The science of time travel television

Daniel and Jorge talk about the science of "Umbrella Academy", "Time Traveler's Wife" and "Dark".

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, Daniel, are you enjoying all the good TV shows
out there? There's definitely a lot to watch. But as
a physicists, are you able to enjoy some of these
and turn your physics brain off mostly except when it
really challenges me with exceptional nonsense? You mean plot wise
or science wise? Is there a difference? I mean plots
have to be scientific, otherwise they're not plots. I think

(00:30):
by definition, creativity is not scientific. I think by definition,
plots rely on cause and effect, which is the root
of all science. Are you talking about time trouble? That
is one of the worst offenders. It makes me wish
I could travel back in time and talk to the
writers before they make both choices. Wait, wait, what wouldn't
that create a paradox? Like if you go back in
time and prevent them from writing the show, then you

(00:52):
wouldn't have seen the show. That sounds pretty good to me. Actually,
that sounds like a good plot. Yeah, they would make
your life nonsensical. My life already feels nonsensible. Then you're
going to get a low rating on rotten tweatoes my
own review of the scientific validity of my own life.
But what if you go back in time and prevent
yourself from watching the show. That could sort of work, right,

(01:12):
or I guess technically to make sense, you would still
have to watch it, in which case you'll be watching
it over and over again and again and again in
an infinite loop that sounds like a nightmare. I mean,
you just watch it until you finally like it, and
I would break you out of the loop that might
take forever. I am poor Hamming cartoonists and the creator

(01:46):
of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist
and a professor at U C Irvine, and I give
every science fiction show one episode to win me over. Wow,
you have you watch every pilot of every single science
we can show out there? Is that part of your
job as a physicist or is this just a personal vendetta.
I'm not saying that I watch every show that exists,

(02:07):
but every science fiction show that I do watch, I
really give it the benefit of doubt for an episode
to prove that it makes some sense, and if it
doesn't hook you in, you stop watching it. If the
plot is nonsense, then the story is just not compelling
because anything can happen at any time, and so why
even watch who cares what the characters do. So your
attention span is basically what one hour. What if it's

(02:28):
a slow bill. Slow bill is fine as long as
it makes sense in the first episode. If they make
a bunch of rules and then break them already in
the first episode, I'm out. I see. So you're watching
Alice in Wonderland. You're like stoves down next Daniel Pan's
great literature. That's exactly, but it seems like But anyways,
Welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe,

(02:50):
a production of My Heart Radio in which we try
to explain and describe the universe, of which I am
a great fan because so far the universe seems to
make some sense. There are lots of cases where the
universe does something that we do not yet understand, but
by application of our mental framework and our mathematical models,
and our sheer persistence and stubbornness, we have always been

(03:12):
able to understand everything that we observe. It seems to
be some sort of logic behind the universe, some rules
that it follows, and those rules we can uncover. And
on this podcast we do our best to explain what
we do and do not know about those rules to
you in our universe and in fictional universes. That's right.
It is a pretty engrossing universe, full of interesting plot

(03:33):
twists and characters and amazing world building. I mean, what
could be a bigger world built than the entire universe?
I guess technically the multiverse is bigger than the universe, right,
so Marvel is bigger than reality. It's like multiple seasons
of the universe make up the multiverse. But I feel
like Danny, you're saying that you like the universe because
it makes sense, but maybe you don't like people because

(03:54):
people don't know. People do make sense. Just because we
don't understand it yet doesn't mean they don't make sense.
I mean, are you suggesting that people don't follow some
laws of physics, that we are like exempt somehow from
natural laws of the universe. I'm saying, if you read
the news these days, it's hard to find any sense
and anything people do these days. I think that there's
two kind of things out there, things we understand and

(04:15):
things we don't yet understand. Well, understanding things is what
we are here, and that's what this podcast is all about.
We try to look at the universe and try to
find sense of it, even if it sometimes doesn't make
sense completely. We hope that one day science will unravel
all of the mysteries of the universe, but there may
be a fundamental limit to human capacity to understand the cosmos.

(04:36):
After all, your dog probably doesn't understand the universe as
well as we do, and so unless you assume the
humans are infinitely intelligent or maximally intelligent, it might be
that the universe can't escape our understanding. Well, I feel
like dogs look happier than humans a lot of the times,
so maybe they figure out something we haven't. Ignorance is bliss,
that's what dogs have figured out. But scientists are not

(04:57):
the only ones trying to make sense of the universe
or try to paint a picture of the universe that
makes sense. There are also creative artists and writers trying
to make science fiction television and films that let us
think about these awesome ideas about the universe. And I
think there's an underappreciated overlap between the creative efforts of
storytellers and the descriptive powers of scientists. In the end,

(05:19):
science is not a dry list of facts. It's an
explanation of the universe in the sense we aren't telling stories.
We're saying this mass mood because there was a force
on it. That's a story about what happened to the mass.
So science, in the end is a story that humans
tell to each other to explain the universe that they
see around them. Here's why this happened, Here's why it

(05:40):
reigned last Wednesday, Here's why you don't have anything to
eat for dinner tonight. And in the same way, creative
types are telling stories in fictional universes, wondering what stories
can exist and what human experiences might be like in
other universes where the rules are different. But I feel Daniel,
isn't that sort of anti scientific to go into science
and expecting things to make sense? Shoulding you, as a scientist,

(06:03):
go into it with a completely open mind to maybe
the possibility the universe doesn't make sense. I think if
you're going to take a scientific approach, you have to
assume that science works, and it might fail at some point,
but so far it's been pretty successful. There are a
lot of really interesting assumptions at the foundation of science.
You know that empiricism works, that we can test theories
that scientific laws don't change with times, so we can

(06:24):
do an experiment now and a hundred years from now
we get the same answer. One of those might one
day fail and that would be a fascinating philosophical discovery. Yeah,
that'd be quite the plot twist. I wonder if then
you would give it a negative review. To the universe.
You go online and like, you know, try to get
try to lowerd ron Tomato score. Somebody cancel season two

(06:44):
of this universe. I'm not a fan. It doesn't apply
to me. I don't like it. My standards are pretty low, really,
I just want you to have rules and follow them.
So far, the universe is satisfying that pretty basic requirement.
If it breaks that, if it turns out the universe
is just random nonsense fundamentally, deep down, I will admit

(07:05):
to being disappointed. But we've we've sort of feared that
out happen. We I mean, at the quantum level, things
are random, aren't they. Well, there is randomness, but there's
not nonsense. Quantum mechanics does predict the future. It's deterministic
about the probability distribution for the future that is fixed
in stone, just which branch of that probability is random.

