Bob Gale - Claudia Wells - Kevin Pike
The day my Back to the Future dreams come true, meeting Bob Gale - Claudia Wells - Kevin Pike !!!
I got to drive Bob Gale to the event who signed my Hoverboard and car seat ! ,also Claudia Wells signed my DeLorean Sunvisor and Kevin Pike spent 20 minuets looking at the detailing on my Time Machine conversion
⚡ Blog Post: Great Scott! We Went Back to the Future and Met the Legends! ⚡
Headline: Time Travel Confirmed: When the Sandstone DeLorean Met Bob Gale, Claudia Wells, and Kevin Pike!
As massive fans of the Back to the Future franchise, we at Sandstone Productions pour years of passion into building and maintaining our iconic movie car replicas. We live and breathe the film. But what happens when you get to meet the very people who created the magic?
This is the story of an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime encounter that made our entire journey worthwhile: meeting screenwriter/co-creator Bob Gale, the original Jennifer Parker, Claudia Wells, and the Special Effects Supervisor who built the original Time Machine, Kevin Pike!
The Day the Future Arrived
This wasn't just a quick handshake and an autograph; this was a deep dive into the very fabric of Back to the Futurehistory, with our own meticulously crafted DeLorean Time Machine at the heart of the action.
1. Driving the Visionary: Bob Gale
When the opportunity arose to drive Bob Gale himself to a convention, it was a dream beyond belief!
The Chauffeur Experience: Imagine opening the iconic gull-wing doors for the man who wrote the script. We got to talk in-depth about the film, the legacy, and his genuine happiness that the story continues to resonate with fans across generations.
The Ultimate Validation: As a fan and builder, the moment he signed the back seat of our Time Machine—and even our Hoverboard—was the ultimate honour. He officially brought our replica into his visionary world. We literally arrived in 'Style'!
2. Marty’s Better Half: Claudia Wells
Meeting Claudia Wells, the original Jennifer Parker, was a burst of pure, infectious energy.
Positive Energy and Passion: Claudia’s enthusiasm for the fans and the franchise is absolutely contagious. She was so gracious, posing for a mini-photo shoot with the DeLorean, allowing us to capture that classic Marty and Jennifer vibe right next to our Time Machine.
A Photo for the Ages: Getting to see the original "Jennifer" next to a fully equipped Time Machine was a pinch-yourself moment that proved this day was truly special.
3. The Expert Eye: Kevin Pike
For us, meeting Kevin Pike, the man responsible for the incredible practical effects of the original Time Machine, was a masterclass in movie car engineering.
The Technical Talk: We had to know—is our replica up to snuff? Kevin was kind enough to give our DeLorean conversion a thorough inspection, pointing out details and giving us invaluable advice.
Mission Complete: Getting a nod from the actual Special Effects Supervisor was the ultimate validation of our six-plus years of research and build time. His insight is now driving our ongoing efforts to make our Time Machine the most accurate and immersive experience possible.
More Than Just a Movie Car
This extraordinary day confirmed what we’ve always believed: The DeLorean is more than just a car; it's a community. It's a key to meeting the most creative, imaginative, and energetic people in the world—from the franchise creators to the devoted fans we meet every weekend.
It's truly humbling to have the 'Gatekeeper' of the BTTF universe and the special effects genius who built the car inspect and approve our Time Machine. It energises our mission to bring this incredible, immersive experience to your next event!
Thank you, Bob, Claudia, and Kevin. You’ve cemented our place in the timeline!
Bob Gale - Claudia Wells - Kevin Pike …… Meeting Back to the Future
“The Future is here !!!”
Being a huge fan of Back to the Future (ever since the DeLorean appeared from Doc Browns truck in the original film),
meeting the creators and actors of the film was a mission that seemed impossible ……..
in July gave the the opportunity not only to meet :
Bob Gale (Screenwriter and Co-writer of Back to the Future)
Claudia Wells (aka Jennifer Parker - Marty McFly’s Girlfriend in the first Back to the Future )
Kevin Pike (Back to the Future -Special Effects Supervisor)
But also opportunity to spend time with them, and even drive Bob Gale to the event !
Let me start with a little back story…..
Taking you ‘Back’….. Back in time to 2016 when I decided to make my dream come true by owning a DeLorean !
I certainly didn’t release on what a roller coaster ride my DeLorean would take me on…..
(I know “where we’re going we don’t need roads” !! ) but in this story we do ….
It’s took me to new places, met some amazing people, found new communities, learnt so much including engineering, electronics, car mechanics (including engine strip and rebuilds), vehicle electronics, Movie prop making, website design, sales and marketing, website design, SEO, and much much more….
Some may say it’s a Car ….. well yes, that of course is true, but it’s much more than that …..
The DeLorean was one man’s vision, a vision for a new future of automotive car building in the hope of providing an ethical Sports Car to masses. This vision was from a briliant engineer called John Z DeLorean.
A car to this day, was built in record time (28 months) a record which has never been beaten. Especially as he started it all without a factory, no workers, no money, not even a working proto type.
All these factors didn’t matter to John, as this was to prove one man could accomplish anything in late 1970’s 1980’s with just imagination, sheer will power, and undoubted belief he could start his own car company.
Anyway I digress (as I could get too carried away telling this story) please read more here ….
Fast forward to 1980, a Visionary Writer called Bob Gale wrote the Back to the Future Script along with Robert Zemeckis. At the time the studios’ did not like the script and concept, saying Time Travel movies just do not work, they where looking for something different.
But Bob and Robert persisted (again similar to John DeLorean never givinging up on their dream. With the script being knocked back (over 40 times) finally Universal picked up the production through Amblin Entertainment
And the Future was now set…….
Fast forward again to 1985, by this time a lot had happened (especially concerning the DeLorean) with John Z DeLorean’s dream becoming a reality in February 1981 with the 1st DeLorean rolling off the production line. But then on 26th October 1982 the company filed for Bankruptcy. John DeLorean along with his car’s reputation where in tatters.
Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis where looking for a Time Machine for their script (the original idea was a refrigorator) and the futuristic DeLorean was the only vehicle that they wanted Doc Brown to drive and convert into a ‘Time Machine’
Pressing the fast forward button to March 2020, the start of lockdown ! a very strange time for everyone.
I was not furloughed from my job which meant I worked all the way through the lockdown. But with no car shows, no events, and no days out and about. I thought why not use this extra spare Lockdown Time to Lock myself in the garage to convert My DeLorean into a perfect replica of the ‘A-Car’ Time Machine as used in the first film ( as any one would do ! )….
So in March 2020 I began….
The idea had come from visiting may shows throughout the years I owned my Delorean. At these shows I would display the props like the flux capacitor (as that’s one of the first questions anyone asks ) when they see a DeLorean. And also a Hoverboard, Almanac, Nike Mags, Marty’s cloths and trainers, and all the letters from the films.
Seeing what enjoyment everyone got from the props, I thought when you say DeLorean the Time Machine words always follow on.
I am both a fan of the car itself and John Z DeLoreans background story, and also a huge Back to the Future Fan. So putting these two together is a Dream come true.
As I entered the conversion I released two things :
It had to be movie accurate, so all the parts needed to be built out of alloy and all the hoses wiring etc had to be real
I didn’t want to damage the DeLorean in anyway (as a conversion would require drilling into those lovely stainless steel panels) so any equipment fitted must be able to be removed without any damage to the car itself.
So both of these two points would add major complications on top of an already difficult task
So I spending the whole of lockdown studding the A Car in the film (which is now located in Los Angeles California’s Peterson Museum) .
Luckly for me it was rebuilt in 2015 for the 30th celebration of the Back to the Future franchise. So there were plenty of photo’s. Of course there’s’ more to it than studding the photos
The rebuild of the car came out on Blu Ray, so I watched this (just a few times !) and then the exact dimensions had to be obtained.
Fast Forward again now to July 2022 where the opportunity to meet the creator of Back to the Future, the Special effects Supervisor for the Film and also Marty’s Girlfriend
came to Southampton.
I desperately wanted their signatures, but how was this going to happen when they are in such demand at these events. But little did I realise I would have the opportunity to Drive Bob Gale to the Event itself, where he would sign my car. Which would also give me time to answer the questions I always wanted answering.
So the doors of the Hotel opened and Bob Gale walked out, (I still cannot believe I met him) he shook my hand and asked my name. He was so friendly and really wanted to spend time talking about Back to the Future Film, at the same time signing the back seat of my DeLorean and my Hoverboard !
We then set off in the Time Machine with both doors open, as we drove past all the fans waiting to get into the event. Arriving in ‘Style’ in Bob Gales visionary Time Machine
Bob Gale was an absolute pleasure to, and is genuinely happy that everyone enjoys the Film which keeps it Alive….
Then I returned to the Hotel, this time the doors opened to reveal Claudia Wells who enthusiasm, energy and enjoyment of the Film was absoutley fantastic, especially as she interacted with all her fans. She was so easy to talk to and was only too pleased to take part in a mini-photo shoot and signing with my DeLorean.
I spoke breifly spoke with Kevin Pike on the Saturday (to ask if he could cast his expert eye over my Time Machine Conversion,) what better person than the Special effects Supervisor of Back to the Future to give me advise on Time Machine conversions !
So on Sunday he rembered I was desperate for his oppionin and visited my DeLorean to give me the ultimate word on whats correct
He has an excellent sense of humour and a fantastic memory for detail. He started at the front of my DeLorean with the flux bands and worked all the way around the car (which I have filmed !) He very compilentory (especially on my Flux bands which took me absolutely ages to get right), and was giving me pointers regarding the finer details on the components and wiring (even down to the tightness of the wiring looms). Also the exact colours to use (which even with all the reasearch I did, did not find this information. So once again Thank You to Kevin for his time and advise.
I was so happy that he had the time to spend with me, and now my mission to fix all those points he went through, and at the same time was Surprised how much detail I got correct.
Then managed to get Kevin Pike and Claudia to pose for a Time Machine Photo’
Being at this comic con around such creative, energetic, imaginative people is truely refreshing. This is a world of ‘Anything it possible’, if you can imagine it, it can be built for everyone to enjoy through the media of TV and Film. I felt truely energised, and greatful these people had brought something special for anyone from the age of 3 to 103 to enjoy for a lifetime.
I was so pleased that in addition to the Back to the Future As an additional bonus I also got to drive :
Chris Barrie -
Comedian, impressionist - Spitting Image - Red Dwarf (Arnold Rimmer) - The Brittas Empire (Gordon Brittas) - Tomb Raider (Lara Crofts Butler)
Tim Blaney-
The Voice of Short Circuits - Johnny 5 - Puppeteer and voice actor - Voice of Frank the Pug in Men in Black
Short Circuit - Johnny 5 with Mark D Elliott
Tim Blaney - The Voice of Short Circuits - Johnny 5 - Puppeteer and voice actor - Voice of Frank the Pug in Men in Black with Mark D Elliott
Bob Gale with Mark Elliott’s DeLorean Time Machine
Claudia Wells Back to the Future (Jennifer Parker ) with Mark D Elliott
Ghostbusters - Ecto 1
Ghosbusters Ecto 1 The automobile used to help them catch ghosts around the state of New York….There ready to believe you !
The Ecto-1 is more than just transportation; it's the official Ghostbusters mobile headquarters. Starting life as a dilapidated 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor ambulance/hearse, the vehicle was acquired by Ray Stantz and meticulously overhauled by Egon Spengler. Doc Brown might have had a time machine, but the Ecto-1 is a ghost-busting machine!
Its iconic siren and flashing blue lights announce the heroes' arrival, while the custom-fabricated roof rack carries all the necessary paranormal equipment, including proton packs, traps, and P.K.E. meters. With its sleek white body and signature red fins, the Ecto-1 is the stylish workhorse that ensures the world stays safe from supernatural threats. Who you gonna call?
#Ecto1 #Ghostbusters #Cadillac #MillerMeteor #ProtonPack #Ghostbusting #WhoYouGonnaCall
Ghostbusters Ecto 1
GHOSTBUSTERS - ECTO 1
The Ecto-1 was the vehicle that the Ghostbusters used to travel throughout New York City busting ghosts and other entities. Being one of one of most recognisable Movie cars of all time the Miller-Meteor company was the company that converted this Cadillac into 3 different models, which were :
Futura - Which had a rear passenger area with windows that wrapped around the entirety of the automobile. This could be easily converted from limousine to ambulance to funeral coach.
Landau - This closed off the rear-cargo windows to create a level of privacy.
Sentinel - For Ambulance use - Higher ceiling / roof area
History
The vehicle used for the Ecto-1 was a 1959 390 CID V8 - 360 Hp - 4 speed - 20 gallon tank. The ambulance/hearse combination was the end loader variety. Dr. Ray Stantz found the vehicle shortly after he mortgaged his mother's house to buy the Firehouse.
Because of his mechanical skills, he was able to repair the vehicle, which he acquired for $4,800.
After repairs were completed, the vehicle had quite a unique character. It became a well-recognized symbol for the Ghostbusters franchise. The vehicle had enough room in it to store Proton Packs for all of the crew, along with Ecto Goggles, P.K.E. Meters, and a slew of Traps.
Repairs
Ecto 1
Ive Found the Car !
After purchasing the vehicle in used condition, Ray had to make repairs on the following parts of the car:
· Suspension work
· Shocks
· Brakes
· Brake pads
· Lining
· Steering box
· Transmission
· Rear end
· New rings
· Mufflers
· (a little) wiring
Roof Rack
One of the most iconic parts of the Ecto 1 is the roof rack, What does it do ? What equipment is fitted ?
Here we are going to list the equipment, but in later Blog’s will be covering how this equipment works ….
Ecto 1 Equipment
Ecto 1 in action
Ecto 1 Roof Equipment
Dr. Egon Spengler miniaturized ghostbusting technology for mobile purposes and they were mounted on the roof rack of Ecto-1.
Muon Scrubbers * Federal Siren * Whelen HRDF - 200 * Federal Signal Model 19 * PKE Detection Array * Modified A-6 Compressed Air Tanks * Modified Marine Radio Antenna * T.U Antenna (AKA the Sniffer) * HVAC Unit * Code 3 Force 4 XL Lightbars * Modified Texas instruments cross-section sensitivity unit * Half Dome directional dish * Radio GPS Locator * High Intensity Microfoams * EMF Scrubbers
New Incarnations
Ecto 1 in action
After the Ghostbusters were shut down, the Ecto-1 was used primarily for transport to and from appearances at such places as children's birthday parties. It fell into a state of disrepair, and is seen spewing smoke, and having various other mechanical problems.
Following the Ghostbusters' return to business after capturing the Scoleri Brothers, the Ecto-1 got an overhaul had more lighbars, scrolling signs, and more equipment, and was renamed Ecto-1a.
A further updated version of the Ecto-1 appears in during the Thanksgiving 1991 weekend, Ecto-1b. This version is similar to the Ecto-1a, but adds a Super Slammer Muon Trap on the roof which enables it to capture smaller ghosts much more quickly than the portable versions, as well as adding the possibility of capturing much larger ghosts.
Behind the Scenes
Ecto 1
· Stephen Dane, credited as a Hardware Consultant, was the fabricator of the original Ectomobile.
· On October 5, 1983, Dane started working on Ecto-1. He visited the primary ambulance in the backlot at The Burbank Studios. He took reference photos and measurements then went home. Dane drew up isometrics of Ecto-1 and its roof rack and various views and elevations of the exterior and interior. Dane spent the longest amount of time in his gig working on the Ecto-1 design.
o After Reitman approved Dane's design, studio painters and prop makers at The Burbank Studios Mill went to work on paint and detailing. Dane oversaw construction and directed them on building the car based off his designs. After about two weeks, the paint job and details were blocked out. The prop makers also repaired the ambulance to driving condition, cleaned the interior, and installed equipment.
o By the time it shipped on October 19, the ambulance was about half-done. Dane bought parts for the roof rack. Once it was done, it was shipped to New York where it was attached to Ecto-1. The finished Ecto-1 wasn't an exact duplicate of Dane's designs. Dane originally drew the Proton Packs to lay sideways on Ecto-1's gurney but the prop makes changed that so the packs were upright at a slight angle. Some parts on the roof rack changed position from the design. They were on top of each other or faced in a different direction. After one to two days of finishing touches, Ecto-1 was ready for filming.
· Dan Aykroyd drove the Ecto-1 in New York.
· In previous drafts of the first movie, Ecto-1 was originally different models. In the July 6, 1983 draft, it was to be a blue and white 1975 Cadillac Full Formal Excelsior Ambulance bought for only $600 but by the time the September 30, 1983 draft was written, the price had escalated to $1400 for an even older 1959 model, "very long, gold 1959 Cadillac ambulance." During filming, inflation increased the cost to $4800.
Ecto 1 First Concept
· Dan Aykroyd's original Ecto-1 was an all-black, rather sinister-looking machine with flashing white and purple strobe lights that gave it a strange, ultraviolet aura. While going through the script, the cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs first pointed out the black design would be a problem since part of the movie would be shot at night.
· Dan Aykroyd's original Ecto-1 had some extranormal powers, such as the ability to dematerialize. One use of it would be to elude police pursuit.
· $4800 was a rather large sum at the time for a used vehicle in such disrepair
· A second Cadillac was bought in case of any maintenance problems during filming but only the primary was fully converted. The secondary was used solely for early "premodification" scenes.
· Sound designer Richard Beggs incorporated a modified leopard snarl for the siren sound. The snarl was reversed, played backwards, and then its speed was changed.
· Ecto-1 was promoting the 1984 film shortly after it was released in theaters. It drove around New York City with one of the Ghostbusters driving it in costume. Ecto-1 caused many accidents because other drivers lost control when they spotted the now-famous car.
· In a deleted scene of the first movie, there was encounter between a policeman and the Ecto-1. It was the only scene in the final shooting script that suggested the vehicle had some extranormal powers carried over from Aykroyd's initial draft. It was removed because it slowed down the montage. Ivan Reitman also felt it was asking too much from the audience.
· After shooting moved to Los Angeles, the second unit continued doing a couple of shots in New York with Ecto-1 and it broke down.
Ecto 1
o Ecto-1 died during filming of the Chapter 20 "Keymaster" scene where Ray and Winston drove across the Manhattan Bridge.
( The scene where Ray and Winston are in Ecto-1 talking about end of the world was used to audition actors for the role of Winston )
· Ecto-1 broke down in Central Park. They were blocking the crosstown traffic so the cast and crew pushed it out of the way.
· In the final shot of Ecto-1 driving away, a 65mm camera was used. They could only do one take because they were losing daylight.
· In Ghostbusters II, Ecto-1 was backfiring and spewing smoke. This was not done by special effects as the Cadillac truly was in a poor state of repair. It finally "died" on the Brooklyn Bridge. The NYPD fined the filmmakers because the Brooklyn Bridge does not have breakdown lanes and Ecto-1 was blocking traffic.
· Before Ghostbusters: The Video Game was released, the original (and now rusty and literally falling apart) Ecto-1 was restored to promote the game. Dan Aykroyd was shocked at the high quality of the restoration.
· There had been 3 Miller-Meteor Ambulances to portray the 2 vehicles, the pre-Ecto-1 which was never transformed, Ecto-1 which was originally a gold ambulance and Ecto-1a.
Trivia
· In the August 5, 1983 draft of the first movie, on page 65, a Motor Trend cover hails Ecto-1 as "Car of the Year."
References
↑ Ray Stantz (2005). Ghostbusters (1984) (DVD ts. 20:36-45). Columbia Pictures. Ray says: "Everybody can relax, I found the car. Needs some suspension work and shocks... and brakes, brake pads, linings, steering box, transmission, rear end."
↑ Dan Aykroyd (2009). 2009 Remaster of Ghostbusters, Ecto-1: Restoring the Classic Car (2009) (Blu-Ray ts. 11:17-11:20). Columbia Pictures. Dan Aykroyd says: "Those are Muon Scrubbers up there."
