Time Travel in Science and Cinema

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In a special programme to mark, amongst other things, the centenary of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, Adam Rutherford is joined by The Film Programme's Francine Stock to explore the theme of time-travel - in science, in film and as film. With studio guest, science writer Marcus Chown, they'll discuss time-machines - as imagined by scientists and film-makers; the grandfather of all paradoxes; the notion of the multiverse and how the pioneers of cinema created their own 'time-machines' through the art of editing. And to mark Back the Future Day, otherwise known as 21 October 2015, they talk to director Robert Zemeckis about how and why he imagined a future with hover-boards but, oddly, no smart phones.

Producers: Stephen Hughes and Rami Tzabar.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello you this is the podcast version of Inside Science from the BBC first broadcast on the 15th of October 2015.
0:07.0	I'm Adam Rutherford and today it's one of our thrice annual specials where we join up with the film program and I get to nerd out
0:15.0	about where science meets cinema.
0:19.2	Oh great Scott we hit 88 miles per hour today and head off into multiple timelines.
0:25.8	Grandfather paradoxes, eternal loops, delorions, we're lost in the fourth dimension,
0:31.3	time travel in science on film as film.
0:35.0	Over the next half an hour we'll explore time machines both imagined and real
0:39.2	well mathematically real at any rate and as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the publication
0:44.0	of the general theory of relativity we'll be asking what has Einstein ever done for
0:48.9	time travel. But before that another anniversary is almost upon us that it is quite possible that you might not have noticed
0:55.8	the 21st of October 2015 does that mean anything to you?
1:00.0	Well film fans across the world are building up to Back to the Future Day, and by Back to the Future,
1:06.0	we actually mean Back to the Future 2, because the 21st of October is the day on which the events of the sequel take place amidst flying
1:15.0	delorians powered by household rubbish and also flying skateboards powered by
1:19.4	well we're not quite sure what they're powered by.
1:22.0	And neither was director at Robert Zamechis who told me that despite having predicted much 21st century
1:27.3	gadgetry, they never set out to do any such thing.
1:31.3	Generally what happens when you predict the future is you always underestimate it.
1:36.2	But we did pretty good.
1:37.7	Somebody tabulated it and we got 50 percent, which is pretty good for futurists.
1:43.8	But I think the only reason we succeeded is because everything was a joke.
1:47.4	We took nothing seriously, and we hit 50%.
	...

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