(07:26):
But that doesn't mean it's nonsense, right, it still makes
some sense. That's why quantum mechanical things like transistors in
your phones are working. Right now, I feel like you're
saying that nonsense makes sense because that makes you a
sleep better at night. As a scientist, I'm saying there's
nuances of nonsense. I see, there's the there's a sense
of sense and nonsense. But we do like to talk

(07:49):
about the creative efforts of writers and novelists and filmmakers
who try to paint interesting pictures about the universe who
I think, like you said, it's sometimes take interesting ideas
from science and then try to extrapolate that and see
how far you can push those ideas. Yeah, and one
of our earliest episodes was about the fiction of time travel,
where we analyze the physics of it, and recently on

(08:12):
our discord server, a bunch of listeners asked if we
would do another episode on more recent time travel fiction. Yeah,
so to be on the podcast, we'll be tackling the
science of time travel television. Now, is this going to
have a cliffhanger at the end if it is really
like television? Well, this is episode two right of the

(08:35):
time travel television series. So I hope this is going
to be a third episode, episode two? Or is this
a sequel? It's so hard to tell these days. Well,
if time travel is possible, then does the order even
really matter? If time doesn't matter, does anything matter? But
the way you announced the title of the episode made
me think that the television itself was traveling in time, Like, hey,

(08:55):
can we watch TV tonight? Now? The television went back
to nineteen fifties. It's not here right now. Well, no,
I said time travel television. I didn't say time traveling television.
That would be maybe a good show. That would be
time travel television, The Adventures of a time traveling Television. Yeah,
but what programs does it show? Like? Does it carry

(09:16):
does it bring the shows from a certain time back
to different spots in time? Or is it stuck in
the middle ages streaming another? Well, can the Internet broadcast
through time or does it need like a really long
time traveling cable. M Well, that is the plot of
that movie I was talking to you recently called Beyond
the Infinite two minutes. All right, well, don't spoil it
for me. It's on my two watch list and maybe

(09:36):
we will talk about it in the third edition of
Time Travel Science Fiction Science Reviewed. It will be like
another sequel. We'll go back in time and do it first,
so we are prequel. We technically did it first. It
wouldn't be a prequel, it just be the first one.
Oh that's right. Prequels you do afterwards that they're slotted
in time doing it. Yes, yes, and they're usually not better. Yeah,
we'll call the time travel menace. So today we'll be

(09:58):
talking about the science fiction of time travel and a
couple of interesting television shows that have been out recently.
And I guess we'll give it. What kind of rating
do we give it? Daniel for our glasses for time
traveling televisions for physics thumbs up. That sounds good because
between us we have four thumbs. I mean, I haven't

(10:19):
seen you recently, but last I remember you had two thumbs. Yes,
but I'm not a physicist. A podcast and these shows
we're reviewing are the ones requested by folks on our discord, sir,
So if you'd like to interact with us, ask questions,
and suggest topics for future episodes, please don't be shy.
Jump over to discord and join the conversation. You can
find the link on our website at www dot Daniel

(10:41):
and Jorge dot com. All right, well, let's maybe start
talking just generally about time travel. Daniel, What I physicists
think of time trouble? Is it possible? There's not actually
agreement on this question. Most physicists think time travel is
probably impossible because it violates something really simple and basic
that we think is part of all science, and that
is causality. That the past causes the future, that the

(11:05):
future is determined by the past plus some quantum mechanical randomness,
and that it doesn't go the other direction. And so
if causality is a thing, then the past can't be
a function of the future. You can't change the past
from the future. It's really pretty basic if you believe
in causality. Right. Well, although I think you know, technically

(11:27):
time travel is possible. We're all traveling through time right now, right,
I think maybe we need to maybe a specify a
little bit. What do you mean by time travel because
we were technically traveling time right now? Right? Yeah? Sure,
so sort of normal physics, we have three dimensional space x, y,
and z, and then we have this weird fourth dimension time.

(11:48):
And while in space we can move backwards and forwards.
You can go to the same spot over and over
again in time for reasons we don't really understand, you
can sort of only slide into forward direction. So technically
the whole universe versus value of time, the location of
now is changing all the time rights sliding forward, So
we are moving forwards in time. We're not being stationary

(12:10):
in time. So in that sense, we are traveling in time.
But from that perspective, all TV is time travel TV.
So I think more specifically, we're considering alternative views where
you can somehow move around the timeline or change the timeline,
or jump back and forth. Right like you can skip
along time, like suddenly be here and one time and
then the next a few thousand years in the future,

(12:31):
or a few thousand years in the past. Right skipping
around time maybe should be called time skipping maybe. And
I get why this is an attractive idea. People are
being creative and trying to imagine crazy ways the universe
might be, But I'm not sure they're always doing the
necessary work to make sure that their fictional universe actually
hangs together, is actually self consistent. Right now, when you
say a lot of physics think time travel is impossible

(12:53):
or time skipping isn't possible. Is that really true though, Like,
isn't it possible to skip through time and still be
consistent and still respect causality. So there are a couple
possible wrinkles, Like obviously you can skip forward in time
without breaking causality, right, Like I can maybe disappear and
appear a thousand years in the future and that wouldn't
break any logical rules. Right, Well, how you be appearing

(13:15):
a thousand years in the future, you know, what is
the mechanism for your appearance there? That moment when you
appear has to be caused by the moments before that.
Like in quantum mechanics, the future is determined by the past.
There's this evolution of the wave function of the universe,
and things don't just appear, right. Information in the universe
is not just arbitrarily created or destroyed. It's a function

(13:37):
of the past. So for things to just disappear for
a thousand years and then appear, it doesn't really make sense.
I don't know it could in my future appearance be
caused by my presence state. You could cook something up,
like Jorge goes into a black hole like thing where
you imagine he's no longer really part of the universe,
and then that black hole evaporates in a thousand years

(14:00):
and you or the information that is equivalent to you
somehow comes out of it. And so maybe technically you
can imagine that's not really part of our universe anymore.
But really it still is. For you to reappear in
the future, there has to be a cause of that,
and that cause has to immediately proceeded. You know, the
universe we think is local the way, like something that
happens here can't affect something that's happening super far away.