↑ Dan Aykroyd (2009). 2009 Remaster of Ghostbusters, Ecto-1: Restoring the Classic Car (2009) (Blu-Ray ts. 11:26-11:35). Columbia Pictures. Dan Aykroyd says: "There's radio GPS Locator, there's high intensity microfoams, EMF scrubbers, it was all related to the hardware needed to go out and do what we had to do."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 66. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Paragraph reads: "Working with a basic 1959 Cadillac ambulance, hardware consultant Steven Dane designed and modified the final vehicle."
↑ Joe Medjuck (2019). Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters (2019) (Blu-Ray ts. 1:03:35-1:03:38). Bueno Productions. Joe Medjuck says: "Dan drove the Ectomobile."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 50 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Paragraph reads: "In all previous drafts -- including Aykroyd's -- the basic vehicle from which the 'Ectomobile' would evolve was specified to be a 1975 Cadillac ambulance, secured for a bargain basement price of only $600. By the time the final script was written, the price had escalated to $1400 -- for an even older 1959 model. During filming, inflation struck once more, and the pricetag was upped to $4800."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 67 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Paragraph reads: "Dan Aykroyd's original Ectomobile was an all-black rather sinister-looking machine with flashing white and purple strobe lights that gave it a strange, ultraviolet aura. Though kept essentially intact through all the drafts, the vehicle concept -- suggesting a hearse rather more than an ambulance -- was clearly more in keeping with the darker tone of Aykroyd's first draft than with the lighter ones that followed it. It was cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, however, who first pointed out a serious problem with it."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 67 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Joe Medjuck recounts: "The Ectomobile would have been nothing more than a couple of headlights driving through the streets. So, keeping that in mind, we decided we'd better go with a white ambulance trimmed in red."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 67 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Harold Ramis recounts: "Dan's script was set in the near future and there was much more fantasy in it. In that script, the Ectomobile was able to dematerialize. When we anchored the script more in reality and set the time in the present, that concept had to go. Besides, it's funnier so see them in an old ambulance that barely runs."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 95 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Harold Ramis recounts: "The encounter between the policeman and the Ectomobile is the only scene in the final shooting script which suggested that the vehicle itself had some extranormal powers -- a carryover from Dan Aykroyd's initial draft in which the Ectomobile was equipped with an advanced dematerializing capability that allowed its operators, functioning somewhat outside the law, to readily elude police pursuit."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 66. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Paragraph reads: "Although a second backup vehicle was procured as a hedge against maintenance problems, only the primary ambulance was fully converted. In the end, the backup was used solely for early 'premodification' scenes."
↑ Wallace, Daniel (2015). Ghostbusters The Ultimate Visual History, p. 42. Insight Editions, San Rafael CA USA, ISBN 9781608875108. Richard Beggs says: "It was a leopard snarl that I had done a number of things to. I looped it, cut it in quarter-inch tape, and played it backward. Usually I am very loath to play things backward, because they have a very telltale characteristic and I think it's sort of a cop out. I played it backward and it did that err-reearr-err-reearr- the exact opposite of an animal going arghh. It lost some of its organic sound and it became this 'mechanical animal' claxon."
↑ Richard Beggs (2019). Cleanin' Up The Town: Remembering Ghostbusters (2019) (Blu-Ray ts. 1:05:52-1:06:05). Bueno Productions. Richard Beggs says: "I made that from a leopard howl that was edited and then reversed and played backwards. And the speed was changed."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 95 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Paragraph reads: "Though the ticketing sequence was shot and cut into the film, it was ultimately removed because it slowed down the breakneck pace of the montage."
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 95 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Ivan Reitman says: "There was no reason for the Ectomobile to have magical powers. It had been done with the Bluesmobile in The Blues Brothers -- where the car did somersaults and things like that -- and I didn't think it was particularly successful. I don't like movies that have no rules -- where anything is possible. We were already asking the audience to believe that there was a piece of equipment that could trap a ghost. Asking them to accept an Ectomobile with supernatural powers was just too much."
↑ Beyond the Marquee Joe Medjuck Interview 9/15/14 Joe Medjuck says: "When you're making a movie, you have doubles for everything. We didn't have a double for that car. It was the only painted car and when we left town and flew back to LA to finish shooting, we had our second unit doing a couple of shots with the car in New York and it broke down. "
↑ Joe Medjuck (2005). Ghostbusters- Commentary (2005) (DVD ts. 1:03:21-1:03:23). Columbia TriStar Home Video. Joe Medjuck says: "This is when the car died at the end. "
↑ Shay, Don (November 1985). Making Ghostbusters, p. 129 annotation. New York Zoetrope, New York NY USA, ISBN 0918432685. Joe Medjuck: "This was one of the few scenes in the film that didn't have any big laughs in it, but we always liked it because it offered a possible explanation as to why the city was suddenly being plagued with ghosts. Also, it was a good scene for Winston -- in fact, this was the scene we used to audition actors for the role of Winston."
↑ Ernie Hudson (2009). Ghostbusters- Slimer Mode (2009) (Blu-Ray ts. 29:21-29:33). Columbia TriStar Home Video. Ernie Hudson says: "I mean, I remember we were in Central Park, you know, the little crosstown traffic that goes through and we held traffic up when the car broke down. And we had to get out and try to push the thing."
↑ Joe Medjuck (1999). Ghostbusters- Commentary (1999) (DVD ts. 01:40:16-01:40:34). Columbia TriStar Home Video. Joe Medjuck says: "I remember we got one chance at this shot because the light came down just as we were doing the shot. And they said it was the 65mm camera. So they could do that last shot. And they said they could only do one take because they lost all the light immediately."
↑ Aykroyd, Dan & Ramis, Harold (1983). Ghostbusters (First Draft August 5, 1983) (Script p. 65). Line reads: "FREEZE FRAME The cover of Motor Trend magazine: ECTO ONE - CAR OF THE YEAR.""
Also See
· Ecto-1a
· Ecto-1b
· Ecto-10
Ghostbusters
(DS): Ectomobile Rejects A Parking Ticket
(DS): Pulling Up To Fort Detmerring
(DS): Busy
(DS): Promotion
(DS): E.P.A.
(DS): Puft Hat
Ghostbusters II
88MPH Studios
Ghost Busted (manga)
Stylized Version
Stylized Portable Versions
IDW Comics
Ghostbusters: The Board Game
·
Ghostbusters
(DS): Ectomobile Rejects A Parking Ticket
(DS): Pulling Up To Fort Detmerring
(DS): Busy
(DS): Promotion
(DS): E.P.A.
(DS): Puft Hat
Ghostbusters II
88MPH Studios
Ghost Busted (manga)
Stylized Version
Stylized Portable Versions
IDW Comics
Ghostbusters: The Board Game
To find out more fun Future Facts by clicking our Blogs below……….!!! Please Share …..
Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/3/31/ghostbusters-ecto-1
Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/17/ariel-leader
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history-jxrr4
Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history
Back to the Future - Detailed storyline
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What is a Fat Bike ? And where did the idea of Fat Bikes come from ?
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The Time Paradox explained - Back to the Future
The Sinclair C5
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Mini Jeep Mini Review
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Hoverboards - Back to the Future
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How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
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The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
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The DeLorean Motor Company - History
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Time Paradox Explained - Back to the Future
Great Scott !!! We feature Doc Brown’s Time Travelling DeLorean in our Blog about one of the wonders of Time Travel the Time Paradox. What is a Time Paradox - How does it relate to Time Travel and we discuss the science involved.
⏳ Blog Post: Great Scott! The Paradox That Could Unravel the Universe! 🤯
Headline: The Vanishing Act: How Marty McFly Almost Erased Himself with the Grandfather Paradox
The DeLorean Time Machine and the Flux Capacitor are what let us travel through time, but it's the Time Paradoxthat gives the Back to the Future trilogy its heart-pounding tension!
It's not just a cool sci-fi concept; it's the central problem that Marty McFly must fix, and it's the reason Doc Brown is so adamant about one rule: "Do not, under any circumstances, interact with anybody... from your own time."
Understanding the Grandfather Paradox
In the first film, Marty accidentally creates the most famous paradox of all: the Grandfather Paradox.
Paradox TypeThe Core ConceptHow it Applies to Marty McFlyGrandfather ParadoxIf you travel back and prevent your own ancestors from meeting (or existing), then you can't be born. If you're not born, you can't go back in time to prevent them from meeting. This creates an infinite, self-contradictory loop.Marty accidentally prevents his parents, George and Lorraine, from having their first meeting. If they don't fall in love, they don't have children—meaning Marty and his siblings would never be born.The Fading PhotoThe physical manifestation of this paradox is the iconic photograph of Marty and his siblings. As Marty's interference threatens his existence, his siblings begin to fade away from the photo one by one. This is the ticking clock that pushes Marty to fix the timeline before he's erased forever.
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The "Changeable" Timeline Model
The Back to the Future universe operates on a changeable timeline model, often called the "ripple effect" theory.
Original Timeline (A): The history Marty left, where George is a pushover and Lorraine is unhappy.
Interference (1955): Marty's presence in 1955, especially saving George from the car instead of George's father, changes the cause of their parents' meeting.
New Timeline (B): Marty successfully gets his parents to fall in love and returns to 1985, which is now a vastlyimproved reality. George is a successful, confident author; Lorraine is happy; and Biff is a subservient car washer.
In this model, the past is not fixed. Small changes—like inspiring Goldie Wilson to run for mayor or helping George gain confidence—send a "ripple" through time, which quickly changes the future.
The Paradox of the Paradox
While the film is famous for the Grandfather Paradox, it also subtly includes the Bootstrap Paradox (or Ontological Paradox).
The Problem: The Bootstrap Paradox occurs when an object or piece of information has no original creator—it exists because it was passed back in time to be created in the first place.
Examples in the Film:
"Johnny B. Goode": Marty plays the song on stage in 1955, and Marvin Berry hears it and calls his cousin, Chuck Berry, telling him he's found the "new sound" Chuck has been looking for. This implies Marty, from the future, is the original source of the song in the past. If the song came from the future, who wrote it in the first place?
The Sports Almanac: In Part II, Old Biff gives the Almanac to his younger self in 1955. This piece of information (future sports results) has no point of origin in the altered timeline—it only exists because it was brought back from the future.
The paradoxes in the Back to the Future trilogy are what make it a brilliant piece of sci-fi: they are the high-stakes threat that makes Doc's frantic warnings about the space-time continuum so utterly memorable.
Time Paradox
“Doc: “I foresee two possibilities. One, seeing herself thirty years in the future would put Jennifer into shock and she’d simply pass out. Or two, the encounter could create a time paradox. The results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!... Granted, that’s the worst-case scenario. The destruction however might be limited merely to our own galaxy.”
Marty: “Well that’s a relief!”
— Doc and Marty discussing the implications of 1985 Jennifer running into her 2015 self.
A paradox, in time travel, is “a situation in which the effect of an incident contradicts or eliminates the cause of that same incident”.[1]
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Time travel paradox Explained
The Earth rotates around the sun - the sun rotates around the galaxy - the galaxy moves in the universe. All that being said, if the time machine were possible, the DeLorean would be in a different place, and not the same place each time it moves into the past or future.
Solar System
Here’s one possible answer: The time machine is still affected by the gravitation pull of a body such as that on Earth.
Expounding upon that: Views from inside the time machine indicate that the DeLorean time machine is traveling through a portal that only opens when the machine reaches 88 miles per hour.
Since time travel hasn't been witnessed, it's plausible that the unopened time portals are held in place by the Earth's gravity or by a physical force not yet proven. The ideas behind the first paragraph, about Earth's movement in space, have been discussed in the article about spatial displacement.
DeLorean Time Travel
Behind the scenes
The word "paradox" is often used to describe a mystery or an unanswered question. eg :
Paradox was also the title of the musical score played during the scene in Part II in which the time-traveling Doc Brown talked with his younger self while handing himself a wrench to attach the electrical cable to the lamppost in 1955; since Doc Brown caused a "pair o' Docs" to occur.
Doc Brown
Though many paradoxes arise in the trilogy, Doc may be overzealous about them because, though the effects obviously happen, the risk of destroying the space-time continuum may not really exist, mearly being a fabrication of Doc's mind to give reason to fix time-lines.
Evidence of such exists, because 1985 Doc was willing to correct 1955 Doc with the wrench size and give him the suggestion that he was conducting a weather experiment as well as telling him there was going to be a storm. He also gave 1955 Doc information on how to repair the DeLorean, via the letter, while he was stuck in 1885, knowing the risks.
There is nothing in Einstein’s theories of relativity to rule out time travel, although the very notion of traveling to the past violates one of the most fundamental premises of physics, that of causality.
With the laws of cause and effect out the window, there naturally arises a number of inconsistencies associated with time travel, and listed here are some of those paradoxes which have given both scientist and time travel movie buffs alike more than a few sleepless nights over the years.
The time travel paradoxes which follow fall into two broad categories:
1) Closed Causal Loops, such as the Predestination Paradox and the Bootstrap Paradox, which involve a self-existing time loop in which cause and effect run in a repeating circle, but is also internally consistent with the timeline’s history.
2) Consistency Paradoxes, such as the Grandfather Paradox and other similar variants such as The Hitler paradox, and Polchinski’s Paradox, which generate a number of timeline inconsistencies related to the possibility of altering the past.
1: Predestination Paradox
Travel through Time
A Predestination Paradox occurs when the actions of a person traveling back in time becomes part of past events, and may ultimately causes the event he is trying to prevent to take place.
This results in a ‘temporal causality loop’ in which (Event 1) in the ‘past’ influences (Event 2) in the ‘future’ (time travel to the past) which then causes (Event 1) to occur.
With this circular loop of events ensuring that history is not altered by the time traveler, and that any attempts to stop something from happening in the past, will simply lead to the cause itself, instead of stopping it.
This paradox suggests that things are always destined to turn out the same way, and that whatever has happened must happen.
Sound complicated? …… O.K this may sound a grim, but just for a moment Imagine that your lover dies in a hit-and-run car accident, and you travel back in time to save her from her fate, only to find that on your way to the accident you are the one who accidentally runs her over.
Your attempt to change the past has therefore resulted in a predestination paradox. One way of dealing with this type of paradox is to assume that the version of events you have experienced are already built into a self-consistent version of reality, and that by trying to alter the past you will only end up fulfilling your role in creating an event in history, not altering it.
– Cinema Treatment
The Time Machine (2002)
In ‘The Time Machine’ Movie' in (2002) for instance, Dr. Alexander Hartdegen witnesses his fiancee being killed by a mugger, leading him to build a time machine to travel back in time to save her from her fate.
His subsequent attempts to save her fail, though, leading him to conclude that “I could come back a thousand times… and see her die a thousand ways.” After then traveling centuries into the future to see if a solution has been found to the temporal problem, Hartdegen is told by the Über-Morlock:
“You built your time machine because of Emma’s death. If she had lived, it would never have existed, so how could you use your machine to go back and save her? You are the inescapable result of your tragedy, just as I am the inescapable result of you.”
The DeLorean Time Machine
Movies: Examples of predestination paradoxes in the movies include :
12 Monkeys (1995), TimeCrimes (2007), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009), and Predestination (2014).
Books: An example of a predestination paradox in a book is Phoebe Fortune and the Pre-destination Paradox by M.S. Crook.
2: Bootstrap Paradox
Bootstrap Paradox
A Bootstrap Paradox is a type of paradox in which an object, person, or piece of information sent back in time results in an infinite loop where the object has no discernible origin, and exists without ever being created.
It is also known as an Ontological Paradox, as ontology is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being, or existence.
– Information: George Lucas traveling back in time and giving himself the scripts for the Star War movies which he then goes on to direct and gain great fame for would create a bootstrap paradox involving information, as the scripts have no true point of creation or origin.
– Person: A bootstrap paradox involving a person could be, say, a 20 year old male time traveler who goes back 21 years, meets a woman, has an affair, and returns home three months later without knowing the woman was pregnant. Her child grows up to be the 20 year old time traveler, who travels back 21 years through time, meets a woman, and so on.
These ontological paradoxes imply that the future, present and past are not defined, thus giving scientists an obvious problem on how to then pinpoint the “origin” of anything, a word customarily referring to the past, but now rendered meaningless.
Further questions arise as to how the object/data was created, and by whom. Nevertheless, Einstein’s field equations allow for the possibility of closed time loops, with Kip Thorne the first theoretical physicist to recognize traversable wormholes and backwards time travel as being theoretically possible under certain conditions.
Movies: Examples of bootstrap paradoxes in the movies include ‘Somewhere in Time’ (1980), ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ (1989), ‘The Terminator’ movies, and ‘Time Lapse’ (2014). The Netflix series Dark (2017-19) also features a book called ‘A Journey Through Time’ which presents another classic example of a bootstrap paradox.
Books: Examples of bootstrap paradoxes in books include Michael Moorcock’s ‘Behold The Man’, Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates, and Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”
Cyberdyne Systems Model 101
3: Grandfather Paradox
The Grandfather Paradox concerns ‘self-inconsistent solutions’ to a timeline’s history caused by traveling back in time. For example :
Again we are going to be very grim for a minuet, if you traveled to the past and killed your grandfather, you would never have been born and would not have been able to travel to the past – a paradox. Let’s say you did decide to kill your grandfather because he created a dynasty that ruined the world. You figure if you knock him off before he meets your grandmother then the whole family line (including you) will vanish and the world will be a better place. According to theoretical physicists, the situation could play out as follows:
The Grandfather Paradox
– Time line protection hypothesis: You pop back in time, walk up to him, and point a revolver at his head. You pull the trigger but the gun fails to fire. Click! Click! Click! The bullets in the chamber have dents in the firing caps. You point the gun elsewhere and pull the trigger. Bang! Point it at your grandfather.. Click! Click! Click! So you try another method to kill him, but that only leads to scars that in later life he attributed to the world’s worst mugger. You can do many things as long as they’re not fatal until you are chased off by a policeman.
– Multiple universes hypothesis: You pop back in time, walk up to him, and point a revolver at his head. You pull the trigger and Boom! The deed is done. You return to the “present” but you never existed here. Everything about you has been erased, including your family, friends, home, possessions, bank account, and history. You’ve entered a timeline where you never existed. Scientists entertain the possibility that you have now created an alternate timeline or entered a parallel universe.
Movies: Example of the Grandfather Paradox in movies include ‘Back to the Future’ (1985), ‘Back to the Future Part II’ (1989), and ‘Back to the Future Part III’ (1990).
Books: Example of the Grandfather Paradox in books include Dr. Quantum in the Grandfather Paradox by Fred Alan Wolf, The Grandfather Paradox by Steven Burgauer, and Future Times Three (1944) by René Barjavel, the very first treatment of a grandfather paradox in a novel.
4: Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox
We will steer off this subject soon but similar to the Grandfather Paradox which paradoxically prevents your own birth, the Killing Hitler paradox erases your own reason for going back in time to kill him. Furthermore, while killing Grandpa might have a limited “butterfly effect”, killing Hitler would have far-reaching consequences for everyone in the world, even if only for the fact you studied him in school.
The paradox itself arises from the idea that if you were successful, then there would be no reason to time travel in the first place. If you killed Hitler then none of his actions would trickle down through history and cause you to want to make the attempt.
Movies/Shows: By far the best treatment for this notion occurred in a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode called ‘Cradle of Darkness’ that sums up the difficulties involved in trying to change history, with another being an episode of Dr Who called ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’.
Books: Examples of the Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox in books include How to Kill Hitler: A Guide For Time Travelers by Andrew Stanek, and the graphic novel I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason.
5: Polchinski’s Paradox
American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski proposed a time paradox scenario in which a billiard ball enters a wormhole, and emerges out the other end in the past just in time to collide with its younger version and stop it going into the wormhole in the first place.
