About time

Time flies like an arrow (...and fruit flies like a banana - yes... I know, I know...), and time flies in only one direction. Unless, of course, you are a fan of science fiction, and then you know. You know.... that there are more possibilities than the four dimensional world we currently live in. The flux capacitor invented by Dr. Emmett Brown in the Back to the Future movie trilogy was one such device that distorted the space time continuum (temporal displacement) and enabled him and his young friend Marty McFly (and on one occasion his dog Einstein) to traverse forwards and backwards in time - as long as they could accelerate their Delorean DMC-12 car to a speed of exactly 88 miles an hour. The film trilogy was a tremendous take on the time-traveler trope, exploring many concepts such as space-time paradoxes, personal relationships, societal change and of course, new and emergent technologies.

If I talk about these films, or show the image above, there is a reaction. I remind people that we have now 'arrived' in the year (2015) that Marty and Doc also arrived in 'the future', and people almost always say the same thing. Well, first they call me an anorak or a nerd. But then, once they've got themselves past the mild insult stage, they ask: OK, they say, so where's my hoverboard? Sometimes they ask about flying cars, but I can't help them there. As for the hoverboard, well the simple answer is, it's here. It has already been invented, although just like the earliest iterations of mobile phones or portable computers, it is quite clunky and unwieldy. The YouTube video below demonstrates it being tested out by Tony Hawk and Dave Carnie.... and here is an explanation of the physics of the hoverboard by Wired magazine. Take a look.



Yes, it looks heavy and cumbersome, and is nothing like the sleek representation of hoverboards in the movie, but give it time (see what I did there?). We could say the same thing for other technologies that first appeared on our screens in science fiction. Remember the first automatic doors that appeared in Star Trek, or the personal communicators - or even the replicators in the Next Generation series of Star Trek? They look very shiny and high tech in those television shows, but the earliest real versions were incredibly expensive, had clumsy designs and were probably not that easy to use either (for personal communicator read mobile phone, and for replicator think 3D printer). It took time for these technologies to be developed into something that - in the case of automatic doors and mobiles at least - are now taken for granted and have all but faded into the background. I'm sure the same will be said for 3D printers in the next few years.

As for the  Hendo Hoverboard - whether or not it fails to operate over water, or whether it will ever be quick enough to outrun the Biffs of this world, I don't know. I sure as hell have no idea what the pedagogical applications of the device might be either, so don't ask - but the hover board is here, and I fully expect one day for my students to be riding them around. And as for me? Great Scott! You wouldn't get me on one for all the Deloreans in Houston, Texas.

Photo from this website


About time by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.