(14:22):
Things now can affect the immediate future, which then affects
the immediate future. But you can't just like skip forward
and say something that's happening now can affect the deep
future without affecting the intermediate time points. Right, things have
to be sort of connected to each other in physics.
But isn't there also the idea of like a wormhole.
Couldn't a wormhole take you into the future. Yeah, so

(14:43):
here the weird little cracks that might allow time travel
to happen. According to our understanding of general relativity, you
can do things like build wormholes where you have places
in space that do exactly that. You can connect distance
places in space. You can have a place here which
is somehow usually connected to a place somewhere else. It's
not like a literal tube. It's like that location is

(15:05):
now just connected to this location, so that, for example,
if you create a ripple here, it also gets created
over there. You should think of it as like a
non simple weaving of the fabric of space. If you
imagine space is like a bunch of places in space
that are all connected to the neighboring places, like pixels
on the screen, this would be like a weird connection
between two little dots. And so if wormholes are a thing,

(15:28):
and general relativity says they can be, it is possible
to turn them into time machines by taking one end
of it, making it go really fast, and then like
the time dilation effects, give you a wormhole which connects
two different points in time, not just two different points
in space. M So it is possible then, as far
as we know, to travel into the future, and wormhole

(15:50):
would allow you to travel into the future are also
into the past. There's another wrinkle in general relativity that
allows this. They're called closed time like curves. We have
a whole episode of about how those work, and briefly
they involved how general relativity bends your light code in
the presence of great masses, and we think that if
you've made, for example, an infinitely long spinning cylinder of dust,

(16:10):
you might create the circumstances that allow you to go
through a loop in time where you go back in
time and then loop back to the present state, and
you're stuck in this loop forever. These are theoretical. Nobody's
ever observed these, and most physicists think that they probably
represent the breakdown of general relativity, not an actual prediction
for what would be possible in our universe. I think

(16:31):
probably quantum effects prevent these things from actually happening. But
as far as we know, then you're saying that you
could also have a wormhole that takes you back into
the past, So time travel is technically possible backboards and forwards.
I think that's true with a couple of legalistic caveats. Right,
according to our best current theory of physics, those things

(16:52):
are not disallowed. But we also strongly suspect that our
best current theory of physics is wrong about exactly those
aspects of the universe, so we don't really know. It's
definitely a question mark. Definitely not disallowed. Is all we
need now to have an interesting, interesting conversation here. All right, Well,
let's get into the science fiction of time travel of

(17:14):
several popular shows that are being played right now on
the internet and on broadcast TV. But first, let's take
a quick break. Alright, we're talking about the science of

(17:35):
time travel television, not time traveling television, more about the
television that's about time travel, because it's a popular topic,
right for a lot of shows. It is a popular topic.
You see a lot these days. Maybe almost too much?
Oh too much? Wow? Is it possible to have too
much of anything in our current culture? I don't know.

(17:56):
I've definitely had too much ice cream some days. Impossible, impossible.
But there are a lot of interesting shows that deal
with time travel, uh, and so we'll tackle them one
by one, and let's start with the first one here,
the Umbrella Academy, which streams on Netflix. Yeah, this is
a really fun show. Have you seen it? I have.
I was actually a big fan of the comics, you know,

(18:17):
to ten fifteen years ago, way way back in the day.
So the current TV show is a TV show based
on a comic book which was written by a punk
rock artist. So there's multiple nested creative loops there. I
love one one genre inspires another, and so it's the
TV show a fair representation of the ideas in the
comic book. They definitely did more, you know, they had

(18:39):
to add more storyline and more drama to it, but
I'd say the general feel of it is is pretty
pretty close. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting universe because the
rules are definitely very flexible, and lots of stuff happens
that's never really explained. You know. You have the creation
of these kids with special powers through some mysterious process
which I don't know. Maybe it's and to get explained

(19:00):
sometime deep in season seven, sort of left as a
background mystery for the whole show, which is fine. I
love that it makes me curious about the universe that
the show takes place in, so that's fun. Yeah, the
show definitely throws a lot at you, Like, in this
world in this story, the characters that have superpowers, and
there's time travel, and there's like a talking monkey and

(19:22):
there's a AI robot. Also, it's like what else can
you throw into a sci fi show. Yeah, there's a ghost, right,
there's a ghost. That's right, there's a ghost. Yes. Oh man,
this this show has it all. Yeah, it does feel
sort of like a smoothie of culture. You know. They're
just like threw everything into the blender and they're like,
what happens when we have all these characters here at once? Yeah,

(19:43):
it's pretty wild. I like the second season more than
the first one, I think. But the plot is that
there are these kids that are mysteriously born with superpowers
throughout the world, right, and then one eccentric billionaire somehow
manages to collect it's seven or eight of them, and
it tops them m and gives very creative names like
number four, number five, number six, numbering their children. Who

(20:08):
would do that? My dad did, what what number are you?
I'm number two? I'm the best number. Do you sometimes
introduce it to people are saying, this is my number one,
this is my number two, it's my number three. Well,
I sometimes meet Italians whose names are like Primo and Ultimo,
and I'm like, that's interesting. First kid, last kid? Is

(20:28):
that where those names come from? Oran, They're just the
ultimate kid. But you probably do it all the time too, right,
you say, this is my oldest child, this is my
youngest child. Right, I only have two, so I just
introduced them by their names. But I remember my younger
brother making a big deal about being called the youngest
brother and not the little brother. For him, that was
a big distinction. Wait, which one did he want to be?
He wanted to be the younger brother. He thought little

(20:50):
brother was like diminutive. Somehow sounds like you have some
fun family dynamics there, definitely anyway in this story, it's
kid number five who's of interest to us because he's
not a ghost, he's not an AI robot, he's not
super strong, but he possesses the ability to move through
time and space, so he can sort of teleport from

(21:11):
spot to spot, and he can also jump forwards or
backwards in time. Pretty powerful stuff. Yeah, well, it's the
sort of starts that he can teleport in space, right,
and then he starts experiment with jumping in time more
and more each like bigger time jumps. And then one
day he jumps too far or too much and he
gets stuck in the in the future or the past. Well,

(21:31):
he jumps forward finding like this post apocalyptic future, you know,
like the future Earth, where a lot of people have
died and he's basically alone, and he gets stuck there.
He lives there for decades until he finds his way
back to what's I guess the present. In the main
narrative of the show, right, he gets stuck because he
somehow couldn't jump back or something, and then he actually