Polchinski’s Paradox
Polchinski’s paradox is taken seriously by physicists, as there is nothing in 'Einstein’s General Relativity to rule out the possibility of time travel, closed time-like curves (CTCs), or tunnels through space-time.
Furthermore, it has the advantage of being based upon the laws of motion, without having to refer to the indeterministic concept of free will, and so presents a better research method for scientists to think about the paradox.
When Joseph Polchinski proposed the paradox, he had Novikov’s Self-Consistency Principle in mind, which basically states that while time travel is possible, time paradoxes are forbidden.
However, a number of solutions have been formulated to avoid the inconsistencies Polchinski suggested, which essentially involves the billiard ball delivering a blow which changes its younger version’s course, but not enough to stop it entering the wormhole.
This solution is related to the ‘timeline-protection hypothesis’ which states that a probability distortion would occur in order to prevent a paradox from happening. This also helps explain why if you tried to time travel and murder your grandfather, something will always happen to make that impossible, thus preserving a consistent version of history.
Books: Paradoxes of Time Travel by Ryan Wasserman is a wide-ranging exploration on the topic of time travel, including Polchinski’s Paradox.
Are Self-fulfilling Prophecies Paradoxes?
A self-fulfilling prophecy is only a causality loop when the prophecy is truly known to happen and events in the future cause effects in the past, otherwise the phenomenon is not so much a paradox as a case of cause and effect.
Say, for instance, an authority figure states that something is inevitable, proper, and true, convincing everyone through persuasive style. People, completely convinced through rhetoric, begin to behave as if the prediction were already true, and consequently bring it about through their actions. This might be seen best by an example where someone convincingly states:
“High-speed Magnetic Levitation Trains will dominate as the best form of transportation from the 21st Century onward.”
Jet travel, relying on diminishing fuel supplies, will be reserved for ocean crossing, and local flights will be a thing of the past. People now start planning on building networks of high-speed trains that run on electricity. Infrastructure gears up to supply the needed parts and the prediction becomes true not because it was truly inevitable (though it is a smart idea), but because people behaved as if it were true.
It even works on a smaller scale – the scale of individuals. The basic methodology for all those “self-help” books out in the world is that if you modify your thinking that you are successful (money, career, dating, etc.), then with the strengthening of that belief you start to behave like a successful person. People begin to notice and start to treat you like a successful person; it is a reinforcement/feedback loop and you actually become successful by behaving as if you were.
Are Time Paradoxes Inevitable?
The Butterfly Effect is a reference to Chaos Theory where seemingly trivial changes can have huge cascade reactions over long periods of time. Consequently, the Timeline corruption hypothesis states that time paradoxes are an unavoidable consequence of time travel, and even insignificant changes may be enough to alter history completely.
Lets explain this theory in a little story ….
A paleontologist, with the help of a time travel device, travels back to the Jurassic Period to get photographs of Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Ceratosaurus, and Allosaurus amongst other dinosaurs. He knows he can’t take samples so he just takes magnificent pictures from the fixed platform that is positioned precisely to not change anything about the environment.
His assistant is about to pick a long blade of grass, but he stops him and explains how nothing must change because of their presence. They finish what they are doing and return to the present, but everything is gone. They reappear in a wild world with no humans, and no signs that they ever existed..
They fall to the floor of their platform, the only man-made thing in the whole world, and lament “Why? We didn’t change anything!” And there on the heel of the scientist’s shoe is a crushed butterfly.
Butterfly Effect
The Butterfly Effect is also a movie, starring Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn and Amy Smart as Kayleigh Miller, where a troubled man has had blackouts during his youth, later explained by him traveling back into his own past and taking charge of his younger body briefly. The movie explores the issue of changing the timeline and how unintended consequences can propagate.
Solutions
Scientists eager to avoid the paradoxes presented by time travel have come up with a number of ingenious ways in which to present a more consistent version of reality, some of which have been touched upon here, including:
–The Solution: time travel is impossible because of the very paradox it creates.
–Self-healing hypothesis: successfully altering events in the past will set off another set of events which will cause the present to remain the same.
–The Multiverse or “many-worlds” hypothesis: an alternate parallel universe or timeline is created each time an event is altered in the past.
–Erased timeline hypothesis: a person traveling to the past would exist in the new timeline, but have their own timeline erased.
Thank you to KEVIN BONSOR & ROBERT LAMB for this excellent article.
Here’s some more Paradox theory’s for you to think about ….
As we mentioned before, the concept of traveling into the past becomes a bit murky the second causality rears its head. Cause comes before effect, at least in this universe, which manages to muck up even the best-laid time traveling plans.
For starters, if you traveled back in time 200 years, you'd emerge in a time before you were born. Think about that for a second. In the flow of time, the effect (you) would exist before the cause (your birth).
A math professor travels into the future and steals a groundbreaking math theorem. The professor then gives the theorem to a promising student. Then, that promising student grows up to be the very person from whom the professor stole the theorem to begin with.
Then there's the post-selected model of time travel, which involves distorted probability close to any paradoxical situation [source: Sanders].
What does this mean? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the time-traveling assassin again. This time travel model would make your grandfather virtually death proof. You can pull the trigger, but the laser will malfunction. Perhaps a bird will poop at just the right moment, but some quantum fluctuation will occur to prevent a paradoxical situation from taking place.
But then there's another possibility: The future or past you travel into might just be a parallel universe. Think of it as a separate sandbox: You can build or destroy all the castles you want in it, but it doesn't affect your home sandbox in the slightest. So if the past you travel into exists in a separate timeline, killing your grandfather in cold blood is no big whoop. Of course, this might mean that every time jaunt would land you in a new parallel universe and you might never return to your original sandbox.
Confused yet? Welcome to the world of time travel.
Explore the links below for even more mind-blowing cosmology
A big thank you to Elizabeth Howell November 14, 2017 = Theories, Paradoxes & Possibilities
The DeLorean TIme Machine
Time travel may be theoretically possible, but it is beyond our current technological capabilities.
Time travel — moving between different points in time — has been a popular topic for science fiction for decades. Franchises ranging from "Doctor Who" to "Star Trek" to "Back to the Future" have seen humans get in a vehicle of some sort and arrive in the past or future, ready to take on new adventures. Each come with their own time travel theories.
The reality, however, is more muddled. Not all scientists believe that time travel is possible. Some even say that an attempt would be fatal to any human who chooses to undertake it.
Understanding time
What is time? While most people think of time as a constant, physicist Albert Einstein showed that time is an illusion; it is relative — it can vary for different observers depending on your speed through space.
Albert Einstein
To Einstein, time is the "fourth dimension." Space is described as a three-dimensional arena, which provides a traveler with coordinates — such as length, width and height —showing location. Time provides another coordinate — direction — although conventionally, it only moves forward. (Conversely, a new theory asserts that time is "real.")
Most physicists think time is a subjective illusion, but what if time is real?
Einstein's theory of special relativity says that time slows down or speeds up depending on how fast you move relative to something else. Approaching the speed of light, a person inside a spaceship would age much slower than his twin at home. Also, under Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity can bend time.
As Marty McFly would say ‘ Doc this sounds Heavy ! ‘
Doc Brown
Picture a four-dimensional fabric called space-time. When anything that has mass sits on that piece of fabric, it causes a dimple or a bending of space-time. The bending of space-time causes objects to move on a curved path and that curvature of space is what we know as gravity.
Both the general and special relativity theories have been proven with GPS satellite technology that has very accurate timepieces on board. The effects of gravity, as well as the satellites' increased speed above the Earth relative to observers on the ground, make the unadjusted clocks gain 38 microseconds a day. (Engineers make calibrations to account for the difference.)
In a sense, this effect, called time dilation, means astronauts are time travelers, as they return to Earth very, very slightly younger than their identical twins that remain on the planet.
Through the wormhole
General relativity also provides scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA. The equations, however, might be difficult to physically achieve.
Wormwhole
One possibility could be to go faster than light, which travels at 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) in a vacuum. Einstein's equations, though, show that an object at the speed of light would have both infinite mass and a length of 0. This appears to be physically impossible, although some scientists have extended his equations and said it might be done.
A linked possibility, NASA stated, would be to create "wormholes" between points in space-time. While Einstein's equations provide for them, they would collapse very quickly and would only be suitable for very small particles. Also, scientists haven't actually observed these wormholes yet. Also, the technology needed to create a wormhole is far beyond anything we have today.
Can You Time-Travel?
Alternate time travel theories
While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some groups have proposed alternate solutions to jump back and forth in time.
Infinite cylinder
Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder) where one would take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into very long but very dense cylinder.
After spinning this up a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around this cylinder — could get itself on a "closed, time-like curve", according to the Anderson Institute. There are limitations with this method, however, including the fact that the cylinder needs to be infinitely long for this to work.
An artist's impression of a black hole like the one weighed in this work, sitting in the core of a disk galaxy. The black-hole in NGC4526 weighs 450,000,000 times more than our own Sun. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Black holes
Black Hole
Another possibility would be to move a ship rapidly around a black hole, or to artificially create that condition with a huge, rotating structure.
"Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be traveling through time," physicist Stephen Hawking wrote in the Daily Mail in 2010.
"Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had."
However, he added, the crew would need to travel around the speed of light for this to work. Physicist Amos Iron at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel pointed out another limitation if one used a machine: it might fall apart before being able to rotate that quickly.
Cosmic strings
Credit to Aderson Institute
Another theory for potential time travelers involves something called cosmic strings — narrow tubes of energy stretched across the entire length of the ever-expanding universe. These thin regions, left over from the early cosmos, are predicted to contain huge amounts of mass and therefore could warp the space-time around them.
Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends, scientists say. The approach of two such strings parallel to each other would bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that might make time travel possible, in theory.
Time machines
It is generally understood that traveling forward or back in time would require a device — a time machine — to take you there. Time machine research often involves bending space-time so far that time lines turn back on themselves to form a loop, technically known as a "closed time-like curve."
The Doctor's time machine is the TARDIS, which stands for ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’.
Doctor Who Tardis
To accomplish this, time machines often are thought to need an exotic form of matter with so-called "negative energy density." Such exotic matter has bizarre properties, including moving in the opposite direction of normal matter when pushed. Such matter could theoretically exist, but if it did, it might be present only in quantities too small for the construction of a time machine.
However, time-travel research suggests time machines are possible without exotic matter. The work begins with a doughnut-shaped hole enveloped within a sphere of normal matter. Inside this doughnut-shaped vacuum, space-time could get bent upon itself using focused gravitational fields to form a closed time-like curve.
To go back in time, a traveler would race around inside the doughnut, going further back into the past with each lap. This theory has a number of obstacles, however. The gravitational fields required to make such a closed time-like curve would have to be very strong, and manipulating them would have to be very precise. [Related: Warp Speed, Scotty? Star Trek's FTL Drive May Actually Work]
Back to the Grandfather paradox
If that were to happen, some physicists say, you would be not be born in one parallel universe but still born in another. Others say that the photons that make up light prefer self-consistency in timelines, which would interfere with your evil, suicidal plan.
Some scientists disagree with the options mentioned above and say time travel is impossible no matter what your method. The faster-than-light one in particular drew derision from American Museum of Natural History astrophysicist Charles Lu.
That "simply, mathematically, doesn't work," he said in a past interview with sister site LiveScience.
Also, humans may not be able to withstand time travel at all. Traveling nearly the speed of light would only take a centrifuge, but that would be lethal, said Jeff Tollaksen, a professor of physics at Chapman University, in 2012.
Using gravity would also be deadly. To experience time dilation, one could stand on a neutron star, but the forces a person would experience would rip you apart first.
Time travel in fiction
Two 2015 articles by Space.com described different ways in which time travel works in fiction, and the best time-travel machines ever. Some methods used in fiction include:
Interstellar
One-way travel to the future: The traveler leaves home, but the people he or she left behind might age or be dead by the time the traveler returns. Examples: "Interstellar" (2014), "Ikarie XB-1" (1963)
Time travel by moving through higher dimensions: In "Interstellar" (2014), there are "tesseracts" (which is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube) available in which astronauts can travel because the vessel represents time as a dimension of space. A similar concept is expressed in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle In Time" (2018, based on the book series that started in 1963), where time is folded by means of a tesseract. The book, however, uses supernatural beings to make the travel possible.
Travelling the space-time vortex: The famous "Doctor Who" (1963-present) TARDIS ("Time And Relative Dimension In Space") uses an extra-dimensional vortex to go through time, while the travelers inside feel time passing normally.
Instantaneous time jumping: Examples include "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (2006), the DeLorean from "Back To The Future" (1985), and the Mr. Peabody's WABAC machine from "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" (1959-64).
Time travelling while standing still: Both the "Time Machine" (1895 book) and Hermione Granger's Time-Turner from "Harry Potter" keep the traveler still while they move through time.
The Time Machine
Slow time travel: In "Primer" (2004), a traveler stays in a box while time traveling. For each minute they want to go back in time, they need to stay in the box for a minute. If they want to go back a day in time, they have to stay there for 24 hours.
Traveling faster than light: In "Superman: The Movie" (1979), Superman flies faster than light to go back in time and rescue Lois Lane before she is killed. The concept was also used in the 1980 novel "Timescape" by Gregory Benford, in which the protagonist sends (hypothetical) faster-than-light tachyon particles back to Earth in 1962 to warn of disaster. In several "Star Trek" episodes and movies, the Enterprise travels through time by going faster than light. In the comic book and TV series "The Flash," the super-speedster uses a cosmic treadmill to travel through time.
Star Trek
Difficult methods to categorize: There's a rocket sled in "Timecop" (1994) that pops in and out of view when it's being used, which has led to much speculation about what's going on. There's also the Time Displacement Equipment in "The Terminator" movie series, which shows off how to fight a war in four dimensions (including time).
So is time travel possible?
While time travel does not appear possible — at least, possible in the sense that the humans would survive it — with the physics that we use today, the field is constantly changing. Advances in quantum theories could perhaps provide some understanding of how to overcome time travel paradoxes.
One possibility, although it would not necessarily lead to time travel, is solving the mystery of how certain particles can communicate instantaneously with each other faster than the speed of light.
In the meantime, however, interested time travelers can at least experience it vicariously through movies, television and books.
Article credits to www.space.com Elizabeth Fernandez
More Time Travel and Philosophy
In general relativity, things called closed time-like curves can exist, and are a way to solve general field equations.
It’s like stepping on a train, taking a wonderful trip through the mountains, and returning to the same spot you left off, both in space and in time.
That means the moment where you step off the train is both in the past and future of when you got on the train in the first place. In a closed time-like curve, an object returns to the same place and time that it was in the past, completing a loop. It’s unclear if closed time-like curves exist in our universe, but if they do, mathematically, they would allow for time travel.
Then there’s option two.
In this quantum mechanical model, each choice opens up another universe. If time travelers changed something in the past, they would enter another parallel universe.
The original timeline would still exist, one among many branching worlds. In such a model, it might be very hard for time travelers to return to the universe they came from.
Finally - if time travel is possible, time travelers can only do certain things.
A time traveler who went back in time, for example, could not kill Hitler, no matter what he tried. This raises all sorts of philosophical problems - does the time traveler still have free will? It’s difficult to say time travel is possible while simultaneously destroying freedom of choice.
Paradox-Free Time Travel While Preserving Freedom of Choice
That’s where young physicist Germain Tobar steps in.
Under the supervision of physicist Dr. Fabio Costa, Tobar came up with a way to mathematically preserve freedom of choice, while allowing for paradox-free time travel.
For example, let’s imagine there is a scientist in a laboratory with a time-traveling coin.
The coin enters the laboratory at some point in the past as “heads” and leaves at some point in the future as “tails”. Tobar’s model fixes the boundary conditions - the point in time where the coin enters and leaves the laboratory - as always heads and tails.
Then, his model allows the state of the coin to change when it is in the laboratory. Since the initial and final state of the coin is fixed, a paradox is avoided. However, anything can happen to the coin when it is in the laboratory. “For example,” says Tobar, “she [the scientist] can decide to always flip the coin, or always prepare heads regardless of what she got... it can flip, it can hit other coins, and so on.” But no matter what she did or how hard she tried, each time the coin time-travels through her lab, it will always leave as “tails”.
Let’s take another pertinent example. “Say you traveled in time, in an attempt to stop COVID-19’s patient zero from being exposed to the virus,” Costa says. “However if you stopped that individual from becoming infected – that would eliminate the motivation for you to go back and stop the pandemic in the first place.”
In Tobar’s model, no matter what you did, the virus would still escape somehow. “You might try and stop patient zero from becoming infected, but in doing so you would catch the virus and become patient zero, or someone else would,” says Tobar. “No matter what you did, the salient events would just recalibrate around you.”
Even time travellers couldn't stop the spread of the coronavirus.
That means that you have complete freedom of choice, but no matter how hard you tried, you could not stop COVID-19 from escaping.
But this is good news for Marty McFly in Back to the Future. Nothing he did could prevent his parents from falling in love and getting married, and eventually, allowing Marty to be born. Other things might change, like how they met, or what his father ate for breakfast that morning. But nothing could change their eventual meeting.
This doesn’t necessarily rule out other models of time travel, for example, a quantum mechanical one.
Quantum Mechanics
“Some of the quantum approaches would indeed invoke the existence of multiple universes, which interact through the time machine, possibly creating alternate timelines,” says Tobar. Instead, Tobar and Costa’s model is classical and shows that if only one universe exists, it is possible to allow for paradox-free time travel.
This work has other implications as well, including the unification of quantum theory with general relativity. “One of the main issues is that, in such a theory, time seems to disappear, making the traditional, temporal view of dynamics unsuitable,” says Tobar. “Our work presents a different way to look at physical laws, which could find applications in theories of quantum gravity.”
Could closed time-like curves, and potentially time machines, exist in our Universe?
Credit to Anderson Institute
“Proposals so far involve exotic matter (with negative or infinite energy), and we don't know if such matter exists in our universe,” says Tobar. “An interesting consequence is that the CTCs [closed time-like curves] would only exist after a certain point in time, which means it would not be possible to time travel to before the first time machine was created. This would explain why we haven't seen any time traveler from the future yet.”
And to leave you to ponder on the future in Doc Browns own words :
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Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
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Back to the Future Fashion
Marty McFly
The clothing and accessories that people wear are a distinctive part of the popular culture. Clothing styles change not only with the time period, but also communicate one's social class and occupation. Those who don't dress appropriately are often viewed as outcasts or rebels, or at the very least, odd and out-of-place, so Marty McFly's clothing proved to be an endless source of embarrassment for him during his adventures, in spite of Dr. Emmett Brown's attempts to be prepared.
They generally had three options when they traveled from one time period to another:
They purchased and changed clothes after arriving in a new time period
They tried to find appropriate clothes for their destination before traveling
They neglected to change clothes and just endured the awkwardness of attracting attention.
Note: Outfits are described here under the time periods the clothing came from, which were not necessarily when they were worn.
Back to the Future Fashion
Outfit 1: Marty McFLY
This Marty McFly outfit is probably the most iconic of them all.
Everything from the vintage wash denim jacket and faded dad jeans, to the orange puffer vest, looks as good now as it did back in ’85.
Trainers
They’re the overwhelmingly popular Nike Killshot 2 which was originally released in the ’80s and saw a surge in interest when it re-released in 2009, and subsequently in 2014 in collaboration with J.Crew.
Marty McFly
Marty McFly
Denim Jacket:
Quilted Vest:
Tennis Sneakers: Nike Killshot 2 (They’re the overwhelmingly popular Nike Killshot 2 which was originally released in the ’80s and saw a surge in interest when it re-released in 2009, and subsequently in 2014 in collaboration with J.Crew)
Aviator Sunglasses: RayBan
Retro Calculator Watch: Casio
Marty
"Life preserver" First day of school in 1955
Marty wore a red and gray jacket (that he took off in the school cafeteria), white shirt with light blue rectangles, brown pants, brown loafers (slip- on shoes), and had hair tonic in his hair.
