Movies: Time Travel on a Budget

One of the things I like about Netflix is that it gives me a chance to watch lots of obscure, independent, often low-budget science fiction movies. This time, I'll review a trio of time travel films that I've watched in the last couple of years. (Minor spoilers ahead.)

Time travel is a natural theme for this kind of film, since a lot of the really cool ideas about it require no glitzy special effects. You just need an intelligent script and sufficient acting and production quality to put it across. Such movies can have twisty plots and complex narratives. The same scene might appear several times, each time imbued with new significance. Because of this, I often like to watch a good time travel movie more than once.

Primer (2004). This movie, shot in suburban Dallas for something like $30K by Shane Carruth, has a reputation as a superb "underground" science fiction movie. In my view, the reputation is well deserved. Two guys -- engineers at high tech firms during the day -- are trying to invent antigravity in their spare time. They invent time travel by mistake. The process of discovery is wonderfully portrayed, and the operating rules of time travel are extremely well thought out.

At one point, we learn that one of the guys, at the very beginning of their time travel experiments, built a "failsafe device" -- an additional time machine to allow someone to go back to the beginning and fix problems that might arise. This idea is a great example of why I like this movie so much. It is clever, but also naive; so instead of being a safety measure, it turns out to complicate things immensely. (Especially after it turns out that a time machine can be folded up to fit inside another time machine....)

The movie is complex and makes the viewer work to "get" the plot. It soon becomes apparent that you are not watching the first "iteration" of the time travel loop. You are already being presented with a timeline that has been changed many times, recursively. Not everything is explained, so even after two or three viewings you may still have questions. If you like, you can check out one theories on one of the web pages devoted to discussion of this movie. I still find myself pondering certain aspects and scenes of this movie, long after I watched it.

Feedback (2002). Another extremely-low-budget movie about time travel. This go round, the device is a telephone that can call six hours into the past.

I did not like Feedback as much as I did Primer. For one thing, I did not identify with the characters as much. (One review, with less kindness than accuracy, called them "low-rent hoods".) The tension is provided by conventional dangers such as criminals with guns. There is one rather cool special effect -- I will not spoil the surprise -- but the film budget was similar to Primer's. Like Primer, though, it manages to look quite good.

12:01 (1993). This movie is often compared to Groundhog Day, which was made about the same time. The movies differ in two important respects: Groundhog Day gives no explanation for its basic premise, which puts it more in the fantasy category; and Groundhog Day is a truly great movie, while 12:01 is merely somewhat charming. In each movie, the central character has to live the same day over and over again, trying to learn enough to make everything come out right. (12:01 is very loosely based on a short film from 1990, which is included in the DVD. The short film is much, much darker -- real Twilight Zone stuff. The original source material is a short story by Richard A. Lupoff.)

This is not really an independent movie, since it was made by an established (third-string) Hollywood studio and has fine, recognizable actors (like Martin Landau and Helen Slater). There are some funny parts. The technobabble is especially babbly.

I suppose I need a ranking system for the movies I review. Here goes. Each movie gets three grades: Smart/Exciting/Pretty (S/E/P). "Smart" refers to how intelligent the plot and premise are; "Exciting" refers to how entertaining the movie is to watch; and "Pretty" recognizes striking images and cool special effects. All rankings are purely subjective; your mileage may vary.

• Primer: S/E/P = A+/A/B+
• Feedback: S/E/P = B/C/B+ (extra credit for one scene)
• 12:01: S/E/P = C/B-/C
  

All of them pass in all categories, but then I'm not a very hard grader. If you can only watch one of these, watch Primer. If you can watch two, watch Primer twice! But if you have lots of time, check out one of the others.

Next time -- two movies about forbidden knowledge.

Return of the Blog

I haven't posted here in more than a year and a half. I had taken on a couple of huge projects, and something else had to give -- in my case, blogging. The projects were:

• I did a course of 24 DVD lectures on quantum mechanics for the Teaching Company. Devising and recording these was a fascinating business; I'll probably do a blog post on it later on. The course is selling pretty well -- the folks at TTC seem happy -- and it has generated some interesting email correspondence with my new "students".
  
• My friend Mike and I finished the manuscript of our quantum mechanics textbook, which is now in the clutches of the copy editor. The book will probably be out just after the first of the year.