(21:52):
ages out there in the post apocalypt the future. He
becomes an old man, but then somehow when he jumps
back into the present time, he's back to being a kid,
and it's something cool there about how it's inherent, So
he doesn't really understand how it works, and he's not
great at controlling it, which makes sense to me. If
this is something like biological then every skill we have
is something we have to develop and practice. You know,

(22:14):
even the way you learn to walk. You're pretty clumsy
when you're one and two, and then by the time
you're thirty five you can run and jump and do
all this stuff without thinking about it. So for a
kid with these abilities, it makes sense that they would
still be exploring it and still sort of getting grips
on how to do it. And so he jumps back
into the present time and then he tries to warn
everyone that there's going to be an apocalypse, right, because
he lived in the apocalypse and so he tried he's

(22:37):
trying to stop the apocalypse. Yeah, so that's the driving
narrative of the show. He has seen the future and
it is terrible, and he's trying to figure out what
he can do to avert it. Right. And he's a
pretty funny character because he's like an old man stuck
in the body of a twelve year old. Yeah, and
I never really understood that part, like if he comes
back in time, why is his mind still sixty years

(22:57):
old or whatever, but his body has become twelve again.
That never really made sense to me. Yeah, they never
explained that, Nor do they explain the poking monkey or
the robot. It's kind of a show that charges ahead.
It does, though, you know, there have to be explanations
for you to buy in if they want you to care.
For example, that he can avert this apocalypse, so you
have to know something about what the rules are of

(23:18):
averting the apocalypse, so you can have a sense for
is he succeeding or is he failing or can he
just snap his fingers At the end of the season
and get it done in a second. Right, So he's
trying to prevent the apocalypse, which means this is the
kind of science fiction universe or time travel science fiction
universe where you can change what happens in the universe. Right. Yeah,
it's like a single timeline world where you can go

(23:40):
back in time and change the future. So it's got
these sort of causal loops in it. He goes into
the future, he learned something, he takes that information back
into the present again, and then changes the future. So
the future that he experienced he hopes never happens. That's
kind of the driving narrative of the show, where or
a lot of these shows, it is like can you
change the future? Can you avert the apocalypse that somebody

(24:03):
experienced in the future. Yeah, They certainly leave the audience wondering,
And when I'm watching, I'm wondering, like is it technically
possible or is it just something that we don't know
if he's going to be able to accomplish, Like is
it even feasible in his universe to change the future
or is this one of those setups like in Harry
Potter where the time loops are part of the timeline

(24:24):
from the beginning, and so everything is inevitable, And so
I get a little confused watching these like what kind
of universe are we in? What are the rules here?
So I can know whether to care, Like are they
trying for something that's impossible or what do they have
to accomplish in order to achieve your goals? It gets
me a little confused sometimes, right, And in this universe,
there's also like a like a time bureau, like a

(24:44):
big somehow bureaucracy that somehow has the job of making
sure that the timeline stay intact. Yeah, they call it
the Commission, And it's a bunch of like bureaucrats in
an office somewhere who are responsible for maintaining the like
natural order of time, whatever that means. There's a mysterious
organization that has like a plan for how they want
the future to go, and their agents appear in moments

(25:06):
sort of craft that future. And those agents don't have
the same inherent capabilities that Kid number five does. They
transport through time using some mechanical device this briefcase that
they used to go from point to point on the
timeline right right, And the head of this agency is
a person with a fish bowl for a head with
a talking goldfish in it. Right. Also, never we're talking

(25:29):
about here, folks, there's a character whose head is a
fish bowl and there's a goldfish in it. The talks
and Daniels complaining about the time trouble. I did like
the fish bowl head. That was pretty funny. You give
the thumbs up. Yeah, that was creative. And the fact
that this was all from the brains of a punk rocker,
you know, maybe that does explain a lot. I'm not

(25:51):
sure sort of what substances this creator was on when
it came up with these visions. Oh, that's a that's
a hefty accusation there, Daniel. Are you saying you can't
be creative about chemical support? Well, I've tried to leave
it broad, you know, just said substances. Maybe they just
need breakfast. I don't know, but I'm trying to leave
it broad. Yes. So then, how would you rate the
time travel in this show? Thumbs up, thumbs out? I

(26:13):
guess it depends on the standard. It's definitely a fun,
freewheeling show and creatively sort of very open world, sort
of anything can happen. I do get a little confused
about whether I should care about what happens, Like, is
it inevitable? Does it not matter what they do, they're
gonna end up in the same future. Do they have
to worry about things like paradoxes because if you can
go back in time and change the past and the

(26:35):
future that created the past, changing you no longer exists. Um.
They actually try to address that in this show. Whenever
you come near like another version of yourself, you suffer
from this condition called paradox psychosis, which is sort of
like plot armor to prevent you from really talking to
yourself in the past too much. So I would give
it sort of like half thumbs up. It's definitely fun

(26:56):
to watch, but it's not really like rigorously thought out
time travel. M Yeah, I guess without spoiling it too much,
it is possible in this universe to change the future, right,
and so that's what they're talking about, Like if you
go back and shoot your grandfather, that's going to create
a paradox, and that's gonna somehow drive you crazy. I'm
not sure that's my interpretation at the end of the
first season at least, but I suppose we can't get

(27:17):
too much into the details without spoiling it for everybody.
All right, Well, this show has a half a thumb
up or a half a half a thumb down, or
half a thumb up and a half a thump down,
one thumb knuckle up, yes, one thumb knuckle off, all right,
not to have thumbs up. So just a quarter a
quarter of the possible rating you could give it. I

(27:37):
think that's fair. But it's definitely fun to watch. Yeah,
I'm yeah, totally if you like superheroes, robots, talking monkeys,
talking fish, and time table also the civil rights movement.
That's a big part of season two. It's got it
all history. I really did enjoy that it touched on
big moments in history, you know, the jfk assassination. That
kind of stuff. Makes it feel like it's revealing some

(28:00):
truth that we might not have understood about the universe.
So there's a little bit of the aura of the
power of science there, which I did enjoy. All right,
but you're still giving it just one half of thumb.
I'm not changing my review. Maybe you go back in
time and watch it again. All right. Well, the next
year we're gonna talk about is called The Time Traveler's Wife,
and this is a TV show which is based on

(28:22):
a movie, which is based on a book. Yes, and
I originally read the book and really enjoyed it. It
was very creative. It's totally different kind of time travel
fiction from anything I'd ever read before, So I was
constantly guessing about what was going to happen next and
being pleasantly surprised by sort of unpredictable consequences of the
rules that the author did lay out for her universe. Yeah,