"Darth Vader"
The day of the skateboard chase – Marty wore the same red and gray jacket, this time with a black shirt with red chain link pattern, brown pants and Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star shoes.
"That zoot suit"
Marty wore a gray wool suit, a white shirt and narrow red tie, that afterwards he called a “zoot suit”. "Get yourself some 50’s clothes ... something inconspicuous!"
—Doc to Marty
Marty in his "inconspicuous" disguise.
"Something inconspicuous"– Marty chose an “inconspicuous” outfit to cover his basic outfit; he added a black felt fedora hat, black leather jacket and dark sunglasses. When Biff confronted Marty, he referred to the outfit as "that stupid disguise".
After getting to Biff's car, Marty took off his sunglasses. At the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Biff's gang member Match wondered how he changed his clothes so fast. After being knocked down by a door as his other self ran through it, and when Biff stole back the almanac, Marty was forced to abandon the fedora, which had fallen off his head. When taking Doc back to his mansion, Marty put the jacket and Nikes by the fireplace, along with the letter, so they could dry off.
At the Delgado Mine – Marty wore the same clothes as the day of the skateboard chase, and added a tan overcoat.
Marty's 1955 western outfit
"Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this" – Doc prepared Marty to travel to 1885 with a pink and blue shirt with long, yellow fringe running along the chest, back and sleeves, under five embroidered atomic model designs on the front and back of his shoulders, a red bandana around his neck, red corduroy pants, an ornately tooled belt with golden sunburst buckle, white Nike sneakers, and carried along a white cowboy hat and boots that were too tight.
Outfit 2: Biff Tannen
Biff Tannen
Oh Biff — the mild mannered, charismatic antagonist of the Back To The Future trilogy.
Contrasting shirt tie combo, for the pants I tailored wool (herringbone) trousers. And for the shoes, black leather with white soles to complement the shade of the knit tie.
· Bomber Jacket: (alt) Grey
· Charcoal Wool Trousers
· Black Oxford Shirt
· Grey Knit Tie
· Black Minimalist Sneakers
Outfit 3: George McFly
The timid George McFly
George McFly
· Harrington Jacket: ASOS
· Olive Corduroy Pants: Everlane
· Grey Oxford Shirt: Everlane
· Black Frame Eyeglasses: Warby Parker
· Navy Suede Chukka Boots: Thursday Boot Co.
Outfit 4: Emmett Lathrop ‘Doc’ Brown
Doc Brown, the effervescent inventor of the first time machine, built out of a DeLorean sports car.
Often in a state of shock and awe, Doc had some questionable outfits throughout the series.
Doc Brown
Doc Brown
Doc Brown
· Khaki Trucker Jacket: Flint and Tinder (alt)
· Slim Fit Alpha Khaki: Dockers
· Stripe Polo Shirt: Amazon Essentials
· Suede Sneakers: Koio
“…your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has! Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one!”
https://www.gentlemanwithin.com/back-to-the-future-fashion/
The clothing and accessories that people wear are a distinctive part of the popular culture. Clothing styles change not only with the time period, but also communicate one's social class and occupation.
Clothing in 1985
"C'mon, I had to change! You think I’m going back in that-- that zoot suit?"
—Marty
Basic outfit –
Marty McFly
Marty McFly
Marty McFly
During most of his adventures, except when he changed clothes in 1955 and 1885, Marty wore Guess blue jeans with black 3/4" suspenders, a red t-shirt, lavender ("purple") Calvin Klein underpants, and white Nike Bruin shoes with red swoosh and backtab
(no word Nike on them until he visited 1885) with gray socks (changed to white socks when he visited 2015).
School outfit –
Marty McFly at School
From Friday before school through his first day in 1955, Marty added a Guess Marciano two-tone blue denim jacket with an "Art in Revolution" button, a Fender P-Bass pin and a white checked Shah Safara shirt to his basic outfit.
He accessorized this with a Casio CA50W digital watch on his left wrist, a silver Aiwa model HS-P02 Walkman, and mirrored Zeiss aviator sunglasses with a sweatguard in the morning.
"Life preserver" – From the evening at Twin Pines Mall through his first day in 1955, Marty added a dark orange Class-5 bubble down vest to his school outfit.
Tales From Space – Doc gave Marty a yellow full-length radiation suit for protection when loading the plutonium. Due to the similarity of his outfit to that of a space alien on a comic book cover, his outfit scared the Peabody family and an elderly couple driving past Lyon Estates in 1955.
"Darth Vader" – Marty wore the yellow full-body radiation suit, a hair dryer from Doc Brown's suitcase tucked into a belt, and held his Aiwa portable stereo cassette player.
Darth Vader BTTF
Doc Brown
Doc Brown
"Devo outfit" – Doc wore a white full-length radiation suit, over a green print shirt, white undershirt, black pants and orange Nike Vandal high-top shoes. He also had a watch on his left arm, and digital stopwatch on a lanyard around his neck.
Train shirt – While in 2015, Doc changed back to 1985-style clothing, a yellow Hawaiian shirt with a cartoon train pattern and brown cargo pants, expecting to return Marty, Jennifer and Einstein back home right away.
Jennifer "Hey Mom, nice pants" -
Jennifer wears a blue vest over a white shirt and has pink flower pants.
Other distinctive clothing of 1985
§ Dave wore a uniform for his job as a Burger King restaurant server.
§ George owned a suede jacket.
§ Biff wore a green warm-up outfit on Saturday; a purple warm-up outfit on Sunday.
Clothing in 1955
Biff
"Biff" - On Saturday, Biff wore a red short-sleeve pullover shirt.
School - At school, Biff wore blue jeans and a shirt with a checked red and white pattern.
For the rest of the week, Biff wore a grey jacket, a white T- shirt and black pants. He added a black shirt and a white tie for the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
Lorraine
"You’re so ... thin" –
On Saturday, November 5, Lorraine wore a pink and purple plaid dress which had a rounded collar, a matching belt around the waist, and a pink bow at the neck. She also wore white socks.
School –
At school, Lorraine wore a blue blouse with a silver brooch and a purple pencil skirt. She also wore her hair in a bun.
"I think you'd look better wearing nothing at all"
On Saturday, November 12 at Ruth's Frock Shop, Lorraine wore a pink knitted sweater, saddle shoes and a novelty black cotton giraffe-print circle skirt which Biff lifted up to expose her panties once outside the shop.
"Well, lookee what we have here"
At the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Lorraine wore a pink strapless dress, bought with Babs at Ruth’s Frock Shop, which she covered with a white sweater. When she leaned over in the car, Biff was able to see down the front of her dress.
Doc
On Saturday evening, Doc wore a silver robe with black lapels, white shirt, and white knit tie, and dark pants. During the rest of the week, he wore a long white laboratory coat, and put on a pair of green safety goggles when demonstrating the clock tower model. The following Saturday, as he tried to connect the electrical cable, Doc was wearing shoes with Velcro closures that had not yet been invented,[5] although he might have found them in his future counterpart's suitcase.
Other distinctive clothing of 1955
§ Milton Baines wore a coonskin cap, popularized by Disney’s Davy Crockett films.
Clothing in 2015
"First, you have to get out and change clothes."
—Doc to Marty upon arrival in 2015
Doc in his 2015 yellow coat.
Doc Brown
* Marty in his future son's outfit.
"Marty, you’ve got to come back with me"
Doc appeared in Marty’s driveway wearing a long yellow coat, a red shirt with Japanese symbols (no undershirt), silver wraparound glasses with internal video display, and a plastic transparent necktie.
Train shirt – (See: 1985 Doc Brown)
Marty
"You're the spitting image of your future son" –
* Marty Jr.’s outfit and Marty’s disguise consisted of an auto-adjusting and auto-drying jacket (though Marty Jr.'s jacket was broken on the left sleeve), blue jeans worn inside-out (Marty only turned his pockets out), white socks, white Nike MAG power-lacing shoes and a color-shifting lenticular baseball cap.
Marty Jr. wore a white t-shirt with a logo featuring a plus and minus sign. 47-year-old Marty wore a brown business suit over a light brown shirt and brown and yellow multiple ties with rising sun motifs.
Biff
Biff's outfit consisted of a red quarter zip sweatshirt and black, white and green plaid pants.
Griff
Biff Tannen
Griff's outfit consisted of a helmet with sharp metal spikes, a black-ribbed light green jacket over a black chainmail shirt, black pants and black boots adorned with a sharp metallic rhinoceros-like horn.
Marlene
Other distinctive clothing of 2015
§ Multiple ties worn by Terry, Goldie Wilson III and Marty Sr.
Clothing in 1985A
Lorraine
Lorraine 2015
Lorraine Baines McFly, aged 47, in 1985A clothing and breast implants.
"You’re so ... big" – Lorraine Baines McFly wore a black, belted pant suit with patterns of multicolored dots, and high heeled shoes. The blouse had a low neckline revealing her breast implants.
Biff
Although Biff was fabulously wealthy as a result of his cheating with the almanac in 1985A, his sense of dress was still tacky as the Biff of the original timeline. His outfits were gaudy and ugly, with gold chains and bright blue blazers, giving him the appearance of a lounge lizard. After coming out of the hot tub, Biff wore a blue bathing robe over black swim shorts.
Other distinctive clothing of 1985A
§ Biff's bodyguard Match wore a white cowboy hat.
§ Biff's goon 3-D no longer wore his nominal 3-D glasses as the 3-D movies fad had long since faded by 1985. However, unable to part with the nickname, he wore aviator sunglasses which he had custom made, the left lens to be red and the right lens to be blue.
Clothing in 1885
"You can’t wear those futuristic things in 1885. You shouldn’t even be wearing them in 1955."
—Doc Brown at the Pohatchee Drive-in
Marty
"Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this" – (See: 1955 Marty)
Marty's 1955 western outfit plus hat.
"You sure look like Seamus McFly" – Same as "Clint Eastwood never wore anything like this" (see: 1955 Marty), with a straw derby hat[6]
"Some respectable clothes and a fine hat" – Most of the week, Marty wore a long, blue workshirt, brown jeans, and a brown sarape over long underwear, with a brown flat-topped hat, and boots.[7] The outfit was very similar to the one Marty saw Clint Eastwood wearing in A Fistful of Dollars.
"Go ahead, make my day" – One morning, Marty woke up wearing his long underwear with a half-fastened drop seat, and put on his hat and gun belt to practice in front of the mirror.
Behind the scenes
1955
Bob Gale said that costume designer Deborah Scott found nearly all the clothing for the film in the studio’s wardrobe department; they didn’t have the budget for her to make many original items.[8]
Lea Thompson found the pink dress uncomfortable to wear and even more uncomfortable to dance in, and would walk around the set in the 1950s corset bra and crinoline underskirt to avoid wearing the dress, and once even shocked her mother when she visited her on the set. But despite that, she still hung on to one exemplar of the dress that was given to her, and helped out with the filming of the second movie when the original dress had been lost, and she provided it herself.[9]
The black fedora Marty wore as apart of his 'something inconspicuous' disguise was made by the Stetson hat company, especially for Michael J. Fox.[10]
2015
Costume designer Joanna Johnston said she was terrified at the prospect of designing the clothing of the future, making costumes for the cast and 150 extras from scratch, since Bob’s concept did not have a basis in anyone else’s work. For a future society in which men and women are truly equal, the clothing styles would exaggerate the difference between the sexes. She decided to use a very wide variety of fabrics in bright "but not fluorescent" colors.[11]
1885
Costume designer Joanna Johnston was already familiar with the clothing for the period, having worked on the movie Tess, but found that most of costumes that were made for the Westerns of the '40s, '50s and '60s lacked the authenticity she was looking for. After further research, she created clothing for the main characters and as many as 500 extras based on the original clothing patterns she found.[12]
Back to the Future is being cited as a key fashion inspiration, it will come as no surprise to any fans of the film or, indeed, of fashion.
So much so, in fact, that Eastpak is reissuing the original rucksack Marty travelled through time with this season, sold exclusively at Selfridges (although if you have a DeLorean, you are advised to time-travel and buy one of the 80s originals, as Eastpak is certainly not selling them now at 80s prices).
Marty rocking double denim and high-tops
Marty himself has been something of a hipster template for a while now: the double denim, the checked shirt, the high-tops. If only Marty had arrived in east London 2014 as opposed to Hill Valley 1955 (and, later, 2015 and 1885), he would have fit right in and instantly sparked a sleeveless parka revival.
As for the other characters,
Lorraine Baines (later McFly, then Tannen) has, waist up, a proper Alexa Chung look going on, with her Peter Pan collars and demure little jumpers.
Biff Tannen's sports jackets are definitely in style, for men and women, while George McFly's thick-rimmed glasses have been a fashion staple since the dawn of time (maybe alittle exaggeration there)
As for what Back to the Future fashion pieces the biggest vote has to be for Lorraine's wacky 1955 hairstyle, in which her hair zigzags across her forehead
And honestly? Yeah. The clothing is superb. It doesn’t feel costume-y or try hard like The Great Gatsby or Gangster Squad; in BTTF, the period looks are natural yet interesting, feeling cool but dated.
As this film was made in the 80s, that the period they were parodying (1950s) wasn’t that historical. It was like (literally) looking at pictures your parents wore and checking local thrift stores for clothing ideas.
This all probably contributes to why Hill Valley in 1955 feels real and not filled with some wise-cracking gangster with a down-on-his-luck shoeshine kid.
Clearly, there is a huge difference between menswear in 1955 and 1985, but there are just things that make the 1950’s stand out when compared to other eras, but the 1950’s was a remarkably different than the 1940s.
In this post war time, you had the first inklings of true casual style. Instead of sportcoats as sportswear, you had dedicated garments like Hollywood jackets.
Shortjackets with point collars and bomber styles were extremely popular to wear when you were off work or just a youth.
Jeans and converse were the new go-to for casual pant/shoes, though a few still wore pleated
Hollywood waist gab slacks and derbies. And let’s not forget the explosion of prints (tiki and atomic) and tone-on-tone variations that made sportshirts truly “sporty”.
People today call it the Bold Look for tailoring (due to the heavy shoulder pads and dropped button stance) and Rockabilly for casual style. Either way, it’s pretty cool.
Good examples of the fun casual shirts in the 1950s.
Short jackets of all kinds were common, this time done with fun details.
Great shirts and an epic trouser to boot.
Ties in the 1950’s were more about abstract vertical designs. Some were slim, others were wide.
Leisuire jackets were all the rage.
BTTF gets all of this right, presumably by the use of true vintage (since the patterns and designs are really specific) as according to the wiki, they only used whatever was in Universal’s costume warehouse.
However, warehouses could definitely still make good reproductions! We’ll never know what is true vintage or not, but I’m leaning on the use of true vintage pieces since would only be 30 years old and wouldn’t be hard to source and get in decent condition.
Marty McFly
We all know Marty McFly’s epic 1985 look. Denim jacket on slim high waisted jeans, with a solid colored crewneck under a button up shirt; we also can’t forget the life preserver and white/red Nike Bruin sneakers. It’s a classic outfit that isn’t actually out of place today, since you could wear it at a Halloween costume or as a generic dude in LA (maybe lose one of the layers though).
That period paved the way for “non-traditional” garment mixing that ushered in the current way we approach casual style. Since this is only 15 years from the period of overalls with oxfords or puffers and military chinos, it’s no surprise that wanna-be rocker Marty McFly would also wear something as weird.
However, as we saw in the movie, he stuck out like a sore thumb when he was accidentally sent back in time to 1955. Luckily with a rich heir like Doc Brown as a friend, Marty is able to get some period accurate clothes and fit into this iteration of Hill Valley.
Marty’s first look for a new day in 1955 is a damn good one: every piece is so great. Firstly we can see the two-tone leather-gab jacket with a point collar. Two-tone jackets were popular as youth novelty wear. I’m pretty sure the one in the film is a reproduction, but if you found that as vintage it would be worth a lot.
Underneath the jacket, Marty has a block motif sportshirt that he’s rolled up his sleeves a la James Dean. Patterns like this are what make this era’s shirts so much fun.
He has white socks and penny loafers!
With the shirt, he finishes this perfect 1950’s casual-youth outfit with (presumably) pleated hollywood waist slacks that seem to be made of some silk or rayon blend. providing crunchy/shiny texture that fits in with the era’s obsession with patterns and atomic themes.
Overall, it’s a great uniform to do: sportshirt + high rise trousers + casual jacket. Marty wears the look well, with everything fitting perfectly. In fact, this vibe not only informs some of the looks you can see at Inspiration LA It may not be atomic or tiki, but alohas are certainly in full force in today’s spring/summer. Even the thin belts are coming back.
They need to make prints like this again!
When Marty gets into the epic skateboard chase, he retains the two-tone jacket but brings in a new shirt and pant combo. The shirt, now a red/blue piece with a wild diagonal stripe mixed with oversized squares is an EPIC one. Its a bold pattern, which again makes the 1950’s unique in it’s choice of casual patterns. It just has that retro appeal that I think would look great under a sportcoat, if there were just makers that had it (since a true vintage one would no doubt be expensive).
Note here that he’s now wearing some straight cut blue jeans. It’s different than his slightly acid-washed ones from the 80s, mainly in how it drapes. They’re not overly wide, but moderate, ending with a cuff. They look how I want my jeans to fit with proper drape. Again, Marty kills it.
At some point, Marty swapped his Corteze with black converse. Looks very 50’s when worn with cuffed blue jeans.
Another fun gab sportshirt that is worn untucked with a white undershirt base layer.
Note the two-tone coloring. Very 50’s.
His last major 50’s look is a sportcoat-trouser combo, worn to the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. We don’t really get a good look at the full cut or details, so we’re left wondering if this is a true 50’s jacket (or designed like it) or something from the 1980s that they tried to pass off.
The choice of odd trouser, a charcoal grey fleck Again, this was a time of exploring fabrics and cuts in the realm of tailoring, and while illustrations may keep everything clean, photographs from the era showed that the youth always had a mishmash of things. It’s probably because they didn’t have dozens of trousers to begin with.
The wide cut may be inspired by the zoot suit (Marty does reference it in the film, but zoot suits were more of a 40s thing IIRC), but he rocks it all the same.
Since you get to see it in full force (along with white socks and black two-tone derbies) while he’s playing the guitar, perhaps it’s his way of exuding that rebellious rocker chic in 1955. He certainly stood out amongst the crowd!
Doc Brown
We don’t really get to see much of Doc Brown’s attire until Marty goes to visit him in 1955; Doc is just in a white jumpsuit in the Lone Pine Mall.
When Marty visits him, Doc seems to wearing a variation on what we’d expect a well-to-do heir would wear at home. A pink shirt (the 1950’s loved color, if you couldn’t already tell) and a white single stripe tie are fun nods to the fact that he’s an adult, but you get the affluent charm with an epic silver dressing gown.
With a scale-esque texture and it’s moderate black satin peak lapels (echoed by the pocket piping), it definitely has that post-war fun vibe.
When Doc goes with Marty to Hill Valley High to check out Marty’s parents, Doc has on a very typical “casual man” outfit. The tiki shirt is a no brainer at this point, but note the cool gab jacket he has on.
It’s definitely some form of leisure jacket with modest lapels, patch pockets, and a fun little monogram on the patch. Jackets like this were casual but they clearly took after the classic sportcoat design; it looks smarter than simply wearing a leather jacket or gab short jacket.
Also take note of his straw fedora (I don’t think it’s technically a panama hat). Instead of the traditional black band, he instead has an abstract design as a ribbon, which was a common trend in the 1940s-1960s for straw hats. It also just makes the hat much more casual, which is one of the reasons why it’s hard to wear fedora-type hats often.
Flecked trousers. The 1950s loved fleck.
A checked asymmetrical sportshirt with a yolked pocket flap.
Look at Doc’s weird shirt! Super cool and novelty style that was popular in the late 40s-50s. Finding one today would be rare and expensive.