I'm pretty happy with the way both projects have turned out. Each one, I think, has something new to offer. The two projects -- one for a lay audience, one for advanced undergraduates -- interacted with each other in an interesting way. There are things in each that I wish we'd had room for in the other.

Right now I'm putting together another Teaching Company course, this one on "The Physics of Impossible Things." We'll do the taping in August and October, and the course itself should be out next spring. This is going to be more fun and wide-ranging than the quantum mechanics course. Less math, too. You can get something of a preview by watching the public lecture I did at the Perimeter Institute in December.

I have been giving lectures on "The Physics of Impossible Things" since the mid-1990s, and I've always wondered whether there was a book or something in the subject. Then Michio Kaku's book Physics of the Impossible came out last year, and I figured that I must have been right. Having looked at Kaku's book, though, I think my own take will be quite different -- sufficiently so that I don't have to worry about encroaching on his territory in my TTC course. (His book will certainly be high on my "Recommended Readings" list.)

Besides quantum physics, here are updates on some other interests:

Politics. Those who know me or have read a bit in this blog will not find my opinions of political developments terribly surprising. In the last election, my guy did not get elected. (Actually, I'm not even sure "my guy" -- whoever that might be -- was nominated.) I'm not very happy with many of the policies of the new administration and definitely count myself as part of the Opposition. More about this, no doubt, later on.

Theology. This fall I'm giving another lecture at the seminary where my brother teaches, as part of a larger symposium on science and theology. Now all I need is something to say.

Writing. I continue to work on other writing projects, though the two big quantum projects ate up a lot of my writing time. Last Lent the rector of our church asked me to write a short (10 min) play for an event called "The Good Friday Project". When in doubt, turn to the classics -- in my case, the book of Job. The result, called "Comforters", can be watched here.

Books. My favorite book of the last year and a half, by far, has been Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Also, I love my Kindle (though mine, unlike the one at the link, is a 1st gen machine).

Movies: Movies released in the last year and a half that I saw and liked: Be Kind Rewind, Vantage Point, The Forbidden Kingdom, Iron Man, Prince Caspian, WALL-E, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon, Coraline, Knowing, Star Trek, and Up. I also saw and really loved the HBO miniseries on John Adams, plus some rather cool indie science fiction movies (about which I hope to blog in the near future).

That'll have to do for now. More bloggery later. I promise.

"On being wrong"

I wrote a piece with that title for the faculty "Musings" column in our Alumni magazine. Here it is, if you are interested.

Ray Gun Revival

... is the name of an online biweekly magazine dedicated to space opera and science fiction in the classic Golden Age style. It's run by Johne (Phy) Cook and his merry band of "overlords", and it's pretty good reading. They mix long-running serials and short stories, and every issue has some pretty terrific artwork by a featured science fiction artist.

Starting in the September 1, 2007, issue, they're running my story "The Pasadena Rule", which previously appeared here on ZOA. They're presenting it as a six-part serial, a couple of chapters every other issue, so I won't spoil things by linking to its previous appearance here. (It is in the archive, of course, if you just can't stand waiting till February to see how it all comes out!)

Which is all pretty cool. If this is the sort of fiction that interests you, you should definitely click over to RGR and browse around.

Postscript: Ray Gun Revival is part of an interesting flap involving the DMCA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the online open library Scribd. As far as I can tell, the folks at RGR are entirely blameless and the SFWA has been danged careless in their use of DMCA "takedown" provisions. You can find out more in the forums at the RGR site and in the current issue.

Law of Attraction

I've been off-blog for a long spell, but all is well around here. The quantum mechanics textbook project is humming along pretty well, although it was interrupted this summer by (1) an unplanned trip to Arkansas when my Mom hit her head and went into the hospital, and (2) a month-long trip out west for physics, math and tourism. Mom is much better now and the Great Western Vacation (4000 miles in a rental car) has been successfully concluded, so it's back to work. And when I find a spare moment, perhaps I'll drop something here.

This entry is occasioned by correspondence with Lyn Perry, whose online acquaintance I've made via this blog. (He made some very kind comments about the story "The Pasadena Rule". I may have more to report about that story soon.) Lyn wrote a couple of posts at his own blog regarding "The Secret", which is a quasi-mystical self-help book that has been on the bestseller lists. In the course of our email exchange, he invited me to read these -- especially Part 3, which mentions quantum theory -- and tell him what I thought. It occurs to me that my remarks may be interesting to the rest of you. So OK, Lyn, here goes.