(28:44):
it's a pretty interesting book. And it's actually part of
a kind of a recent genre called speculative fiction, where
it's sort of like anything can happen, and it's sort
of science fiction an maybe a little fantasy, but they
don't like to say that it's science fiction. I think
it might just be political. It's people who would like
to think of themselves writing literature, and they don't like
to to think of themselves as writing science fiction, which
is a genre in itself. So to me, it's like

(29:07):
science fiction for people who don't want to say they're
reading and writing science fiction. Right, Basically, writers who don't
want to be labeled as nerds, I think is what
you're saying exactly, Like you can write a love story,
but you might not want to categorize as a romance
novel sort of the same idea. Well, I think maybe
the descision goes a little bit deeper in that, you know,
there are things in speculative fiction like time travel or

(29:28):
sometimes cloning or things like that, but they're not trying
to base it in the world on science. Right, That's
why it's not science fiction. It's more like speculative fiction
in that, you know, there's a reason science fictween it's
called science fiction is because a lot of the writers
in science fiction try to find a scientific basis for it,
or at least make things in that world based on science.
But speculative fiction, I feel like they don't even try to.

(29:49):
Just like, what if there's a love story that has
time travel in it? I guess so. I've always categorized
science fiction into hard science fiction and soft science fiction,
hard meaning that there really are rules to the universe
that makes some sense and they're trying to give you
an explanation for everything that happens, and soft meaning like,
you know, we just sort of swallow it and move on.
So I'm not sure what the distinction there is between
soft science fiction and spec fiction. Right, this is more

(30:10):
like it's jelly's fiction. Maybe science fiction. Yeah, Anyway, there's
a lot of great stuff in speculative fiction. For example
of the book The City and the City by China
Meaville is officially a speculative fiction book, but it's really
a fantastic novel. Alright. Well, The Time Traveler's Wife has
an interesting plot, which is that there's this man who
has a genetic condition that makes him travel through time

(30:33):
but sort of randomly, right, he can't control it. Yeah,
unlike Kid number five in the Umbrella Academy, he has
no control over it. He sometimes gets some warning it's
like a gusting wind, and he feels a little bit nauseous,
and then he just sort of like disappears and appears
and another point in time. Right, And they don't even
try to explain this, right, Maybe that's the difference between
speculative fiction and science fiction. Like there's no effort at

(30:54):
all to explain what could be happening to him or
what if the basis is biological or aliens or some
kind of you know, I mean, like some sort of machine. Right,
there's no clue, not even an attempt to explain it.
I think there's a small effort made. They suggest that
it's genetic, right, because later on when he tries to
have kids, his children also have the same effect, and

(31:15):
so they imagine that it's a genetic thing, which suggests
that it's biological. In that sense, it might be similar
to the Umbrella Academy. Kid number five is created biologically
with this power, and so in the same sense, it's
like a product of his physiology. As much as I
hate to say anything that's definitely not aliens, I know
they you should invent your own genre science fiction aliens.

(31:36):
For Danny. That's about fifty of science fiction anyway, so
that's good. Keeps you busy reading. But in this story,
he can't change the past or the future, right or Kenny,
he can't. Yeah, it's interesting because he knows things about
the past in the future, he like zaps forward and
backwards in his own life. He appears, for example, to

(31:57):
his wife when she's really young, and he knows things
about their future together because he's been there. But he
doesn't seem to be able to change the timeline. And
that part isn't really very well explained, though I was
imagining it was sort of again the Harry Potter structure
where he had this timeline with branches and connections on it,
but it's sort of always been that way. The timeline

(32:18):
itself doesn't ever change, just has these sort of loops
and paths in it. So every time you count one
of these branches, the same thing happens because it's always
the same conditions, right, And so did this start when
he was little or at some point when he was
an adult? Like has he always been hopping around in time?
And is he growing along the way? He's growing along
the way, and he's getting older. And so the fascinating

(32:41):
sort of narrative structure of this book is that it's
told from the point of view not of him, but
of his wife, Like what's it like to be married
to someone like this? Where you meet him when he's
really old because he's apps backwards in time when you're twelve,
and you meet your future husband when he's sixty or whatever,
or you meet him later on in life and he
doesn't know you yet because he hasn't experienced that. So

(33:02):
it sort of like scrambles their whole relationship and makes
it really tricky and complicated. He's definitely moving forward through
his life that he takes these occasional jumps forwards and
backwards along his own timeline, and then you see ever
in the same point in time twice, like in his
can his older self meets his younger self. It is
possible in that universe. Yeah, there are some scenes where

(33:22):
future and present Henry's that's the name of the time
traveler can meet each other. I feel like it's a
good statement for people out there, like, Hey, you think
your spouse is acting like a child and it's never
around and is not in the same time as you,
will check out this story exactly. Are you frustrated in

(33:42):
your marriage? Will at least be glad you're not in
this one? Be god, you're not the time Traveler's wife.
And there's a lot of fun, but there's also some sadness,
you know, because this is biological. When she does get pregnant,
she tends to miscarry because the baby also has this
capacity though because it's not fully formed, it can't survive
jumping out of her womb into some time in the

(34:05):
future and some time in the past, so she has
this series of miscarriages. Yeah, it's kind of a basically
a love story, Like what would the love story look
like if one of the people was a time traveler
and they couldn't control their their time jumping right. Like
sometimes like she is a little girl, meets him when
he's really old, which is kind of creepy because he

(34:25):
knows that she's going to be his future wife and
talks to her. But then sometimes later like she's an
adult and he's a little kid. Yeah, exactly, So she
sort of falls in love with a very grown up,
very mature version of him, and then later on in
her life she has to meet the immature, young version
of him, and she's already sort of used to the
more grown up version. So they have difference of romantic

(34:46):
challenges than most couples do. And that's what I really
enjoyed about this book. It's not just like, hey, time
travel I'm gonna go back and save the world. It's like,
what is this like to live through universe where this happens?
What are the consequences for real people they are feeling?
It was really creative in that sense. Yeah, it's an
interesting premise. I don't know which one came from at first,
but there's a season of Doctor Who that's basically this

(35:08):
but taken kind of to the extreme. It's like doctor
who has this woman that he's in love with, but
she's also a time traveler, and they basically travel all
throughout the cosmos from the beginning of time to the
end of time, and so they like meet up pretty
extreme situations in their different timelines. Interesting, they're not traveling together. No, No,