Doc Brown’s last outfit in 1955 is hard to make out, as he wears an balmaccan style rain coat for the climax, but his polo-style shirt deserves some recognition. Like so many other pieces we’ve seen, the shirt features a fun print, consisting of red and black squiggles.
The shirt has a contrast collar/placket and cuffs, which again fits in with many of the stylistic choices of the era. I’m not sure if I would wear it today, but more brands should definitely take a page out of the era and make something “new”!
Marty’s dad, at least this version of him, dresses like a dweeb because he is a dweeb. It’s supposed to be 1985, where RL and other mall clothes are in full swing, and yet he dresses like a caricature of a 1960’s accountant.
Short sleeve shirt, repp tie, pen pockets, and browline glasses, all contribute to it. I mean I’ve worn socks and shorts together, but I don’t think it looked this bad.
I mean, it makes sense since the film is portraying George as someone who is unlucky, who gets bullied, and gathers no respect.
A flecked short jacket.
In 1955, George McFly actually dresses pretty decently! He’s not exactly sticking out like a nerdy sore-thumb. Like Marty, he wears a few different sportshirts and short jackets, though in comparison, they’re much more plain. George could also benefit with a better fit, but it’s not terrible. At least in most cases.
What George does make a habit of doing is wearing his sportshirts fastened all the way to the top. Now this was done back in the day, but based on photos and illustrations, sport collars were definitely best worn open.
It’s a nerd thing to do that came back in the mid 2010s as the “air tie” and always results in the wearer looking “closed up”. And since George is a nervous guy with no friends or confidence, it works perfectly.
I like the checked cloth and red buttons.
In one scene, George actually wears a two-tone Hollywood Jacket! Like with Doc’s ivory jacket, these are meant to be a casual-yet-tailored approach to casual wear. You’ll see that the cut and design are similar to a chore coat’s, just with shoulder pads and “formal” cloth.
George’s brown gab short jacket has shoulder pads and is a size or two too big for him. Also see how he’s got his shirt buttoned all the way up.
An interesting cotton short jacket with a wider collar and hand warmer pockets. Very cool.
George goes all out for the dance, mainly because it’s his big moment to “save” Lorraine. A white dinner jacket and black tie is hard not to separate from James Bond (or Casablanca), and its actually the first time George wears something that fits him well. It’s still in the 1950’s aesthetic, so he has padded square shoulders, a low button stance, and closed quarters.
When we return to good ol’ modified 1985, accounting-nerd George has been replaced by a true chad version. There are no short sleeve shirts and browline shades here. Instead, he has a very 80s biz-caz outfit consisting of a moleskin blazer, vibrant red polo, and pleated slacks. It’s not bold, but since this is a “normal” outfit, it contrasts against George’s first appearance.I also love the aviators for max 80s cool.
Biff Tannen
Biff. When we first see him, his commandingly bold 70’s outfit just screams like a guy who peaked in high school and still bullies others. Which is definitely true.
It’s such a weird look that actually has some prep vibes to it, mainly with the use of a navy brass button blazer and plaid odd trousers; I think I may even see a white braided belt.
1985 Biff actually dresses rather “normal” for the era, though he stands out for his boisterous character and sheer Kingpin-like aura.
It’s all just sportshirts, white crewneck tees, and jeans, nothing to write home about. but with it just being done with jeans and sneakers, it feels boring, mainly because its an easy way to do a 1950s look. It’s easy to replicate, but don’t forget that a sportcollar makes a world of difference; a regular standing collar wouldn’t achieve the same effect.
I guess the point is that Biff is just a regular old bully, contrasting against George’s plain looks that utilize jackets and Marty’s much more interesting take on the era.
Biff’s jacket of choice is a bomber style one that has black contrasting collar and cuffs. Can’t you see how popular two-tone clothing was in those days? Like Marty’s leather jacket, this one also ends around the waist, but instead of it just being a plain bomber design, Biff’s jacket has decorative front pleating. Don’t ask why, it’s just for show.
Like with the shirt patterns, I wish we also had more vintage-inspired jackets like this!
A black shirt and bold tie? I guess stereotypical prom style was a thing even in 1955.
Others
Strickland has a bowtie and suit, but if you look closely, the suit is very 80s with wide shoulders, open notch and low buttoning point.
In 1955, he has a suit that clearly has more weight and features a fun shadow stripe, a common thing for vintage suits.
Ivy style isn’t really in the film other than the committee deciding on the band. 80s ivy is just like 70s ivy tbh: just a more exaggerated and bold version of 60s ivy.
Goldie Wilson also wears a bar motif sportshirt, though with the wide collar, it might be from the 40’s. That makes sense, since he might not have access to current fashions.
Lorraine’s dad wears a car coat (an overcoat with a shorter length). He has a fedora, which gives him an “adult” look. Not sure if the trouser fit is right though.
As can be expected, Lorraine’s dad has a gab sportshirt. The shorter collar points and higher buttoning point is period accurate to the 1950s.
So much great stuff here, from the faded, cuffed denim and saddle shoes to the absolutely epic novelty knitwear. I’m very glad that the youth have a variety of style!
Striped shirts are what kids wore back then, not flat caps, plus-fours, and suspenders.
Biff’s gang all have variations on casual style. Is that a knit tee I see? Wish we could see the ribbing!
More variety in style here and it all looks period. Love the kid’s pastel blue pleated pants, the red sweater, and what I think is a Cub Scout uniform. Check out that tiny brimmed hat!
Marvin Berry and the Starlighters all wear 50’s silk dinner jackets with their quintessential square shoulders and low button stance. Instead of bowties, they have matching continental bow ties.
Great short jacket.
Conclusion
BTTF is a great example of a movie that makes 1950’s clothing seem accessible and easy. There isn’t a big focus on tailoring, which probably makes it much more palatable. Instead, we see casual 50’s, rockabilly-esque style, which informs a lot of the heritage-Americana that is so easy for guys to wear. Sportshirts and cuffed jeans should get you through the most of it.
The real way to make it interesting is by checking out how Marty does it. Instead of plain shirts, he wore fun patterns that made his attire stand out among the others. It might be vintage and dated, but I certainly love the personality they bring to an outfit, especially since today you can refine it by wearing with loafers or a sportcoat instead of on its own.
Bonus points for those epic two-tone jackets (or leather jackets in general). I’m not sure if the world is ready for the return of hollywood jackets, but after the rise of chore coats and safaris, maybe there’s room for it.
Overall, I think a lot of guys who are searching for a more interesting way to dress can take some cues from this. BTTF did a great job and since it didn’t go too crazy (note the lack of flat caps, which if included would just be inaccurate), it comes off as classic and actually wearable.
I love this movie and I hope you enjoyed this dive into the costuming
Always a pleasure,
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Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
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How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
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The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
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References
1. ↑ http://www.bttf.com/forums BTTF.com Message Board
2. ↑ http://www.bttf.com/forums BTTF.com Message Board
3. ↑ http://www.bttf.com/forums/topic.php?tp=38901-I+FOUND+IT%21+This+is+like+finding+the+holy+grail...+I+have+found+the+Marty+McFLy+Vest%21%21%21#
4. ↑ BTTF III novel, p. 38, 39
5. ↑ Velcro 50th Anniversary : Timeline, see "1985".
6. ↑ BTTF III novel, p. 73
7. ↑ BTTF III novel, p. 98, p. 205
8. ↑ Feature Commentary with Bob Gale and Neil Canton, Part I, at about 1:10.
9. ↑ Gaines, Caseen, We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future trilogy, p. unknown
10. ↑ http://www.icollector.com/Back-To-The-Future-2-Marty-s-Something-Inconspicuous-Fedora-Michael-J-Fox_i20788290
11. ↑ Klastorin, Michael, and Sally Hibbin, Back to the Future: The Official Book of the Complete Movie Trilogy, p. 71-72.
12. ↑ Klastorin, Michael, and Sally Hibbin, Back to the Future: The Official Book of the Complete Movie Trilogy, p. 60-61.
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Back to the Future - Detailed Storyline
It all started when…
Marty: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Doc, uh... Are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?"
Doc: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? Besides, the stainless steel construction makes the flux dispersal- l…….ook out !!!"
Read the plot to Back to the Future in our Blog to the Future post today !
Teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent from 1985 to 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his friend, Doc Brown. Stranded without plutonium, Marty accidentally disrupts the moment his parents, George and Lorraine, first meet, jeopardizing his own existence. With the help of the 1955 Doc, Marty must play matchmaker—and get George to stand up to bully Biff Tannen—to ensure his parents fall in love at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Their only way back to 1985 is to harness a massive 1.21-gigawatt lightning strike on the Hill Valley clock tower. Marty succeeds, returns to an improved future, and races to save Doc's life.
#BackToTheFuture #BTTF #MartyMcFly #DocBrown #TimeTravel #HillValley #FluxCapacitor
Doc Brown and Marty McFly - Credit to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Back to the Future Detailed storyline - It all started when…
Marty: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Doc, uh... Are you telling me you built a time machine... out of a DeLorean?"
Doc: "The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? Besides, the stainless steel construction makes the flux dispersal- look out!!!"
— Doc and Marty during the first test
The DeLorean time machine was Dr. Emmett Brown's most successful invention, a plutonium-powered time machinecomprised of a DeLorean DMC-12 sports car that had to reach 88 miles per hour in order to time travel.
On November 5, 1955, Doc was standing on the edge of his toilet, while hanging a clock in his bathroom. But the porcelain was wet, making Doc slip, fall and hit his head on the sink. When Doc came to, he had a vision of the flux capacitor in his head, and drew a crude schematic diagram as well as scrawling some hurried calculations. The capacitor was constructed afterward and completed in 1985.
Doc Browns Flux Capacitor - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Hill Valley Telegraph
History
Doc purchased the DeLorean DMC-12 from a seller named Robert, who had advertised it in the classifieds section of the August 11, 1984 issue of the Hill Valley Telegraph.
The first test
Main article: World's first temporal displacement
Doc and Marty stand in the fire trails left behind by the DeLorean on the first test.
Doc Brown revealed his creation to his friend Marty McFly at Twin Pines Mall, in the early morning of October 26, 1985, and for its first test, Doc sent his dog Einstein one minute into the future. The sequence of events that followed were as so; after Doc revved up the engine to 65 m.p.h. while braked, he released the brake sending the car towards Doc and Marty.
Einstein Time Travelling Dog - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
A faint glow developed at the front of the car and then engulfed the vehicle. The coils lit up, internal circuits glowed, and the flux capacitor fired rapidly. Suddenly the car seemed to explode just before it hit Doc and Marty. Fire trails then scorched the pavement where the vehicle would have passed through, completing the temporal displacement sequence.
Marty: "Jesus Christ, Doc. You disintegrated Einstein!"
Doc: "Calm down, Marty, I didn't disintegrate anything. The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact!"
Marty: "Well, where the hell are they?!"
Doc: "The appropriate question is "When the hell are they?" You see, Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler. I sent him into the future! One minute into the future to be precise. And at exactly 1:21 A.M. and zero seconds we will catch up to him and the time machine."
— Doc and Marty after the time travel experiment.
For Einstein, the trip was instantaneous, but to Marty and Doc they had to wait exactly one minute to catch up to Einstein in the timeline. In the meantime, Marty asked why a DeLorean was used.
Doc explained that it needed some style and implied that the stainless steel construction of the car helped it in temporal displacement. But Doc didn't fully explain why because the watch he was wearing at the time beeped, warning him that the DeLorean's return was only seconds away.
The car suddenly appeared where Doc and Marty were standing and screeched to a halt as a frozen shell. Supercooled from traveling through time, the gullwing door was troublesome for Doc to open while using his hands. Inside the car, Einstein was unharmed, much to the surprise of Marty. Doc then showed Marty the interior and its controls.
"First, you turn the time circuits on. This read-out tells you where you're going. This one tells you where you are. This one tells you where you were."
—Doc Brown
While inputting dates on the keypad, Doc used July 4, 1776 (the date the American declaration of Independence was signed) and December 25, 0000 (the date of the birth of Christ) as examples, before inputting "a red-letter date in the history of science, November 5, 1955". From there he left the cockpit of the DeLorean and reminisced about the past, particularly about Old Man Peabody owning the land that is now Twin Pines Mall and his pine tree farm.
"My, things sure have changed. I can remember when this was all open land as far as the eye can see. Old Man Peabody owned all of this. He had this crazy idea... about breeding pine trees."
—Doc talking to Marty
Trapped in 1955
Soon after a new pellet of plutonium was inserted into the time machine, the Libyans who he stole the plutonium from intervened in a Volkswagen and shot Doc dead. Marty ran into the DeLorean to try to escape the Libyans. Marty accidentally turned the time circuits (still set to 1955) on while shifting, and as he avoided being destroyed by a rocket-propelled grenade, he sped up to 88 and entered temporal displacement. Suddenly, Marty went from a mall parking lot in 1985, to a field in 1955, and the DeLorean crashed into a scarecrow and then the Peabodys' barn.
Frozen Delorean - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
VW Camper Chasing DeLorean - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Lyon Estate - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
A radiation suit-clad Marty trips as he leaves the DeLorean.
"It looks like an airplane... without wings."
Doc Brown and the Time Machine
—Otis Peabody
For a moment, Marty was stunned, and the Peabody family ran from their house to the barn to investigate. Believing that the vehicle was from another world, they screamed in horror as Marty lifted the gullwing door and stepped out, dressed in a radiation suit. Marty was almost shot from the buckshot of Otis Peabody's shotgun, and ran back to the safety of the time machine, floored the accelerator, and smashed through the doors of the barn. After escaping from Peabody's shotgun, the car ran over one of the two pines that Peabody had been growing. This was the first effect of Marty's trip into the past that would alter the future (the "Twin Pines Mall" would become the "Lone Pine Mall").
Marty pulled the DeLorean onto a highway that ran by the future site of Lyon Estates. He immediately stopped and viewed the undeveloped land stretch far out into the distance, questioning whether or not it was a dream. A meter in the DeLorean indicated that it was out of plutonium, and the car shut down. Marty failed to get it running again and decided to hide the DeLorean behind the Lyon Estates sign, covered by a few shrubs, and walked the two miles to town.
"It works! Ha ha, it works! I finally invented something that works."
—Young Doc Brown
After convincing the 1955 Doc that he was indeed from the future, Marty and Doc went back to the site to recover the time machine. Doc opened the door and turned on the flux capacitor which he had envisioned after his fall earlier that day. The DeLorean was driven back to Doc's garage where it was hidden under a tarpaulin until the night of the thunderstorm, November 12.
On the 12th, Doc brought the time machine to Courthouse Square in downtown Hill Valley, and started working on the cable assembly that would harness the impending lightning strike. Arriving late, Marty was briefed by Doc, just as the storm moved in and took down a tree. Marty drove the DeLorean to the starting line at the Bluebird Motel, and inserted a tall connecting hook into the flux capacitor. He then waited for the alarm to go off while Doc reconnected the cable, and decided to reset the controls to arrive 11 minutes earlier than scheduled. With that, the engine suddenly died, and left Marty trying to restart it. Marty finally (and unexpectedly) succeeded in restarting the engine after head-butting the horn in frustration, and took off. The DeLorean reached the cable just as the lightning struck, and Doc made the connection, sending the time machine back to 1985.
In 1985, Red the Bum was awoken by the sonic boom of the DeLorean, followed by the sound of a crash at the Town Theater. Marty jumped out of the icy time machine to check out downtown and to verify that he had gotten back to the future, and back to his normal year of 1985. Returning to the car to save Doc, Marty tried to drive off and the engine died once again. This was the last time in the trilogy that it had done so. The Libyans passed him on the street, and Marty ran back to the mall. There, he saw the first DeLorean make the jump to 1955, with the terrorists' van crashing into a photo booth. Originally believing he was too late, Marty was in grief, then surprise. Doc recovered, and revealed that he was wearing a bulletproof vest, having read the warning letter that Marty had written 30 years earlier.
Doc returned to downtown to start the DeLorean up, and drove Marty back to his home in Lyon Estates. Doc told Marty he would go roughly 30 years into the future, "a nice round number". Doc backed the DeLorean up with enough room to reach 88 mph on the street and vanished in three sonic booms.
While in the future, Doc decided to give the DeLorean a now standard hover conversion. To afford this, he traveled back to 1938, and bought several copies of Action Comics #1. He sold them for $2.5 million in 2015, and flew off in the newly converted DeLorean. At some point, he discovered that Marty's children were destined to accidentally go to prison, which would eventually destroy the McFly family.
biffTo the future
Marty: "Hey Doc, we better back up. We don't have enough road to get up to 88."
Where we’re going we don’t need …. roads …. Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Skyway to Hill Valley - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Doc: "Roads? Where we're going we don't need... roads."
— Discussion between Doc and Marty in the DeLorean before takeoff
The DeLorean lifts off, bound for 2015.
Doc returned to the McFly residence, the morning after he left. Marty had discovered that his life had changed for the better. His visiting girlfriend Jennifer Parker, and he, were interrupted by the sonic boom and wind blast. The newly upgraded DeLorean knocked over some trashcans, and a futuristically-garbed Doc emerged from the vehicle. Doc made use of his upgraded time machine by adding garbage to the Mr. Fusion as fuel. Plutonium was no longer needed after the trip to the future. Doc told Marty and Jennifer of their future family, and the trouble that occurred (or would occur) with their children.
The DeLorean lifted off the ground and its wheels folded providing thrust. The rear louver then propelled it forward down the street, and Doc turned the car around to get the speed needed to make temporal displacement. This entire sequence was witnessed by Biff Tannen in the McFly driveway.
The time machine entered October 21, 2015, then descended through the clouds into a busy skyway, nearly in the wrong lane of multilevel traffic. Doc pulled off onto an exit ramp to downtown Hill Valley. He landed the DeLorean in an alleyway, just outside Courthouse Square, then left while Marty completed his mission to save Marty, Jr. After Doc recovered Einstein from a suspended animation kennel, he pulled the DeLorean out into the open, where Old Biff saw it, and eventually put two and two together to realize that they were time travelers.
Biff steals the DeLorean.
"Flying DeLorean? Haven't seen one of those in... thirty years"
—Old Biff
Biff followed Doc and Marty in a taxi cab, and while the DeLorean was parked outside Hilldale, Biff stole it and went back to 1955 to hand the Grays Sports Almanac (that Doc had thrown away) to his younger self, thus altering history. In a matter of minutes, Biff returned the vehicle in the same position; however, he was feeling the effects of changing history.
In pain, he left the silver-colored bag and receipt for the almanac, as well as the top of his cane which broke off in the DeLorean when he doubled over. Getting out of view, Biff slumped to the ground and faded from existence behind a parked car. Doc and Marty, unaware that anything had happened, returned to the time machine with Jennifer and headed back for 1985.
An alternate history
"Imagine that this line represents time. At some point in the past, the timeline skewed into this tangent creating an alternate 1985. Alternate for you, me, Jennifer and Einstein...But reality for everyone else."
—Doc showing Marty 1985A on a blackboard.
Doc Brown - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
DeLorean getting struck by lighting - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
By this time it was too late to prevent the changing of the timeline. Flying at a high altitude, the DeLorean was nearly hit by an airliner in the sky. The time circuits began to malfunction as well, indicating 1885 temporarily. After discovering the truth behind the alternate 1985, Doc and Marty left Einstein in Doc's garage, and Jennifer at her house, where time would alter around them pending a change in the past. They traveled back to November 12, 1955, the date that Biff revealed to have been the day he had gotten the almanac.
Doc parked the time machine behind the same sign that Marty hid it the first time in 1955. Marty notified Doc of his status with Biff, and after some repairs, Doc jumped into the DeLorean to pick him up at Hill Valley High School.
As Doc left Lyon Estates, the car had hooked onto some of the pennants on the sign. Doc and Marty followed Biff in his car, and hovered over him, until Marty thought of using the hoverboard to get closer. Marty grabbed the almanac after some fighting, but was faced with being in the middle of a long tunnel from which to escape.
