"Time Machine" offers a blast from the past -- er, Future

Remember Marty McFly? In the film Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox plays a teenager who is accidentally transported to the year 1955. Paradoxes arise once he gets there. To begin with, he accidentally disrupts the meeting of his parents. He must, then, get them together; or else he won't be born!

Back to the Future was not the first film about time travel. Nor it was the last. A new version of the 1960 film The Time Machine is now playing in theaters. The movie is based, loosely, on the classic H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Interestingly enough, the director, Simon Wells, is H.G. Wells' great-grandson. The movie retains the thought-provoking issues that may arise when one thinks about time plus it adds the human side of science.

Believe it or not, time traveling has been seriously considered. Conveniently, Paul Davis, one of the most interesting thinkers about the nature of time, is releasing this month his book How to Build a Time Machine.

The principle and idea of time travel was definitely established by Einstein, but science fiction has given its contribution. In a sense, we are all time travelers as we can witness with our two-week old tomatoes in our refrigerator. Something happened to them. Days ago they were juicy, firm, proud standing tomatoes. Just like we move from east to west or up and down, everything in this universe "travels" from past to future.

There is, as Stephen Hawking would say, a unidirectional "arrow of time". But, can we actually go into the past? Can we travel to the year 3000? These questions would be ridiculous if it wasn't for the fact that experiments have shown that extremely accurate clocks tick at different rates depending on their speed.

The famous Twin Paradox raised, first, by Einstein, but used by his opponents to ridicule him, is now serious science. For example, a clock traveling at close the speed of light will report that five years have passed; the other left at home will report that 500 have passed. Here is where the puzzle starts; in a way one of the clocks went to the future.

But humanity's passion for time is not the property of physicists. What made Back to the Future a great movie is the fact that Marty's life was put in that context.

While time passes other things accompany us. Love, friendship, uncertainty, pain, hope, happiness and a sense of meaning are experiences rooted in our time. A friend just shared with a bunch of coworkers the same book that his dad use to read to her as a child. In a way she was talking about time, just like Hawking, but in a more colorful way. And this is what literature and films add to the discussion.

Simon Wells' time traveler is inspired to build the machine based on profound human feelings. "Why can't I change the past?" he asks, with great suffering. He does not stop there, he continues to ask the question that is the mother of discoveries and motivation to change our present: What if? Maybe we will never build a time machine.

That's all right. We have the most important part of time: our present.

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John Mendez of Hood River is a philosophy student at Eastern Oregon University.