(35:29):
she's like I think he meets her later on. But then, yeah,
it's all pretty a headache douzy. Sounds like you need
a diagram. Yeah, but this one is more maybe little literary,
or more speculative or more jellow fiction, and it is
more a bit of a serious love story, right exactly.
And so the focus really here is on the characters
and the impact on them. And you do get the

(35:51):
sense that there's not much they can do about it.
They seem sort of resigned to life turning out this way.
They're not trying to solve his condition. There's none of
this like back to the future, let's make sure we
fall in love in the right way sort of situation.
It's more just about the experience of living with somebody
whose time is scattered. All right, Well, how many thumbs
up would you give this one? I give this one
a thumb up. I mean it's sort of soft on

(36:13):
the science of it. It's not that well explained, and
I think there are some inconsistencies there, because if you
can jump into the past, why can't you change it
this sort of stuff. But I think it's very clever
and creative and exactly the way I always want fiction
to be, to take me to places that makes sense
that I didn't anticipate. I think, I know what's going
on here. We're we're actually rating things on whether you
like them or not, not whether the science is good

(36:34):
or not. Is that what's going on here? Is this
just really like? What is Daniel like? I mean, it's
part of it, right, I see. So Daniel gives it
a one thumb up, which is not the full two
thumbs up, but it's better than half of them up,
at least for now. All right, let's get into our
last year that we're talking about here today, And this

(36:54):
one is a doozy. It's so complicated. Daniel had to
stop watching it because it was giving him a take.
So let's see how many thumbs that one's worth. But first,
let's take another quick break. We're talking about the science

(37:19):
of time travel television or at least the Daniel's taste
of time travel television. And I watched a lot of
science fiction, and every time the show comes on that
hals time traveling, I'm like, please be good, Please be good,
Please be good. Well, in terms of the science, I
feel like when we talked about this in a previous
episode two about how there's kind of two things, like
one time travel where you can change the future or

(37:41):
the past, and there's time travel where you can't change
the future, like there's one set of events that happened,
and even if you go back in time, you're just
gonna do the thing that you were supposed to do.
And uh, I know as a scientist you don't like
the ones that break that rule. But it sounds like
that's not really related to which television shows you like.
There's a loose relationship there. I mean, if they break

(38:02):
those rules and they can just do anything at any point,
then I just sort of stopped caring about what happens
to the characters. But also, you know, there is still
room for creativity in the whole structure of a time
travel story. I do sometimes see movies where I'm like, wow,
I never thought of time travel that way. You know.
An example is the movie Primer. Primer is a really
creative time travel story that doesn't really fall into either

(38:23):
of those two categories you described. Maybe we'll have to
talk about it when we do the time travel movie
episode in the future. Wait, Primer, isn't it the one
where you can change the future? In Primary you can
change the future, but within certain limits based on sort
of like how far back in the past you built
time machine portals. Well, the thing that always gets me
about time travel in fiction or in general is that

(38:44):
if you travel back in time, the Earth is always
moving because the Earth's going around the Sun, and the
Sun is going around the Milky Way, and the Milky
Way is moving. So if you only change your time
cord in it, you're gonna end up floating in the
middle space if your time trauble right. And yet somehow
in these in shows and films, when you travel back
in time, you're still on Earth, sometimes even in the
same place. Wouldn't that be a super complicated kind of

(39:06):
like uh, cosmological coordinate calculation to end up in the
same place. Well, I think it's a lot of interesting issues.
They're like number one, if you can travel through time
then in principle, you should also be able to travel
through space. Whatever technology is allowing you to move from
an arbitrary time point to another probably also allows you
to move from a space time point to another space
time point. You bring up another point, which is like,

(39:28):
would it be complicated to figure out where that is?
That's actually sort of a fuzzy question theoretically, because there's
no absolute locations in space, right, and so like, how
do you compare a location at one time to a
location at another time? Not even sure really what that means. Well,
we think there's no absolute space. We think that there's
no absolute space. Yeah, we're talking about physics of the

(39:50):
universe here, but you know, yeah, in an arbitrary universe,
maybe there is absolute space, in which case that would
make sense. But you could like define your origin to
be your head. You're at zero zero, So you jump
back in time, you're still at zero zero. Where you
could define the origin to be the center of the earth, right,
and so you were at zero zero, is still at
zero zero. The fact that the Earth is moving relative

(40:10):
to other stuff out there, why should that be relevant
to your time travel device? You know? And then there's
the third wrinkle, which is like, well, what we're really
talking about in time travel here is not you traveling
back in time, but you somehow rewinding the rest of
the universe backwards in time without rewinding you. So like
what happens when you get in the time machine, it's

(40:32):
not like the time machine is moving the stuff inside
of it backwards in time. It's like it's somehow rewinding
the universe outside of it, which is even more bonkers.
So none of it makes sense if you start to
think too hard about it. It really also falls apart.
I mean, that's why they call it fiction. But the
last year we're talking about here today is called Dark,

(40:52):
which also streams on Netflix. Right, basically you only watch Netflix.
Is that what's going on? Because I think the time
travel is a wife? Isn't that also Netflix? That one's HBO?
I watched HBO. Also, Yeah, okay, so this one's called Dark,
and I've never heard of this one, but you said
it's pretty popular. It's pretty popular. It's in German and
with subtitles, and for a while at least it was
one of the top shows on Netflix in Germany, in

(41:16):
the United States and on the Discord server. A bunch
of people wanted us to talk about it. There's a
lot of sort of physics layering here, Like they use
the Higgs boson and nuclear power and wormholes and all
sorts of like physics words to try to give the
impression that the time travel in this show is like
realistic or scientific. So then would you categorize it as

(41:37):
hard science fiction or saw science fiction or jelly science.
I think it's soft science fiction masquerading as hard science fiction.
It's the kind of thing where they give an explanation,
but if you know anything about the words they use
in the explanation, it doesn't really make any sense at all. Well,
they are German, you know, they're probably very exacting about that.