But first, a word to everybody else. In case you have been paying as little attention as I have, "The Secret" is a fundamental teaching about how to attain success, a teaching that has (I gather) been implicitly known to all the great spiritual and ethical teachers since time began. The basis of it is the "Law of Attraction", which says that good things like success are drawn to those who have certain good habits of mind, such as clear focus, optimism, patience, integrity, etc. This affinity is supposed to be built into the laws of the universe -- not simply in the game-theoretic sense that such-and-such behaviors might be "good strategies" for achieving success in a complex multiperson world, but in a more direct way, like gravitation.

Lyn is specifically trying to evaluate these ideas within a Christian context. He makes the case that the practical lessons involved can be valuable and that they resemble some distinctly Christian teachings. He is worried, however, about the theoretical foundations, and thinks that something may be badly amiss there. Rather than comment on Lyn's comments directly, I think I'd rather give my own (necessarily brief) take on the subject.

The "Law of Attraction", such as it is, does represent an enduring human intuition about how the world works. Certain kinds of good things do seem to come more easily to people with certain virtues, and certain kinds of evils seem to cluster around people with certain vices. But as soon as you go beyond a limited empirical observation and a bit of practical encouragement for virtue, it seems to me that the thing begins to stink. I will give three objections that occur to me.

Moral objection. The Law of Attraction appears to have a rather appalling corollary: If somehow you do not succeed, if evil rather than good befalls you, then this is to some extent Your Fault. You may still be a nice person in many ways, but if you had possessed the right qualities than perhaps things would have worked out better. Can a person of good conscience, much less a Christian, contemplate the plagues and atrocities of human history in this way? This strikes me as the kind of casual heresy that could only catch on among people who are comfortable and largely thoughtless, and who imagine that their own middling existence is the full extent of the moral universe. The evils they know are not too horribly black and the goods, frankly, are not too heroically white. But the literature of the Holocaust, the writings of Milosz and Solzhenitsyn and the rest, the testimonies of the great saints, and Holy Scripture itself, all tell us that the world is both better and worse than we comfortable and thoughtless people conceive.

Spiritual objection. Christ on the cross, himself sinless and yet carrying the sins of the world, must be the foundation for all Christian moral teaching. The connection between what we are and what happens to us is shaped by grace, by sacrifice and exchange and substitution (see Charles Williams), by the relations between selves -- in short, by Love. The Law of Attraction seems rather out of step with this Eternal Dance, and on that basis alone it is suspect as a guide to Christian behavior.

Scientific objection. Now I get to the part that Lyn wanted me to say something about. Here is a summary idea under discussion: Everything (including thought) is energy, and (because of the quantum) energy is associated with vibration. One could imagine therefore a kind of "resonance" between thought-energy and other things in the world. This is suggested as a deep mechanism behind the Law Of Attraction. (Lyn may object that I've oversimplified. Fair enough. Go read what he really said.)

The only trouble is that I disagree with the premise. Is thought energy? I think that people have the idea that the mind is a kind of powerful energy "field", pictured as a glowing numinous aura. (Any number of old Star Trek episodes have reinforced this image. After all, a glowing numinous aura was one of the few special effects that 1960's TV could really do.) But the physical energy associated with brain impulses is pretty small, which is why it is easier to lose weight by jogging than by mathematics. This reminds me of those natural philosophers of a past age who carefully weighed dying people just before and after they died, trying to detect the soul's departure. Indeed, given Einstein's famous relation between energy and mass, it may amount to the same thing. "Thought" is energy in much the same way that "baseball" is energy. There is clearly energy involved there somewhere, but a thermodynamic description of yesterday's Cardinals-Padres game leaves out something -- or almost everything -- important.

I think what we have here is a complex unexamined metaphor, of a kind that often occurs when physics concepts are invoked to explain something in a quite different field. The same term "energy" is used to refer both to a physical quantity and to a kind of vital quality shared by sentient beings. But that is essentially metaphorical. Just because we use the handy word "energy" to describe the restless liveliness of an active mind does not mean that this quality is properly measured in Joules. All of which brings to mind the marvelous remark made by another physicist correspondent of Lyn's. He wrote

To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific evidence for a connection between subnuclear or quark physics and the metaphysical sort of attraction that makes our lives more or less worth living. And, I know no basis for a scientific theory along these lines.