At the end of the tunnel, Doc dropped the string of pennants that he had hooked onto earlier, and Marty grabbed the rope in time to prevent himself from getting run over by Biff (who crashed, for the second time in a week, into a manure truck).
Returning to Lyon Estates to destroy the almanac, Doc lowered Marty onto the ground, but deemed it unsafe to land the DeLorean in the storm. Marty successfully burned the almanac in an old bucket, reverting all effects that had been created by 2015 Biff. The celebration was short-lived; lightning struck a tree close to Marty, who warned Doc about getting struck himself. In the next instant, however, lightning struck the DeLorean as feared, spinning it up to 88 mph (thus creating the fire trails in the shape of backward 9's), scrambling the circuits, and sent Doc and the DeLorean back to January 1, 1885[1]
Less than a minute later, a man, representing Western Union, appeared on the rainy street and handed Marty a letter. The letter, from Doc, had been held in their possession for over 70 years, with instructions for delivery to that exact position, at that exact moment, to that exact person — Marty.
Marty ran back downtown, arriving just moments after his other self was going back to the future, and after the temporal displacement, he encountered 1955 Doc, who then fainted.
Marty: "OK, Doc, just calm down. It's me. It's me! It's Marty!"
Doc: "No, it can't be you! I just sent you back to the future!"
Marty: "Yeah, I know. But I'm back. I'm back from the future."
— Marty to Doc before Doc exclaims "Great Scott" and faints.
Doc Brown - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Delgado Mine - Back to the Future Part 3
The letter, read the next morning by Doc, stated that the DeLorean was buried in the Delgado Mine, and provided repair instructions on fixing the time circuits with 1955 parts. At the Boot Hill Cemetery, outside the mine, Marty and Doc stumbled onto 1985 Doc's tombstone from 1885. It was now Marty's mission to save Doc in the past, and bring him back to the future as well.
Finding the DeLorean
Doc replaced the rotting tires with new whitewall tires and, working from the schematic diagram provided with the repair instructions, replaced all the broken instruments with 1955-era vacuum tubes and other components. He also put gasoline in the tank, since 1985 Doc had to drain all the fluids from the car, including the gas, before putting it into long-term storage.
1885 - Back to the Future - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
The Old West
The DeLorean encounters a tribe of local Indians.
"Marty, you're not thinking fourth-dimensionally. You'll instantly be transported to 1885 and those Indians won't even be there..."
1955 Doc and Marty set up at the Pohatchee Drive-In Theatre, far away from town, so that Marty's arrival would not be noticed by residents in 1885. Doc set the time circuits to the day after his 1885 counterpart sent the letter on September 1. Marty hesitated to drive at the screen because of a wall with Indians painted on it; but as Marty reached 88 mph, the 1955 wall was gone, but was replaced with real, 1885, Pohatchee Indians, who chased after the DeLorean, which Marty hid in a bear cave.
Marty avoided the Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry that was chasing them, but discovered that an Indian had shot an arrow into the engine of the DeLorean. Upon removing the arrow, Marty accidentally tears a hole in the fuel line of the car. He pays it no mind as he is chased out of the cave by the bear living there at the time, and fell down the hill and landed on the property of his Irish ancestors.
The DeLorean was recovered by Doc, but there was no gasoline available in 1885 to replace the fuel that had leaked out. [2]Marty wasn't concerned as he stated Mr. Fusion could refuel the DeLorean. Doc said that was impossible as the engine always ran on gasoline and Mr. Fusion only powered the flux compacitor and the flight circuits. Doc then plotted means of powering the car, including having his horses try to reach 88 mph out in the desert, they only made 30 mph.
DeLorean fuel tank damaged by a arrow - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Doc received a strong alcohol concoction from the town bartender, Chester, that he hoped would have a similar effect to gasoline, but instead, blew the fuel injection manifold out. This left only one available option: pushing the DeLorean up to 88, which came in the form of a locomotive.
Doc and Marty's plan was to hijack, or borrow, the locomotive, and take it to an unused spur that ran to Shonash Ravine, where it would push the car before running off the end of the track. On the night of September 6, Doc placed the car onto the track. There, it awaited the locomotive.
DeLorean being pushed to 88mph - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
DeLorean Destroyed by Locomotive - Credits to Universal Picture Amblin Entertainment
Their plan was successfully enacted on September 7, and though Marty was sent back to 1985, Doc and Clara Clayton remained in the past. The DeLorean reached temporal displacement just before hitting the buffer at the edge of the ravine; however the train crashed through and landed into the ravine in a large explosion.
The DeLorean is destroyed by a locomotive.
Back in 1985, the DeLorean traveled along the railroad tracks for about a mile until it came to rest on the track outside Hilldale. Immediately, Marty was stunned to see a modern locomotive barreling towards him, and escaped from the DeLorean just before it was destroyed by the train. After it had passed by, Marty gazed at the time circuits and flux capacitor in shock just as they flickered on and then off for the last time.
"...Well Doc, it's destroyed... Just like you wanted..."
—Marty standing at the remains of the DeLorean
Marty and Jennifer, who had remained on her porch, both went through the wreckage. Then, peculiarly, the railroad crossing's bells sounded and its gates went down. No trains were to be seen. Just then, the Jules Verne Train appeared, and blew Marty and Jennifer back several feet. This was Doc's way to return without the aid of the DeLorean. After introducing Marty and Jennifer to the two new members of the family, Jules and Verne, Doc handed Marty a gift — the photograph of them standing in front of the clock — and gave some words of advice before leaving to times unknown.
"Your future hasn't been written yet! No one's has! Your future is whatever you make of it. So make it a GOOD one!"
Doc Brown - Your Future hasn’t been written yet
—Doc to Marty and Jennifer
Marty: "Where ya going Doc? Back to the future?"
Doc: "No, already been there!"
— Doc and Marty during the final scene of Back to the Future Part III
Just before its destruction, the DeLorean can be seen to have parts from every time period it has been in. Inside the time machine was also a walkie-talkie from 1985A.
Rebirth of the DeLorean
Note: The following section is considered non-canon or is disputed in canonicity.
Six months after the destruction of the DeLorean, another DeLorean time machine, nearly identical to the one used previously by Marty and Doc, appeared outside of Doc's garage. Upon following Einstein's clues to the source of the time machine, Marty drove it back to 1931, where he found Doc in jail for allegedly blowing up a speakeasy.
Doc told Marty that the DeLorean he had been driving was a temporal duplicate, created when the DeLorean was struck by lightning; the original going seventy years back to 1885, and the other version seventy years forward to 2025. Doc went forward in time with the Jules Verne Train, recovered the second DeLorean, fixed it up, and began traveling again. Doc also installed a program that would activate upon Doc not returning to the vehicle within a certain length of time. This automatic retrieval feature allowed the DeLorean to return to a set time and location of Doc's choosing.[3]
Around 1991, Doc Brown and his family returned to Hill Valley in the Train and settled down in the present. Marty had, by now, been attending Hill Valley College, and he visited the Brown family regularly. The DeLorean was rebuilt with added features, including a new audio receptive series of time circuits, submersible capabilities, a pincer, and having the ability to fold into a compact suitcase-sized box (which still weighed as much as the car at 2,796 pounds[4]). The greatest improvement to the DeLorean was the addition of spatial displacement, which allowed the car to travel not only through time, but through space.
Soon after, Doc built additional DeLoreans for use by the Institute of Future Technology.
In 1931B
The DeLorean time machine burned out after Edna burnt down Hill Valley.
One version of the DeLorean was stolen by Edna Strickland who took it back to 1876 to light Beauregard Tannen's half-finished saloon on fire, accidentally burning down Hill Valley and the DeLorean in the process. When Doc and Marty arrive at her residence in the newly created 1931B, the vehicle is a rusted hulk of metal on Edna's property.
Non-canon or disputable information ends here.
Behind the scenes
A rack of vacuum tubes and other components strapped to the hood replaces the time control microchip.
In the animated series, the DeLorean is supposedly rebuilt, regardless of what Doc said about the dangers of time traveling.
In the first script of Back to the Future the time machine was shaped like a refrigerator. The idea was scrapped, for fear of kids climbing into and becoming trapped in refrigerators. Because an abandoned refrigerator can become an inescapable trap for a small child, laws in most nations require that the door be removed when such an item is disposed of.
Coincidentally, the final version of the time machine was composed of stainless steel, from which many refrigerators are made of.
At the end of Back to the Future, the alarm clock that the 1955 Doc had placed on the dashboard of the DeLorean could be seen. But in the beginning of Back to the Future Part II, it is no longer on the dashboard of the DeLorean.
At the start of the 1990 behind-the-scenes TV show The Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy, host Kirk Cameron arrived in an Old West town in the DeLorean.
Construction of the DeLorean for the films
The base of the DeLorean's nuclear reactor was constructed from a hubcap of a Dodge Polara. The engine sounds came from a Porsche but the engine was never replaced with a Porsche engine and kept stock.[5] Aircraft parts and blinking lights were added for additional effects.
Since all American models of the actual DMC-12 had speedometers that only read up to 85 miles per hour, a modified instrument cluster was installed, with a speedometer that reached 95. (A law from the administration of President Jimmy Carter prescribed that automobile speedometers could not read more than 85 m.p.h. with the intent that if people could not read speeds higher than that, that they wouldn't drive faster than that.)
In popular culture
The Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine defines a "delorean" as a unit of power equal to 1.21 jigowatts, and uses 88 miles per hour as a benchmark for comparing speeds. See: "speed cheetah".
In the game Borderlands there is an achievement on the Xbox 360 version entitled "1.21 Gigawatts" which is a clear reference to the amount of electricity needed for the time travel.
In the game Sonic CD (4th generation iPhone/iPod Only) there is an achievement called "88 miles per hour". Sonic's way of time traveling is similar to Back to the Future.
Similarly to Sonic CD, there is a trophy for the PS3 exclusive game Ratchet and Clank (Future): a Crack in Timecalled 88 MPH, though the action for doing so is by preventing a time travel rather than travelling through time.
In Grand Theft Auto V, there are several power stations which have the label "Danger: 1.21 GW", also referring to the amount of electricity needed.
The DeLorean Time Machine appears in Ready Player One as the vehicle of the protagonist Parzival in the OASIS. Parzival uses the DeLorean to win the race that is the first challenge and then speeds through the battlefield in the car during the final battle. The DeLorean is destroyed by MechaGodzilla during the final battle.
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Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/3/31/ghostbusters-ecto-1
Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/17/ariel-leader
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history-jxrr4
Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
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Back to the Future - Detailed storyline
Back to the Future - How to generate 1.21 Giggawatts / Jiggawatts with Mr Fusion
What is a Fat Bike ? And where did the idea of Fat Bikes come from ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/10/fat-bike-what-is-a-fat-bike-history
The Time Paradox explained - Back to the Future
The Sinclair C5
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/9/sinclair-c5-
Mini Jeep Mini Review
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/minicoolsterjeepreview
Hoverboards - Back to the Future
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How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/how-does-the-time-machine-work
The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/whydiddeloreanmotorcompanyfail
The DeLorean Motor Company - History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/deloreanmotorcompany
The Flux Capacitor - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/fluxcapacitor
Is Time Travel Possible ? And what would it take ? Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/istimetravelpossible
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Appearances
Futurepedia has a collection of images and media related to DeLorean time machine.
The Earth Day Special (Non-canonical appearance)
Back to the Future: The Animated Series (Note: It does not appear in the episode "A Friend In Deed", however, it is mentioned by Marty and Verne.)
The Simpsons Ride (Non-canonical appearance)
Star Trek/Legion of Super Heroes #5 (Non-canonical appearance)[2]
A Million Ways to Die in the West (Non-canonical appearance)
Deer in the Headlights (Music video for artist Owl City) (Non-canonical appearance)
LEGO Dimensions (Non-canonical appearance)
Ready Player One (film) (Non-canonical appearance)
Is Time Travel Possible
Is Time Travel Possible and What would it Take ?
⚡ The DeLorean Time Machine: A Fictional Guide for Real-World Time Travel Enthusiasts 🚗
For anyone exploring the question of "Is Time Travel Possible?", there is no better fictional case study than Dr. Emmett Brown's famous invention: the DeLorean Time Machine. Built from a standard DMC-12 sports car, its mechanism offers a concise and highly-structured set of requirements for temporal displacement that perfectly illustrates the fictional science needed for time travel.
1. The Core Scientific Device: The Flux Capacitor
The entire system hinges on the Flux Capacitor, a component that Doc Brown invented after slipping in his bathroom and hitting his head.
Function: It is the primary device that makes time travel possible. It is theorized to generate the necessary field to allow the vehicle to exit and re-enter the space-time continuum at a different point in time.
Appearance: A small metallic box with three glowing tubes arranged in a 'Y' shape, mounted between the driver and passenger seats.
Activation: The Flux Capacitor only engages when two critical criteria are met simultaneously: a power input of 1.21 gigawatts and a velocity of 88 miles per hour. When fully engaged, the tubes pulse rapidly before emitting a steady glow right before the jump.
Flux Capacitor Engagement=Power (1.21 GW)+Velocity (88 mph)
2. The Power Problem: 1.21 Gigawatts
Doc Brown's calculations determined that a colossal amount of energy—1.21 gigawatts (GW)—is required to breach the time barrier. This dramatic power requirement highlights the immense energy theoretical physics suggests would be needed for any real-world temporal shift.
Power SourceFilm EraDetailsPlutonium Reactor1985 (Original)The primary power source; plutonium is needed to generate the initial 1.21 GW.Lightning Bolt1955A contingency plan utilizing natural phenomena. The extreme, instantaneous voltage of a lightning strike provided the necessary 1.21 GW to the Flux Capacitor via a large antenna and hook.Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor2015 and laterA futuristic upgrade that made the DeLorean self-sufficient. It converts ordinary household garbage (organic and inorganic waste) into the required 1.21 GW.
Export to Sheets
3. The Velocity Requirement: 88 Miles Per Hour
The most famous operational constraint of the DeLorean is its speed requirement.
Requirement: The vehicle must be traveling at exactly 88 miles per hour (88 mph) to successfully make the jump.
Theories: While the films don't provide a deep technical explanation, the fan theory (often considered quasi-canon) suggests that this velocity is required for the vehicle to penetrate the momentary wormhole created by the Flux Capacitor before the temporal window closes. The stainless steel body of the DeLorean is also hinted to assist in energy dissipation during the jump.
4. The Interface: Time Circuits
The internal controls of the machine manage the destination, providing an easily understood user interface for a complex multi-dimensional journey.
Function: This unit allows the driver to select the destination time/date and monitor the current temporal location.
Three Displays:
Destination Time (Red): Where you are going.
Present Time (Green): Where you are now.
Last Time Departed (Yellow): Where you just left.
The DeLorean's design suggests that in fictional time travel, the primary challenge is not the means of travel, but the sheer energy and precision required to initiate the temporal shift.
Would you like me to create a similar blog guide discussing the theoretical possibility of wormholes based on real-world physics?
Can humans time travel? It’s a question that countless science fiction authors have asked, and have created answers to. Two of the most famous examples of this are Doctor Who and Back to the Future, as both have characters who find themselves able to time travel. However, the easiest one to take a deeper look at is probably Back to the Future, given that Doc Brown lived on Earth in the 80s and built his time machine out of an DeLorean.
The question still stands today: are we able to time travel? But first, in order to understand time travel and break down the DeLorean, we have to understand two big concepts:
The physics behind time travel, and what it takes to warp spacetime. If we approach the question with the belief that spacetime is something which is linear, or a fabric (although it could take multiple shapes, perhaps being fluid and constantly changing), then we have to understand what it would take to rupture spacetime and travel to a different point in it. However, there are also spatial phenomena which could be contenders for time travel.
Theories which already encompass time travel and our understanding of it. The biggest problem with understanding time travel is that no one’s ever managed to do it before. The closest we’ve come as of now are theories and science fiction ideas, both of which we can analyze for validity and see if they can explain more of how time travel could work.
Despite having these big categories in mind, time travel is still a very large unknown, making all theories about it mere speculation. However, could we use these speculative theories and a hearty spoonful of physics to actually determine whether we could build our own DeLorean time machines? Maybe! Here’s a good question to ask: before deciding if time travel is possible, what is time?
Is time Travel Possible
Defining Time
That’s probably the vaguest title for a section, especially since it’s defining one of the biggest immaterial ideas humans have had. But what is it?
Well, time fits into its own dimension. People always describe there being three dimensions, length, width, and depth — in this case, defining a definition as a measurable extent of some kind. The universe is considered to have around nine or ten dimensions, leaving spacetime with only three or four.
So if “time” is a measurable extent (which it is) then logically in the same way you should be able to move “up” the length of the universe, you should also be able to move into a different point in time.
Even in our experience, the phenomena of special relativity occurs, in which time can speed up or slow down depending upon how close to the speed of light you go.
Astronauts and other space farers are affected by this, often slightly younger than twins or people born the same time who had remained on Earth due to the speeds at which they had been moving and living at.
So that’s a breakdown of what exactly time is, although it’s still a relatively abstract concept.
However, assuming we can travel it, we have to address the next steps, which involves seeing how designing a time travel device could possibly work — and debunk the DeLorean. So what are the main questions to ask to figure out if it’s possible or not?
What are the physical undertakings of an object time travelling? From human knowledge of travelling from one place to another at fast speeds or through dangerous environments usually requires physical protection. If you did try to rip a DeLorean through the fabric of spacetime, what physical protection would be required to keep the DeLorean intact for the entire journey?
How much speed/force would you have to have to rupture the fabric of spacetime? In order to break the sound barrier, an object must travel at least 767 miles per hour. Although we haven’t been able to actually break the fabric of spacetime yet (assuming that spacetime is a fabric), which means the amount of force is also an unknown value.
Sound Barrier 767 mph
A jet makes it through the sonic boom, breaking the sound barrier.
What would the displacement be like for anyone experiencing time travel? We probably wouldn’t just send a machine through time, so let’s assume that this trip involves a human. How would the spacetime displacement affect the person? And how long would the trip from one time to another take?
How would space displacement occur and affect the landing of the time machine? So, let’s say that you did successfully launch your DeLorean, then what? If your goal is to travel back three months, the Earth is revolving around the sun.
This means that three months ago, the Earth was in a different place, leaving you in empty space in your DeLorean. So would you have to modulate your precise space coordinates for the landing date? Or is there actually universe movement which would bring you to a complete different location (since the universe is constantly expanding)?
Despite all these questions (and many more), there’s still the question of if we can actually turn a car into an epic time machine. So back to the basics: let’s tackle each question, deem if it works with theories and physics, and then evaluate if the DeLorean time machine is actually possible.
The best place to start is looking at what we already know about physics and how this could affect our capabilities of time travel.
Going Down The Wormhole: Physics And Wormholes
The first question to ask here is how spacetime is shaped, because this will affect travel first. It’s like figuring out the layout of the road before a street race: you want to know if it’s curved, flat, has many hills, is paved, etc. That way you can prepare. The same goes with the shape of spacetime and time travel.
Right now, spacetime is considered a fabric, in a flat, non-curved universe. Of course, we can’t prove this, but right now that’s what modern physics leans more towards. Time travelling would be leaving one point in spacetime and entering another (likely instantly, although it could take a lot longer). From our current knowledge here, spacetime can be warped by dense objects with a lot of gravity — like black holes. But at what point does this become officially “ripping” the fabric of spacetime?
Most physicists agree that there isn’t exactly a point in which the spacetime is “ripped”. On the assumption that spacetime is continuous, then it can’t necessarily be ripped, a term which is mostly used only in science fiction. However, if it’s a fabric, two points can fold in on one another, creating a pathway from one point in spacetime to another.