(41:58):
It has to be hard science for you know, like
I watched shows and somebody says, well, wait, how is
that possible? And somebody else says, well, due to the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the quantum field theory, and they go, oh, yeah, okay, thanks,
that makes sense. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense
to me. What are you talking about? It's sort of
that kind of thing, right, because you're a physicist, and
so I wonder, like, how many shows do the same thing,
but for like architecture or biology, and you're like, oh, yeah,

(42:21):
sure that makes sense. I'll never know, right unless I
listen to the podcast where an architect reviews all of
these TV shows. They could never build that subway station.
Give it two rulers up. You'll have to go back
in time and study architecture. Me and George Costanza, All right, well,
maybe step us through. What is the basic plot line
of this show. This show is about a mysterious cave

(42:42):
in the woods, and one of the characters disappears when
they go inside the cave, and it's sort of this
multiple plot line mystery. You have plot lines in two
thousand nineteen, you plot lines in nineteen fifty three, you
have plot lines in six And it turns out that
going into this cave, you enter a wormhole that can

(43:03):
take you sort of backwards or forwards in time, back
to the same cave, back to the same cave. Yeah,
so it's a sort of wormhole that has an opening
the same location on the Earth, but different points in time. Wait, like,
you go in, it gets dark, and you keep walking
and you come out the same cave but at a
different time on Earth. Yeah, exactly, Like how do you

(43:25):
have to wait? They're in the cave? How does this work?
There's a portal that you walk through, and according to
the show, this was created during a sort of accident
and a nuclear facility sort of adjacent to the tunnels
in this cave. So somehow this nuclear physics experiment and
blame it on the scientists, created this rift in time.
And so if you walk through this cave, it's sort
of mysterious. They don't show it to you, and the

(43:46):
show is called dark after all, They just sort of
show you coming out of the cave at another time.
Now does it always take it to the same time
or does it always take you the same number of
years in the future or past or or is it rents?
So there are these fixed end points to the wormhole
that are thirty three years apart, so in nineteen fifty three,
nineteen eighty six, two thousand, nineteen, and sometimes you even

(44:09):
get glimpses of the further future. So it seems like
for some reason, this wormhole connects all these points in
time that are fixed times apart. But like it's so
meaning like if I go walk into the cave at
any point in time, I can only come out in
certain years. Yeah, exactly. If you go in nineteen eighty six,
you can't come out in nineteen eighty four or nineteen
eighty two, but you can't come out in nineteen fifty

(44:29):
three or in two thousand nineteen. I see, But what
did like two people going at the same time. Wouldn't
they all come out at the same instant. Well, the
story is taking place at these times, right, If you
go in in nineteen eighty six, you come out in
nineteen fifty three. There's thirty three year increments. Presumably the
story goes on, and if you jumped into it in
nineteen ninety you would then come out in nineteen fifty seven.

(44:52):
So the thirty three years apart. But the wormhole ends
are not fixed in time. It's not like the wormhole
ends appear at nineteen eighty six and appear in two
thousand nine and teen. The portals of the wormhole are
also moving forwards in time. M Yeah, that's what I meant,
Like there's a fixed number of years that the wormhole jumps. Yeah, exactly,
it moves you forwards or backwards a certain integer and

(45:12):
multiples of thirty three forwards or backwards. So like if
you go in, you might go three three years in
the future or thirty three years in the past. Yeah, exactly.
And there's this original wormhole created by this nuclear incident,
which is sort of left fuzzy. But then later there's
also a group of people who are constructing devices that
let them travel forwards and backwards in time, and I

(45:32):
think it's sort of left unclear whether they can control
that gap or not, or whether it lets them just
move forwards and backwards in time without going into the cave. Right,
So there's a natural time travel device, and there's also
artificial time tratle device in the story. You know, it's
sort of all artificial because the one in the cave
is created by a nuclear incident, which definitely comes from
human scientific experiments, right, but that one sort of fixed

(45:53):
in place. And then there's a mobile time travel device,
this clockwork box that some people build so they don't
have to be in the cave to travel forwards and
backwards in time. They made their own cave. And who
are these people that made the cave. I don't want
to give any spoilers, not caveman, cave man. But the
funny thing is that in order to have this box

(46:14):
that can move forwards and backwards in time. They need
some sort of like extra physics, right, They don't use
the wormhole to do this, so the writers needed some
extra layer of physics, so they describe it as being
powered by the God particle. Interesting, wait, so there's multiple
technologies here that can make tried preble possible. There's one
that's a wormhole, and then there's one that uses the

(46:36):
Higgs boson. Basically, Yeah, they never say higgs boson. They
call it the God particle, and they actually show it
to you on the screen, like we see the God
particle on TV, and it looks like this sort of frothing,
swarming mass of blue and black light. It's kind of
creative visually, but you know, of course it's nonsense, like
the higgs boson is not the God particle first of all,

(46:57):
and the higgs boson doesn't look anything like what they've
just gribed it on TV. And the Higgs boson in
no way would allow you to travel through time or
create wormholes. It's just like a phrase in science that
you know that I know, yes, because it is the
God particle. I mean, you're saying it's not the Higgs
boson so it could be some kind of particle that

(47:17):
we have yet to discover, right, yeah, all right. If
the god particle is not supposed to be the Higgs boson,
if it's some crazy future thing that create wormholes and
plot devices, then sure it all makes sense. Didn't physicist
for a while thing neutrinos traveled back in time? No
nobody ever thought new Trina's travel back in time. There
was a moment when some people claim that neutrinos traveled

(47:38):
faster than the speed of light, but that was doing
a miscalibration of their clocks. All right, Well back to
the show. So there is a cave that's a warm hole,
and then there's somebody meant at a box that somebody
uses particle physics to what to teleport whatever goes in
into another time or teleport the whole box where you
can use the box and if you set the box

(47:58):
and you and the box moved forwards and backwards in time.
It's a lot like the briefcase in the Umbrella Academy.
I see, and it's this box blue And does it
look like a British telephone? No, it's much smaller. It
looks sort of like an old fashioned mechanical device the
whole show. I wouldn't say it's steam punky, but it's
more like mechanical than electrical. Like you crank it up,
it goes, and then you and the box somehow travel

(48:21):
to another time exactly, And how do they use all
this time traveling? So on top of this, there's an
incredibly complex plot because people are traveling forwards and backwards
in time. Some of the characters in the future are
actually the same as the characters in the past, but
you just don't know it. And they like become their
own fathers, and like it's very complicated what they become

(48:42):
their own fathers. I mean, again, I don't want to
spoil too much, but did you already spoil it? So
let's get into this. How does this work? Like I
go back into time and I and I have a
kid with somebody who happens to be my mother. Doesn't
that break all rules of biology? Yeah? And that's not
the smallest problem with the show? All right, let's keep

(49:05):
going then, And there's also some very difficult to watch
scenes where they do like painful experiments on humans as
they're developing these time travel boxes to see if they
get them to work. This is like mysterious organization that's
trying to build these clockwork devices for reasons we don't
really understand. Sometimes we get glimpses of a post apocalyptic
future dominated by futuristic weapons and the whole world is

(49:26):
at war, and we get a sense that maybe people
are trying to prevent that future. It's very complicated, and
I watched a season and a half of this and
I had to start taking notes and drawing diagrams to
keep tracking, like what is going on? Who is what,
and what do they want? And eventually I just got
so confused. I did stopped watching. Wow, it was too
much for your physicist brain, or like you just lost interest.