My experience is that people who push such things are usually interested in attracting money out of your wallet. Watch out, please.

And really, this cannot be improved upon.

Hair on fire

This evening, as I was ransacking a hard disk for some old files (all vanished now into the bit beyond, I fear), I ran across a hasty essay that I had written for myself some years ago -- in effect, a blog entry before this blog was ever dreamt of. I will give you a short sample here. The piece is unmeasured, screedy and downright unfair; but it captured my state of mind and made me laugh to read it again years afterward. Hope you enjoy.


Today I attended an "interfaith" worship service. It was held in the College chapel, presided over by our interim rector, but it could not really be called Christian. There was some stuff about God, true, and a couple of elements of a Christian worship service. We chanted part of a Psalm. A reading from James (in Russian). A hymn -- "Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee" -- bowdlerized (even from poor Henry Emerson Fosdick’s lyrics) so that Christ was not mentioned. ("Thou our Father, Christ our Brother" became "Thou our Father and our Mother".) In the readings there were mentions of the Tao, of Buddha, of some American Indian version of the deity.

OK, I understand the point, maybe. The idea was to invoke the blessings of many "spiritual traditions" on the installation of our College’s new president. But the exclusion of Jesus was remarkable. Especially at a College founded by a bishop, especially under a chapel ceiling bearing the arching words "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever."

Well, I felt like the turd in the punchbowl, sitting there not getting a whole lot out of it all, or really thinking much of it. It did not help that some of the readings (like a couple of the passages from some speech by a previous president) seemed idiotic. One of them essentially said that our College had lots of people with leadership potential and we developed this by providing lots of extracurricular activities. Pretty feeble stuff. Oh, yeah, and there was a strong undercurrent of "knowledge and wisdom leads to peace" with "peace" equaling about what you’d expect if you saw the word on a sign at a leftist political rally. In short, the whole thing seemed a mishmash, a fuzzy cloud, whose sole guiding principle was a strict exclusion of the most basic beliefs of those who had founded the College, built the chapel, etc.

One musical piece -- really lovely music that I’ve heard before -- had a line like "We are the breath of the ancestors / We are the Spirit of God." And I thought to myself, No we aren’t. First of all, the ancestors who brought us here would probably think we had lost our minds. I can imagine my grandmother (the one who was the daughter of the Civil War hero, who was the county president of the WCTU and played the piano for the church for about forty years, raised five children on the farm and lost one when he was only sixteen) listening to that "worship" service in a kind of despair. And the Spirit of God would blow away all our pretentions and our comfortable syncretistic sentimental smoke, and we'd be left naked in the cold sharp light.

At the end there was a sort of candle ritual where we all light our tapers from the flame that signified knowledge. And then my daughter's hair caught on fire and her mom had to beat it out. The Spirit of God would be like having your hair catch on fire -- alarming, dangerous, but really really real.

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course . . .

Some of you will recognize the title of this post as the beginning of a handy mnemonic for memorizing the first few digits of pi. Counting the letters in each word, you get 31415926... The whole thing is "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." This gives pi to fifteen significant figures, which is good enough for all everyday occasions and can impress small children (of a certain sort).

It turns out that Wikipedia -- amazing, maddening Wikipedia -- has a cool page devoted to a list of mnemonics. And on that page I found a link to the most amazing pi-mnemonic that I have ever heard of. Not only does it encode pi, it is also a parody of Poe's "The Raven". It begins

Poe, E.
Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

And on and on for 740 places. I am simply in awe. Why isn't this -- surely a work of staggering genius (of a certain sort) -- much better known? Or maybe it is, and I just haven't been paying attention.

Also on the Wikipedia page are a number of other scientific mnemonics, including a couple for the sequence of stellar spectral types: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. The most well-known one is "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!" (Ladies may change "Girl" to "Guy" if they wish.) Another one that I like much better was invented by a student in one of our astronomy classes, and is not mentioned by Wikipedia. It runs, "Only Bad Astronomers Forget Generally Known Mnemonics."

Meanwhile, all such efforts, however witty, shrink to nothing beside this ditty:

So he sitteth, observing always, perching ominously on these doorways.
Squatting on the stony bust so untroubled, O therefore.
Suffering stark raven's conversings, so I am condemned, subserving,
To a nightmare cursed, containing miseries galore.
Thus henceforth, I'll rise (from a darkness, a grave) -- nevermore!