The Physics Wormhole
Sun, Nautron Star, Black Hole
This could include (but isn’t limited to) change of location, time, universe, or a combination of all three. This theory, known more commonly as “The Wormhole Theory”, is consistent with Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
However, no one has actually seen a wormhole, although there is speculation on whether or not black holes could actually provide a similar connection to wormholes.
So the easiest way for the DeLorean to get from point A to point B in time might seem like just creating a wormhole, but it probably can’t.
That’s because wormhole would likely be formed by creating two entangled black holes and then pulling them apart, making a pathway between the two black holes. At least that’s the way that would actually work in the universe.
There’s also the possibility of having a white hole and a black hole connect, forming a wormhole, which would work except for the fact that white holes don’t exist.
They’re the theoretical stark opposite of black holes, being a point in space where nothing could enter (unlike black holes, from which nothing can escape).
So this means in order to create a mini wormhole and travel back in time, the DeLorean would have to harness two black holes, entangle them, and then separate them again.
However, there’s another possibility for making wormholes, except this one involves ties between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics.
Applying Quantum Mechanics To Wormholes And Time Travel
Applying Quantum Mechanics to Wormhole and Time Travel
So we’ve already established that setting up a regular wormhole would be pretty difficult, but as it turns out, maybe there are answers when we look more at the details.
Going into the tiny world of quanta, scientists have started to see ties between the theoretical wormholes and spooky action at a distance.
One possibility involves string theory, in which tiny strings could snap and cause energy flow which could result in the creation of two black holes intertwined in the way necessary for a wormhole.
However, the energy would overpower the black holes, causing them to spiral off in separate directions and straight up collapse the wormhole.
Another analysis of this possibility resulted in the idea that the curvature of spacetime could possibly counteract the acceleration of the black holes, even though the whole idea is pretty unlikely.
On top of that, this wormhole wouldn’t permit time travel, meaning that even if you could create it and keep it stable, there wouldn’t be any time travel happening.
So it doesn’t look like quantum mechanics is a huge help in designing a wormhole, either, especially not one which could be created by a time-machine DeLorean.
So what other options do we have?
Well, time travel isn’t just narrowed down to a wormhole option — in fact, there are a lot of connections between quantum mechanics and time travel paradoxes and theories.
Deutsch’s Prescription — The Quantum Mechanics Of Time Travel Logic
So although we’re still disputing the idea of whether or not someone would be able to travel back in time, there are still the long running theories on what would happen if someone travelled back in time, and how the science would look at that. In 1991, a physicist named David Deutsch proposed a solution for time evolution equations, specifically ones which suggested resolution for both the grandfather paradox and nondeterminism.
Grandfather Paradox
The grandfather paradox is the idea that a time traveller goes back in time and kills their grandfather before their father is born, thus rendering it impossible for them to return to the present time.
Essentially a loop through which the grandfather is both lives and doesn’t, creating timelines in which the grandson exists and therefore creates the time machine and kills the grandfather as well as timelines in which the grandfather is dead, meaning the grandson is never born and can’t build the time machine to kill him, so he lives.
CTC Quantum System
Nondeterminism is the term for when a computer algorithm which will provide different output for the same input.
This is like going to a soda fountain and pushing on the button marked ‘Sprite’ but getting Sprite, Coke, Santa Fe, and Root Beer once each of the four times you try to get Sprite.
Some people don’t agree with the solution provided with Deutsch’s Prescription, because it involves the time traveller entering a parallel universe in which the quantum state is quantum superposition, meaning the time traveller both does and doesn’t exist at the same time — something with also technically can’t happen.
So in the Deutsch Prescription, the quantum system is split into two categories, state A and the CTC (closed time-like curves).
There is a tensor product which is a result of the combine states of both systems. He assumes that the density isn’t necessarily the same in both categories, but that the density state of the CTC is restricted to a fixed point.
This is how a CTC would work/is designed, as it’s basically the rotation which exists to create a timelike curve.
From there, he suggested that fixed points like this always exist, due to the fact that after a repeated trials with the CTC value, the expectation value will match. This just means that the percentage of potential outcomes will come out the same if tried again and again. To some extent, though, this implies that there must also be parallel universes in order for the prescription to be filled.
So You Want To Build A Time Machine?
Delorean Time Machine
But of course, in Back to the Future, Doc Emmett Brown is able to traverse spacetime in his souped-up car and a case of plutonium.
This, too, isn’t very likely — although most people consider time machines to require some exotic matter called “negative energy density”, the machine would have to work without it.
That’s because this matter is theoretical — and even if it did exist, it would likely exist in too-small quantities to be used in an actual time machine.
Thankfully, there’s a potential alternative: if you start within a doughnut shaped vacuum inside a normal sphere of matter, you could use focused gravitational fields to create a closed time-like curve (CTC).
To go back into the past, the traveller would have to loop around and around in the doughnut, constantly moving faster, until he/she moved sufficiently back in time.
However, the gravitational fields would have to be very precise and directed at certain locations.
A Final Breakdown — Is Time Travel Possible
The short answer is yes, by all means, theories allow time travel to be very possible and an option. Although it’s not something we as humans in our current development are capable of experiencing, perhaps time travel will have a bigger chance to occur in the distant future.
Is Time Travel Possible ?
Right now, there are still many aspects of the world we have to understand, and whether that’s breaking down paradoxes with quantum computers, exploring the theoretics of science and understanding how string theory connects classic mechanics and quantum mechanics, and understanding the fabric of the universe better…
well, it’s clear we’ve got our work cut out for us.
So the next time you think about tooling around the decades in a plutonium-loaded car, remember that getting there might be the hardest part!
Thank you so much for reading my article! I hope you enjoyed reading it, and maybe learned a little about time travel! If you’d like to talk more, give feedback, or just comment, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, follow this Medium account, or even email me at amesett@gmail.com!
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Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
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Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
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Ghostbusters Afterlife - The Proton Pack
The Main piece of equipment for any real Ghostbusters is the famous Proton Pack ! as featured in Ghostbusters Afterlife
But what is it ? And how does it work ? ….. It features in all the Ghostbusters films, Ghostbusters 1, Ghostbusters II, and Ghostbusters Afterlife
So buckle up for this Blog to the Future feature on the science behind Ghost catching !
The Proton Pack: Unlicensed Nuclear Accelerator Bio Description 💥
Bio Description:
This is the ultimate resource on the Proton Pack, the iconic, backpack-sized particle accelerator that makes the Ghostbusters the heroes we call! Invented by Dr. Egon Spengler, this device is officially known as a "Positron Collider"and is the primary tool for subduing and containing Negatively Charged Ectoplasmic Entities (ghosts).
Dive into the science behind the most famous piece of fictional paranormal elimination gear ever created. Learn the function of every component, from the Cyclotron and Power Cell to the Neutrona Wand (Particle Thrower) it attaches to. Explore its construction (originally fiberglass shells on military surplus ALICE frames) and its core function: generating a highly-focused proton beam strong enough to hold a ghost over a Ghost Trap. Whether you're a cosplayer, a fan of movie technology, or looking to hire the full Ghostbusters experience (complete with the Ecto-1C and gear), understanding the Proton Pack is essential. Just remember: Don't cross the streams!
Key Components and Technical Features of the Proton Pack
The Proton Pack is a sophisticated piece of ghost-catching technology, essentially a miniature, portable particle accelerator.
Component NameIn-Universe FunctionPhysical Description / FeatureNeutrona WandThe hand-held device that fires the particle beam.Also known as the Particle Thrower. Features lights, sound effects, and an extending barrel mechanism in hero props.CyclotronThe main circular chamber on the bottom of the pack's shell.Contains four rotating red lights to visually indicate operation.Power Cell / InjectorsProvides power and regulates the energy cell.The vertical box and light-bar section on the side of the shell, often featuring scrolling blue lights.Particle BeamThe stream of radially polarized protons fired from the wand.Used to electrostatically control and lasso negatively charged ghosts.Motherboard / ALICE FrameThe structural backing of the entire pack.The pack shell is typically bolted to an ALICE frame (military surplus backpack frame) for wearability.V-HookThe metal bracket connecting the wand to the pack.Allows the Neutrona Wand to be securely holstered when not in use.:
#ProtonPack #GhostbustersEquipment #NeutronaWand #GhostbustersTech #PositronCollider #Cyclotron#GhostbustersCosplay #EgonSpengler #UnlicensedNuclearAccelerator
How does the Ghostbusters Proton Pack work ?
GHOSTBUSTERS - The Proton Pack
The Proton Pack is the most powerful tool that the Ghostbusters carry on a daily basis, equipped with a power source that has a half life of 5000 years, it’s not prone to running out of power. In Ghostbusters II However, it must be recharged at times.
The Proton Pack is an ‘Unlicensed Nuclear Accelerator Backpack’ that consists of raw nuclear energy and Protons.
The Proton Pack is mounted onto an Army issue A.L.I.C.E. Pack Frame with adjustable shoulder and kidney straps and belt, the Proton Pack consists of two parts:
The Nuclear Accelerator Backpack (Proton Pack, Positron Collider, Cyclotron.) and Particle Thrower (Proton Gun, Ion Wand, Ion Cannon, Neutrona Wand.).
Once you turn the Proton Pack on, you can also switch on the Particle Thrower. The Accelerator accelerates the Protons from the Cyclotron on the pack into the Particle Thrower, and you get an extremely powerful but destructive particle stream that consists of Protons and raw nuclear energy.
This is capable of entangling a ghost against its will (An excellent way to think of the particle stream would be as a lasso for ghosts.).
"The Proton Pack is not a toy." …Egon Spengler
Proton Pack
All ghosts are made up of Psychokinetic Energy (Which consists of Electrons, Neutrons, and the infamous substance known as "Ectoplasm".).
The Electron is one of three elements in an Atom (The other two being the Proton and the Neutron.). Electrons carry a negative charge (As does Ectoplasm.), whereas a Neutron has no charge and a Proton has a positive charge.
Negative energy is no match for positive energy. When a person fires the particle stream at a ghost, the ghost will become entangled in the stream and will become trapped (Unless the spirit is more powerful and so the power in the stream will have to be increased accordingly.).
The Particle Thrower also features a control for stream length. This proves invaluable when tracking a ghost that floats.
The Proton Pack can disintegrate a paper cup, cut through steel, chop down big trees, and blast a dam.
The particle stream is harmless to humans on low power. It was later discovered that particle streams could be adjusted to simulate sunlight, in order to vaporize Vampires, and temporarily transform werewolves back into their human form until the next full moon; To permanently cure a werewolf, Wolfsbane Soup is needed.
The Proton Pack has two settings:
Setting 1: Attack. Generates the most energetic stream of particles, expressly designed to weaken an entity's psychokinetic energy and it's connection to our time-space continuum (referred to officially as "Ectopresence")
The GBI pack is set to still emit a weak Confinement field even in Attack mode--GBI Case File GBNY-1986-4/405 (code name "RoboBuster") demonstrates the necessity of not using a "pure" Attack mode.
Setting 2: Confinement. Generates a positively charged "cage" around the entity being confined; however, the Confinement is only effective if the entity's Ectopresence has been reduced to a valence of zero--otherwise it can easily break the Confinement stream.
Once Confined, standard procedure is to capture the entity in a Ghost Trap.
Safety Precautions:
There are two warnings about the Proton Pack that should be taken very seriously:
1) Do not cross the streams:
This process is extremely dangerous as it causes Total Protonic Reversal, which results in the molecules of any nearby person to explode at the speed of light. Information on this situation is sketchy due to the rarity of it ever happening, it has only occurred once where those participating have survived.
Please refer to the case where the Ghostbusters fought Gozer for more details.
2) Do not allow the pack to overheat:
This in some ways is similar to Total Protonic Reversal, however on a more limited scale. It is however still extremely dangerous and it is rare for a person in the vicinity to survive a blast caused by overheating.
A standard radius of destruction from four Proton Packs has been estimated as a quarter of a mile. There are twenty seconds at maximum boost before the Proton Packs overload.
Optional Extras: Rifle Scope.
F/N Adapted from information gathered from The Proton Lab.; some fan fictions have speculated additional settings on later models
The Science of The Ghostbuster's Upgraded Proton Pack
In practical terms, the Proton Pack is a miniature particle accelerator that ensnares negatively charged ectoplasmic entities inside a positively-charged proton beam.
The term "Proton Pack" is not used in the original movie at all — it was originally described as a Positron Collider.
It was not until the subway tunnel scene in the second movie that the word is actually used. So, let's take a look at the physics behind the Proton Pack and see whether it is possible to build one.
Overview of the Proton Pack
Proton Pack Parts
Easter Egg in the new film Trailer …..
· The Ghostbusters trailer contains an Easter egg hidden in the whiteboard filled with physics equations. This Easter egg goes by quickly but if you pause at just the right moment, you will see one "equation" on top is a URL that spells paranormalstudieslab.com.
Fans will recognize this is a nod to the original movie as The Paranormal Studies Lab was the name of the laboratory run by Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) at Columbia University.
· Eagle-eye fans who managed to pick up on this and visit the URL will come across a hidden web page on the physics of the Proton Pack, as explained by MIT particle physicist, James Maxwell.
James curiously shares a name with James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist famous for formulating the laws of electromagnetism. The laws of electromagnetism and special relativity play an important part in the physics of the proton pack.
The Original Proton Pack: The Cyclotron
*As Maxwell points out, the original Ghostbusters Proton Pack, as designed by Dr. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), was a cyclotron.
This was one of the earliest types of particle accelerators ever developed. The device invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1932 works by accelerating charged particles along a spiral path.
Back then, cyclotrons were the most powerful particle accelerators around until they were replaced by the more advanced synchrotrons back in the 1950s though they are still used today in the first stage of some particle accelerators.
Inside the cyclotron, a charged particle is injected into the middle of the chamber where it is accelerated between two D-shaped electrodes or "dees."
In the case of the Ghostbusters' Proton Pack, that charged particle is a positron or positively charged electron. The magnetic field passing through the dees bends the particle's path, making it travel in a circle, while the electric field between the dees accelerates the particle, giving it a "kick" to make it go faster.
When the positron beam has enough energy, it strikes a metal target to release a beam of protons.
The kick the particle gets from the electric field is very similar to a parent pushing a child on a swing. If a parent times the push at just the right moment, the child gains more energy and swings higher and higher.
Instead of having one parent pushing from behind, there is also an adult in front who pushes in the opposite direction. If that parent in front also pushes at the right moment (and does not get hit in the face), the child will gain more energy and continue to swing higher and higher with each push.
Just as the child on the swing in our example gets two pushes, the positron gets two kicks. It gets one kick as it passes through the gap but as it circles back and passes through the dee in the opposite direction, the electric field switches direction to give it another kick.
This was a significant advance over previous particle accelerators. Previous accelerators, or linacs, just accelerated particles along straight lines. Inside the cyclotron, the magnetic field bends the beam, making it curve back on itself so it could pass through the gap where it could be accelerated multiple times. As the particle gains more energy, it spirals outward.
When the particles reach the rim, they exit the dees through a small gap to hit a metal target located at some point beyond the rim of the chamber.
This creates secondary particles, in this case protons (the positively charged partice found in the nucleus of an atom), which may be guided outside of the cyclotron and into instruments for analysis.
Proton beams look nothing like in the movie. Proton beams are (usually) collimated, i.e., they travel in straight lines. In the movies, they are seen to whip about and undulate wildly; this is probably done for visual effect.
Proton Pack Upgrade: The Synchrotron
The size of the accelerator is not the only practical consideration. As the positron spirals outward, it needs to sync up with each "kick," or the cyclotron resonant frequency.
This is the time it takes for the particle to complete a circle and depends on the strength of the magnetic field, the electric charge, and its mass.
If the particles go fast enough to approach light speed, its mass increases as relativistic effects come into play. This changes the cyclotron resonance and the beam goes out of phase with the oscillating electric field — the particle beam no longer gets the kicks at the right time.
The classical cyclotron is therefore only capable of accelerating particles up to a few percent of the speed of light.
To get even higher energy particles, the synchrotron solves this problem by varying the strength of the magnetic field. As the speed increases so too does the magnetic field. Instead of moving out in a spiral, the changing magnetic field exerts a greater centripetal force on thfaster-moving particle to keep it along the same circular path.
This means that the Proton Pack seen in the reboot is a far more powerful accelerator (Go, Erin!) but the science does not stop there.
To make all this possible, the Ghostbusters have to find a way to generate the much stronger magnetic fields needed to keep a charged particle moving in a circular path about the size of a back pack. To do this, they turn to superconductors and cryogen systems to generate these magnetic fields.
And Powerful Magnet to keep it Compact
To get the intense magnetic fields to make a synchrotron work, the Proton Pack uses superconduting magnets.
The resistance of all metals becomes lower as they as cooled but superconductors are special. At a certain critical temperature, their resistace falls to zero.
This means that an electric current flowing through a loop of superconducting wire can persist indefinitely with no power source. This allows superconductors to handle much larger currents than metallic conductors to produce more intense magnetic fields.
To achieve this, superconducting magnets need to be kept cold, at cryognic temperatures.
The new Proton Pack needs a cryogen system, possibly using liquid Helium to keep the superconductors at approximately minus 269.15 degrees Celsius or minus 452.47 Fahrenheit.
This keeps the superconductors at the temperatures they need to be to handle the large currents needed to generate the intense magentic fields for the synchrotron.
Crossing Streams: Does the Science Measure Up?
In an interview, Maxwell said that the movie's director Paul Feig made a lot of effort to make the science in Ghostbusters seem as realistic as possible, as we can see from the Proton Pack's blueprints.
Maxwell points out in the video that, while the science behind the Proton Pack is sound, there are limitations. For one, it's not possible to actually build a synchrotron particle accelerator into an actual back pack.
The technical considerations, e.g., getting the intense magnetic fields to make things work, are not practical.
One of the interesting challenges as one of the show's science advisers was figuring how actual science and technology could influence the prop design.
As a fan of the original Ghostbusters, he admitted that seeing scientists play the role of heroes, and saving the day, was one of the things that piqued his interest in the sciences as a child.
Hopefully, layering real physics into an awesome science based ghost-fighting weapon will do the same when the new Ghostbusters comes out, and capture a new generation of scientists like it did James Maxwell.
To find out more fun Future Facts by clicking our Blogs below……….!!! Please Share …..
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The Proton Pack
Ghostbusters - P.K.E Meter - How does it work ?
We explain how Ghostbusters P.K.E. Meter works, which is similarly to a EMF Detector or a Gas Detector, it is designed specifically to locate P.K.E. (Psychokinetic Energy) in an area.
It is set to register P.K.E. due to this being the substance that makes up most paranormal entities. The P.K.E. Meter tells the operator if an entity is in the area through both indication of its arms with blinking indicator lights, but also through the LED readout screen.
The P.K.E. Meter also informs the operator of the ghost's classification, and how strong it is. Read more by click on our ‘ Blog to the Future ‘ Blog !
Ghostbusters - P.K.E Meter - How does it work ?
Ghostbusters ! So what is the PKE Meter and how does it work ?
The Ghosbusters P.K.E. Meter works similarly to a EMF Detector or a Gas Detector, it is designed specifically to locate P.K.E. (Psychokinetic Energy) in an area. As featured in Ghostbusters 1, Ghostbusters 2 and Ghostbusters Afterlife
It is set to register P.K.E. due to this being the substance that makes up most paranormal entities. The P.K.E. Meter tells the operator if an entity is in the area through both indication of its arms with blinking indicator lights, but also through the LED readout screen.
The P.K.E. Meter also informs the operator of the ghost's classification, and how strong it is. The P.K.E. Meter's power source is just a pair of standard AA batteries.
But what is Psychokinetic Energy ?
Psychokinetic energy (PKE, psionic or psychic energy/force) involves activity dealing with conscious mental energy directly affecting physical objects. It is very specific to consciousness, will, emotion, memory, and other qualities equated with the mind. This energy is very common in Kaf, particularly in the ethereal plane.
