Time travel is an elusive, complicated construct–nearly as baffling, some might say, as the idea of Keanu Reeves being one of the leading actors of our day.
But Reeves could be the poster actor for time travel tales after starring in at least three films dealing with the idea. He’s starred in the slacker classics “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” and, most recently, “The Lake House,” in which the time travel twist is that he and a woman fall in love even though they live two years apart.
This may not be the stuff of H.G. Wells or more serious time travel studies, but it does fit snugly with humanity’s enduring fascination with time travel.
“Humans are always hoping there’s something more than just now, and just here,” said Martin Danahay, an English professor at Brock University in Ontario. “We’re always trying to push beyond some kind of barrier that we’re sure must be blocking us off from some other kind of reality.”
When regular people think of time travel, they think of big brass machines with gigantic slot-machine levers, not unlike the TARDIS machine in “Doctor Who,” the British TV show that has been around since the 1960s. The first season of the latest incarnation of the show came out on DVD this week.
Even when people indulge the possibilities of time travel, they think it’s a pretty fanciful idea. Surely not given much credence by real scientists. Well …
Jaehoon Yu, assistant professor of physics at UT-Arlington, said that a search of a database on physics papers revealed that people are, in fact, “very” interested in the topic. When he plugged “time travel” into the search field, the phrase came up in the titles of 24 physics papers between 1965 and 2005. “Time machine” showed up in the title of 48 papers, just in the past 16 years.
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If you believe Paul Davies, author of “How to Build a Time Machine,” men may be able to travel through time in the future. “Can time travel be done?” Davies asks in his book.
“Indeed it can,” he writes. “Scientists have no doubt whatever that it ‘is’ possible to build a time machine to visit the future. And they’ve known the formula for nearly a century.”