you know, a neural capacity. Yeah, exactly. I'm just a dog barking at the night sky when I watch this show.

at the television. Well, so it's so complicated and made a particle physicist confused and unable to follow. How many thumbs up would you give that? This one, I don't give any thumbs up. Yeah, I couldn't even finish watching it, unfortunately. Zero thumbs up.

Well, let me maybe put it a different way. What do you think of the science? Is the science consistent? Is it like the good kind of time travel where that respects causality or is it the kind of time travel that doesn't respect causality? I think the science of this show

is basically gobbledygook. I mean, when they started using the god particle to explain stuff that didn't make any sense, I was like, yeah, we're done. It insulted you personally. And so you discounted the rest of it, even though apparently it's very popular, you're like, you push my button, man, forget it.

I give it no thumbs. Yes, I will admit, yes. I have an abuse of the Higgs boson button and this show pressed it. Right. So this whole show, this podcast episode, it's not really even the science of time travel or what you like is whether or not

a show mentions the Higgs boson and cause it a god particle or not. That's really the thumbs up or thumbs down here. Yeah, look, if somebody out there is a writer for a science fiction show and you're tempted to use the Higgs boson to solve your plot holes, please just don't, because if you do, I'm not going to watch it. But they didn't, they use the god particle. It's just maybe in German, it's just a mistranslation, Daniel. Maybe you're just projecting your own problems with it.

Yeah, maybe it really is just the Da Vinci Code. Yeah, yeah. Maybe really in the original German, it means the goddess particle or, you know, the deity particle. Okay, you know what? I'm going to learn German and then I'll watch it in the original language to give it a fresh take. That sounds fair. And also learn some architecture and maybe some biology because I feel like if you were a biologist, this show would make you turn it off right away. Like, don't they know how DNA works? You can't tire yourself with another person. Hey, well, if you use the God particle, maybe you can. Oh, there you go. Maybe it uses the God DNA molecule.

Yeah, solves every problem. And it's cool and looks blue and black on the screen. Maybe you're also your wife in this episode. Maybe you are your own time-traveling God particle wife. Yeah, there you go. That's dark and uses an umbrella. That'll be the ultimate show. Maybe then you'll give it a thumbs up.

You know what? I'll give it at least one episode. All right. Well, I think the big takeaway here is that time travel is tricky. but also irresistibly fun to think about and to write stories about it because I guess we all wonder how this universe works and we are all wondering how far can you put it, right?

Like if time travel is possible, what would happen if you made a box that could do it or if someone had the power to do it? Exactly, and it's totally worthwhile being creative about these things because physicists don't really understand them and it's fun to think about what the universe might be like if we could break some of these rules. Like mentioning the Higgs boson,

which is a big note. no here, I guess, on the podcast. Don't break that rule. Don't mention the exoson if you don't know what you're talking about. That is definitely my rule. Oh, man. Now I'm tempted. Every time you say something could be aliens, I'm going to be like,

what if it's just the ex boson? I mean, the God particle. Just to push your button. Then you're going to give a thumbs down to our own podcast. No. No. Thus creating a paradox or a parodctor in philosophy. I'm going to get paradox psychosis.

You're going to get paradoxed. All right. Well, regardless, we. recommend these shows that you check it out yourself and see if you like it and whether the time travel in it or the lack of time travel or the lack of explanation or over explanation for the time travel appeals to you yeah and as you would check out these shows serve yourself a nice scoop of ice cream with extra higgs bosons on top that's right just don't call it the god ice cream you hope you enjoyed that thanks for joining us

see you next time Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. appearance on The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs. The question is, what is the most entertaining listening experience in podcast land? Jeopardy-truthers believe in... I guess they would be conspiracy theorists. That's right. They give you the answers and you still blew it. The Puzzler. Listen on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone

and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice.

Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott. I'm not Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation,

you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving. Takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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