(49:47):
It was just too much for me. Like I can
watch ten different shows at once and keep all the
threads in my head, so when like episode nine comes on,
I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember what's happening. I care
about this again, But this one I was just lost.
I even tried just watching this show by itself for
a week to like try to keep track of the threads.
I even started reading the wiki pages that the fans
put up to explain everything, and I just couldn't even rock.

(50:09):
It was the problem that every time you turned on
the show, the previously on Dark took like an hour
just to explain what happened before. It was just that
I couldn't even recognize any of the characters in any
of the scenes. I felt like there was stuff that
was happening that was really momentous if you knew who
these people were, But I just had no idea, why
are we watching this? Who are these people? What does
that mean that this person just shot that person? Well,

(50:31):
what's the overarch king arc of the show? Or who
are we supposed to follow? Who are we supposed to
care about in this show? Is there one time traveler
that you were following or a group of people that
discover the cave. It's a whole interconnected family and the
consequences for that family and everybody they know. One of
the initial driving questions is like, what happened to this kid?
Disappeared into the cave? Turns that he went back in time, etcetera, etcetera.

(50:55):
He was living as an older version of himself the
whole time. But then it morphs into this like broadened
narrative about preventing this post apocalyptic future and preventing these
clockwork box people from somehow taking over the world with
the god particle, and so it becomes so broad and
complicated that I couldn't even follow the plot. How many
seasons has it been going on? For many more seasons

(51:15):
than I've watched, and the season's happened in chronological order?
Do you have to watch the whole show and from
season one through forward or can you skip around? I
do not recommend skipping around, And if it's not going
to make sense, might as well, right, And maybe it's
just me. I know a lot of people enjoy this show.
A lot of folks on the Discord server are really
into this show. So maybe it just took paying more

(51:37):
attention than I was able to give it late at
night when I watched TV. Or maybe you just need
to speak German right right, Or maybe you're just like
a dog who you know, is b beyond the human
beings or just your you know, neural capacity. Yeah, exactly,
I'm just a dog barking at the night sky when
I watched this show at the television. Well, so it's

(52:00):
so complicated and made a particle physicist confused and unable
to follow. How many thumbs up would you give that
this one. I don't give any thumbs up. Yeah, I
couldn't even finish watching it unfortunately, zero thumbs up. Well,
let me maybe put it a different way. What do
you think of the science and this the signs consistent?
Is it like the good kind of time travel where
you get would that respect causality? Or is it the

(52:22):
kind of time travel that doesn't respect causality. I think
the science of the show is basically gobbledygook. I mean,
when they started using the god particle to explain stuff
that didn't make any sense, I was like, yeah, we're done.
It insulted you personally, and so you discounted the rest
of it, even though apparently it's very popular. You're like,
you pushed my button, man, forget it. I give it
no thumbs Yes I would. I have an abuse of

(52:46):
the higgs boson button, and this show pressed it right.
So this whole show, that this podcast episode, it's not
really even the science of time travel or what you
like is whether or not a show mentions the Higgs
boson and cause it a god particle or not. That's
really the thumbs up Earth of down Here. Yeah. Look,
if somebody out there is a writer for a science
fiction show, and you're tempted to use the Higgs boson
to solve your plot holes. Please just don't because if

(53:08):
you do, I'm not going to watch it. But they
didn't use the god particle. It's just maybe in German
it's just a mistranslation. Then maybe you're just projecting your
own problems with it. Yeah, maybe it really is just
the Da Vinci code. Yeah yeah, maybe really in the
original German it means the goddess particle or you know,

(53:30):
the d D particle. Okay, you know what, I'm gonna
learn German and then I'll watch it in the original
language to give it a fresh take that sounds fair,
and also learn some architecture and maybe some biology, because
I feel like if you were a biologist, this show
would make you turn it off right away, Like don't
they know how DNA works? You can't. You can't sorry,

(53:51):
your own yourself with another person. If you use the
god particle, maybe you can. Oh, there you go. Maybe
the uses the the god dam yeahvolves every problem and
it's cool and looks blue and black on the screen.
Maybe you're also your wife in this episode. Maybe you
are your own time traveling god particle. Wife. There you
go that's dark and uses an umbrella. There'll be the

(54:14):
ultimate show. Maybe then you'll give it a thumps up,
you know what, I'll give it at least one episode.
All right, Well, I think the big takeaway here is
that time travel is tricky but also irresistibly fun to
think about and to write stories about, because I guess
we all wonder how this universe works, and we're all
wondering how far can you push it? Right, Like, if

(54:34):
time travel is possible, what would happen if you made
a box that could do it or if someone had
the power to do it exactly? And it's totally worthwhile,
mean creative about these things because physicists don't really understand them,
and it's fun to think about what the universe might
be like if we could break some of these rules,
like mentioning the Higgs boson, which is a big no
note here, I guess on the podcast, don't break that rule.

(54:57):
Don't mention the eggs boson if you don't know what
you're talking about. That is definitely my rule. Oh man,
now I'm tempted. Every time you say something could be aliens,
I'm gonna be like Pep, what if it's just the
Higgs boson, I mean, the God particle. Just to push
your button. Did you're gonna give us thumbs down to
our own podcast? No? No, that's creating a paradox or
a paradoctor in philosophy. I'm gonna get paradox psychosis, You're

(55:20):
gonna get paradox. All right, Well, regardless, we recommend these
shows that you check it out yourself and see if
you like it and whether the time travel in it
or the lack of time travel or the lack of
explanation or over explanation for the time travel appeals to you. Yeah,
and as you check out these shows, serve yourself a
nice scoop of ice cream with extra Higgs bosons on top.

(55:40):
That's right, just don't call it the God ice cream.
We hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us, see
you next time. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel
and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of I
Heart Ready or more podcast from my Heart Radio, Visit

(56:02):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. H