Psychokinesis
An umbrella term that is used to describe a variety of abilities that directly manipulate this mental force. In the Arcane Realm, the field of study concerned with phenomena produced by this is called parapsychology.
Research has shown that psychokinetic energy has a sympathetic relationship with electromagnetism. This is believed to be the reason how spirits have PK serve as their sustaining life force, how the neural activity of physical brains produce PK, how PK can affect physical objects, or how electronics can detect the presence of PKE.
Spirits and Psychics are in tune with PKE to the level that they have the access to the following abilities:
P.K.E Meter
Telekinesis
The ability to manipulate objects by the power of thought. Telekinetic force works roughly as an analog to electrostatic force, a mental field generated from the psychic can produce waves that polarized objects which can be attracted or repelled by their field.
Telepathy
Transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals via PKE.
Extrasensory Perception
Perception outside the known physical senses, instead relying on PKE.
Precognition
Perception of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals via PKE.
Dowsing
Ability to locate objects, sometimes using a tool called a dowsing rod.
Energy medicine
Healing by channeling psychokinetic energy.
Levitation
Bodily levitation and flying, typically by pushing off the ground.
Precognition, premonition and precognitive dreams
Perception of events before they happen.
Psychometry or psychoscopy
Obtaining information about a person or object, usually by touching or concentrating on the object or a related object.
Remote viewing
Gathering of information at a distance.
Retrocognition or post-cognition
Perception of past events that one was physically present or aware of at the time.
Faith healing
Diagnosing or curing diseases using religious devotion or similar strong beliefs.
Aura reading
Perception of energy fields surrounding people, places and things.
Astral projection or mental projection
An out-of-body experience in which consciousness becomes separate from the physical body.
After the empirical revolution in academia, mental force was reexamined with its own specific field of study, parapsychology. It was found that spirits use PKE in the same way organic beings use the energy from breaking down chemical molecules into electrical energy.
Spirits in fact use ESP as their way to perceive their environment and respond to stimuli of the ethereal plane, and what they draw upon to manifest in the physical plane.
Despite its development for spirits, it is possible for physical beings to harness this power in their minds.
Those who take it upon themselves to tap into this potential and develop these abilities are known as espers or simply psychics.
P.K.E Meter with the Gigameter
P.K.E Meter
One interesting premise of the P.K.E. Meter is that it can be used to track human biorhythms for use in locating missing humans. However these readings are weaker due to this not being the P.K.E. Meter's primary function. The meters can be adjusted to pick up the location of the Proton Pack.
How to Read a P.K.E. Meter: A P.K.E. Meter measures the Psychokinetic energy in the current area. In order to correctly assess the reading, you must view this guide.
200-300 = No Threat, small to no paranormal activity.
301-450 = Trouble, you have a faint trace of a spook.
451-550 = Biblical Proportions, don't let anyone in your house named "Zuul".
Now that you know how to correctly process the information, now you need to know some other tips.
If the meter is reading very close in between 300-305, you may be picking up a trail of a ghoul that was already in your area. In other words, you are seeing his residual traces.
If you are reading anywhere from a 450-455 when a ghost is present, you are looking at a Class V apparition, a ghost not to be taken lightly.
C/N Above entry sourced from GBHQ's Egon's Lab by Dr. Riddle.
Safety Precautions: There is only one warning about the P.K.E. Meter that should be taken very seriously:
Overload: It is not uncommon for a P.K.E. Meter to overload. This ranges from mild electric shock, to a slight burning of skin and even self-destruct. The P.K.E. Meter is by far the most fragile and sensitive piece of equipment, so treat it carefully.
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Ghostbusters Afterlife - Ghost Trap
Ghostbusters Afterlife A deeper look into the world of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusting with the Ghost Trap ! We look at yet another essential part of the Ghosbusters equipment the Ghost Trap or Moen Trap - How does it work ? We explain here……The Ghost Trap as seen in Ghostbusters 1, Ghostbuster 2, and Ghostbuster afterlife has been described as a ‘miniature Ecto Containment Unit’
It utilizes the same basic design as it's larger counterpart; a series of lasers designed specifically for the incarceration of spirits, however the overall size and power of an entity can determine how many entities can be contained in one ghost trap.
The smaller the entities, the more can be contained in the trap. But the bigger the ghost, the less spirits can be contained. When two or more ghosts are trapped together, their molecules merge and cannot be separated without releasing both.
Ghostbusters - Ghost Trap
As seen in Ghostbusters 1, Ghostbuster 2, and Ghostbuster afterlife has been described as a ‘miniature Ecto Containment Unit’
It utilizes the same basic design as it's larger counterpart; a series of lasers designed specifically for the incarceration of spirits, however the overall size and power of an entity can determine how many entities can be contained in one ghost trap.
The smaller the entities, the more can be contained in the trap. But the bigger the ghost, the less spirits can be contained. When two or more ghosts are trapped together, their molecules merge and cannot be separated without releasing both.
Ghostbusters - Ghost Trap
The Trap is an Electromagnetic Field Generator that is encased in an extremely strong and powerful Steel Grid and the EMF draws ghosts into the trap.
It’s connected to a six to eight feet cable, which is connected to a "Stomp-on Pedal". The Cable Wire can be worn on a tiny hook/notch on the standard issue pistol belt. The ghost trap is operated as follows, one team member holds the spirit in a confinement stream, and a second team member rolls a standard Ghost Trap under the spirit.
The operator must shout "Trap Open!" He then activates the Stomp-on Pedal, activating the first stage if the trap.
Now open is ready to receive the ghostly prisoner. The operator then presses the Stomp-on Pedal once more to activate the EMF, the ghost is then sucked into the Trap and the Trap is then closed by removal of the Trap operator's foot from the pedal.
It also runs on a rechargeable battery that lasts up to 48 Hours. So after trapping a ghost, be sure to get to the division headquarters as soon as possible, so you can contain the ghost in the Ecto Containment Unit and recharge the Trap's battery.
Safety Precautions: There are three warnings about the Ghost Trap that should be taken very seriously:
Do not look into the trap:
It is not stated what exactly would happen if a human were to look into a Ghost Trap, however it is believed by most that the glare could cause eye damage and even blindness.
All Video credits goto GHOSTBUSTERSNW visit them here at https://www.gbfans.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47079
GHOST TRAP "Don't look at the trap!"
Do not overload the trap:
Ghost Traps are extremely small pieces of equipment, and can only contain a certain amount of P.K.E., even if it is from a number of small ghosts. Generally the overloaded Trap would explode, then releasing its contents. Also only a certain number of ghosts can be contained in a Ghost Trap.
Do not forget to recharge the trap:
This is extremely important, a Ghost Trap must be at 100% charge to work at peak efficiency. If a Trap is at less then 100% charge when it leaves the division headquarters then it is at risk of loosing it's charge when in operation, resulting in a similar explosion to a overload.
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Check out the New Ghostbusters Afterlife trailer here …..
To find out more fun Future Facts by clicking our Blogs below……….!!! Please Share …..
Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/3/31/ghostbusters-ecto-1
Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/17/ariel-leader
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history-jxrr4
Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history
Back to the Future - Detailed storyline
Back to the Future - How to generate 1.21 Giggawatts / Jiggawatts with Mr Fusion
What is a Fat Bike ? And where did the idea of Fat Bikes come from ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/10/fat-bike-what-is-a-fat-bike-history
The Time Paradox explained - Back to the Future
The Sinclair C5
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/9/sinclair-c5-
Mini Jeep Mini Review
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/minicoolsterjeepreview
Hoverboards - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/12/13/hoverboards-
How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/how-does-the-time-machine-work
The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/whydiddeloreanmotorcompanyfail
The DeLorean Motor Company - History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/deloreanmotorcompany
The Flux Capacitor - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/fluxcapacitor
Is Time Travel Possible ? And what would it take ? Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/istimetravelpossible
Biography Marty McFly (Michael J Fox)
Great Scott !!! 2015 ‘the Future’ has been and gone…..But what happened in the Past ?
Read the Biography of Marty McFly ( Michael J Fox) - Biff Tannen ( Tom Wilson) - Lorraine Baines McFly ( Lea Thompson) - Jennifer Park ( Claudia Wells ) ( Elisabeth Shue )
Marty McFly: The Ultimate Time-Traveling Teenager 🛹
Bio Description:
Welcome to the definitive source on Marty McFly, the reluctant time traveler who redefined the 1980s. From his humble roots in Hill Valley, California, to his accidental, era-hopping adventures, this biography covers it all. Explore the life of the guitar-shredding, skateboard-riding, self-proclaimed "chicken" who navigated family paradoxes, saved his best friend Doc Brown, and made the DeLorean Time Machine an icon. Dive into his style, his complex family life, his relationship with Jennifer, and the critical moments that took him Back to the Future. He's more than just a fictional character—he's the timeless symbol of seizing the moment and shaping your own destiny.
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#BackToTheFuture
#MichaelJFox
#TimeTravel
#HillValley
#80sPopCulture
#BTTF
#MovieCharacters
#TeenageHero
Marty McFly biography Plus - Biff - George - Jennifer - Loranine
Martin Seamus "Marty" McFly
Marty McFly
Marty was born on June 12 1968 in Hill Valley, California to George and Lorraine McFly.
He was the youngest of three children. He had a brother Dave, who was born in 1963, and sister Linda, who was born in 1965, a family of Irish descent. He has an uncle Joey, who is serving a prison sentence in 1985 and been denied parole again.
There is an implication that Marty is ashamed of his family and does not spend much time at home, preferring to hang out with Doc, Jennifer, or the guys in his band, The Pinheads.
However, Marty's relationships with his family changed after he returns from 1955, with him no longer being alienated by his parents and his father working as a local college professor and a successful novelist in the alternate timeline he inadvertently created.
Marty also meets his great-great paternal grandparents Seamus and Maggie, when he was stranded in 1885. He also meets their infant son William, Marty's great grandfather.
Seamus and Maggie McFly
Through his interaction with Seamus and Maggie, Marty discovers that Seamus had a brother named Martin, thus Marty's great-great granduncle.
By 2015, Marty has married his girlfriend Jennifer and has two children, Martin "Marty" Jr. and Marlene.
Little is known about Marty's life prior to the first Back to the Future film, except for the fact that he set fire to the living-room rug when he was 8 years old (in a statement of Marty's to his future parents).
He met his friend Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown when he was around fourteen after hearing that Brown was a dangerous lunatic. Marty, being the “red-blooded American teenager” he was, wanted to go see what it was all about for himself.
Marty McFly and Doc Brown
He found Doc’s lab and was fascinated by all his inventions. When Doc caught him, he was glad to have someone who liked his work and their friendship started there
Marty McFly in Docs garage
Marty McFly “Rock and Roll”
Marty met his future girlfriend Jennifer Parker in elementary school, although they became more acquainted after the fourth grade.
Jennifer Parker and Marty McFly
“I Love you” Marty and Jennifer
When Marty was fifteen, he sneaked out of the house one evening and set off on his skateboard to meet his friends. However, his mother heard the sound of the skateboard and went after Marty in the car.
At some point, Marty became acquainted with Douglas J. Needles, who would frequently goad him into doing foolish things.
Douglas J Needles
In 1985, Marty plays guitar with his group The Pinheads and likes listening to Huey Lewis and the News, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Van Halen. Eventually, Marty became the lead guitar player of his band and dreamed of one day becoming a rich and famous rockstar.
Pinheads Back to the Future
He is also a talented skateboarder and proves to be an excellent pistol shot, a skill he has honed by endlessly playing shooting games such as Wild Gunman at his local 7-Eleven.
Marty is a friendly, easy going but accident-prone everyman who can sometimes lack critical thinking skills; he is nevertheless brave in the face of danger and can be very quick-witted and intelligent.
He has shown some good and basic street fighting skills and often throws punches in hand-to-hand confrontations.
Biff and Marty McFly
Bifff and Marty
He is loyal to his family and friends, regardless of whether or not he is estranged from them. His major character flaw is his pride, which causes him to take unnecessary risks to show others that he is not a chicken.
However, during a visit in 1885, when his ancestor Seamus McFly mentions that his brother Martin was killed in an argument after someone questioned his bravery, Marty begins to re-think his stance on what other people think of him.
Seamus McFly
By 2015, Marty's life has spiraled out of control due to long-term pain from a hand injury that leaves him unable to play guitar.
2015 Marty McFly struggling to play guitar
This injury occurs in 1985, after Marty accepts school enemy Douglas J. Needles' challenge to a road race after being labeled a chicken and crashes into a Rolls-Royce.
In 1885, Biff Tannen's great-grandfather Buford goads Marty into a showdown, which Marty wins despite refusing to draw a gun against Buford. Once he returns to 1985, he remembers both this event and Seamus' advice and politely declines Needles' challenge, avoiding the collision that would have ruined his musical talents.
Rolls Royce Incident
This event shows newfound maturity as he often loses his temper when called a chicken. Over the years, Marty learns how to make his decisions on his own terms instead of being influenced by others, thereby changing his future for the better.
MEETING DOC BROWN
On October 2, 1982, Marty was playing his guitar in his garage when he was suddenly confronted by Needles and his gang, who wished to "borrow" Marty's interocitor tube.
Needles was scheduled to play with his band, The Tabascos, that night. However, he had blown the interocitor tube in his guitar amplifier.
Marty was willing to rent his interocitor tube to Needles for $5.00, but Needles replied that he would pay tomorrow when he would bring the tube back. However, Marty accidentally caused Needles to drop the tube when he forcefully grabbed Needles' arm and insisted to be payed upfront.
Marty was then told by Needles that he had to get him a new tube and bring it to the clocktower by four o'clock, or else Needles would beat him up.
Marty was initially hesitant to agree, citing his lack of money and unwillingness to steal. However, he agreed when Needles goaded him by calling him "chicken". Needles then took Marty's guitar and told him he'd give it back when he got him a new tube.
Marty went to a music store and tried to buy one, but was told by the shop attendant that all of the stock was sold to ELB Enterprises. Marty left to go to Dr. Brown's garage to ask for one, but the attendant warned him that Dr. Brown was a real nut case.
ELB Enterprises - Dr. E Brown
Dr. Brown set a series of traps which Marty had to overcome to gain entrance to the garage. After getting an electrical shock after using the keypad on the electrified gate around the garage, a recording stated that he was not "one to foresee" that happening.
Realizing that the wording was unusual, Marty picked up that it was a code, and punched in 1-2-4-C on the keypad. He tried to knock on the door, but no-one answered.
After deciding not to break the window, he attempted to find more clues and found a key underneath an unusual KNOW ENTRY sign. Once inside, he set off elaborately set up a series of objects that caused a chain reaction resulting in him being captured in a net. He pushed his skateboard at the reset switch, which then released the net.
Marty's first meeting with Doc Brown
Doc Browns Garage
Marty and Doc Brown
Einstein, Dr. Brown's dog, then playfully jumped up on Marty, and Dr. Brown himself then entered to greet his guest. He told Marty to call him Doc, as in "What's up, Doc!", and asked him if he was here to apply for the assistant position that he said he had advertised.
Marty told him that he had, and Doc told him that he was impressed that he made his way through the traps, especially his decision to release the net with his skateboard.
Marty then admitted that he hadn't come to apply for a job, but had instead come for an interocitor tube. After Marty assured him that he hadn't intended to rob him, Doc admitted that he had never put out an advertisement for an assistant, but offered Marty the job anyway.
Doc told Marty that he threw out all of the tubes, as he only wanted the box for his Static-O-Matic electric hair chair. Marty then grabbed the tubes out of the trashcan, and went back to Needles.
He gave Needles one of the tubes, and told him that he had stolen the tube from Dr. Emmett Brown. This resulted in Needles being scared, as he knew that Emmett Brown worked on the atomic bomb, and there were rumors that he was radioactive.
Aliases
Marty has had many aliases through the Back to the Future series, usually due to encountering his relatives at some point, such as Lorraine mistakenly thinking his name is "Calvin Klein", due to it being Marty's brand of underwear.
Calvin Klein aka Marty McFly
In the first film, Marty uses the alias of "Darth Vader, an extraterrestrial from the Planet Vulcan" while wearing a radiation suit in an attempt to coerce George into asking Lorraine out to the dance.
Marty McFly as Darth Vader
In Part III, Marty uses the name "Clint Eastwood" when asked by Maggie McFly and later by Buford Tannen. In Back to the Future: The Game, he uses one of the three aliases; "Sonny Crockett", "Harry Callahan", and "Michael Corleone".
Marty Marty as Clint Eastwood
Marty McFly as Clint Eastwood
Biff Howard Tannen
Biff Tannen
Is a fictional character in the Back to the Future trilogy. Thomas F. Wilson plays Biff in all three films as well as the Universal Studios ride, and voiced the character in the animated series.
Biff is the main antagonist of the first and second films. Biff's great-grandfather, Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen, fills a similar role in the third.
Buford Mad Dog Tannen
The character is portrayed as a tall, aggressive, dim-witted and misogynistic bully who obtains what he wants by intimidating others into doing his work for him, or by cheating.
He and his family members are shown to misuse idioms in ways that make them appear stupid and pathetic despite their intention to insult or scare. His favorite insult is "butthead".
Mad Dog Tannen
Mad Dog Tannen
The character of Biff is developed with a history that he was born in Hill Valley, California.
Biff Tannen
He is identified as the great-grandson of Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen, son of Irving “Kid” Tannen and grandfather of Griff Tannen.
Rather than studying in high school, he is depicted as preferring to bully George McFly into doing his homework for him while he drinks and hangs out with his friends.
Feared by most of his schoolmates, he is less brave without his gang (Match, Skinhead, and 3-D). The only person at Hill Valley High school that Biff is depicted as being afraid of, is Mr. Strickland.
Biff had been living with his grandmother, Gertrude Tannen, at 1809 Mason Street for some time by November 1955. In 1955, Biff was depicted as frequently having been seen driving his black 1946 Ford Deluxe convertible around Hill Valley.
Biffs Relationships
In 1955, Biff had a crush on Lorraine Baines who does not return the sentiments. In the original 1985, Biff's marital status is unknown as no mention of a wife was ever made in the trilogy.
The alternate 1985 reveals that Lorraine, widowed after the murder of George McFly, ended up marrying Biff, in 1973, so that her children could live a better life.
In a video clip after their wedding, Biff is asked, “how does it feel?”, to which he replies, “Third time's the charm.” Hence, it stands to reason, that in the original timeline, Biff would have been married (and perhaps divorced) at least once and presumably, twice before.
By 2015, Biff has a teenage grandson, Griff, suggesting that Biff had at least one child by 1985. The animated series reveals that Biff has a son, Biff Jr.
George McFly
Was born on April 1, 1938 in Hill Valley, California. He was the only child of Arthur McFly and his Canadian-born wife Sylvia Miskin, who were living on Sycamore Street as of 1955.
His parents Arthur McFly and Sylvia Miskin were married in 1936. He was also the grandson of William McFly the first member of the McFly family to be born in the United States.
When he was 12, he nearly stood up for a friend, Billy Stockhausen, who was being bullied, but did not and has hated himself for it ever since.
In 1954, he tried reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, but the advice he gained from this book made people stay away from him even more — with the exception of Biff who, on their first encounter at high school, rubbed a hero sandwich in George's face.
George was probably bullied from a very early age, not just by Biff but by other classmates such as Mark Dixon and even by some adults including Stanford S. Strickland
He had been attracted to Lorraine for some time by 1955 (they may have met for the first time upon entering high school) but was too scared to ask her out.
George watching Lorraine get undressed, before getting hit by her father's car.
On November 5, 1955, George and Lorraine fell in love, when Sam knocked George over in his car due to George falling out of a tree into the road (he had been "birdwatching", watching Lorraine get undressed from the tree).
The Baines family took George into the house and Lorraine felt sorry for him. In a "Florence Nightingale" effect, she fell in love with him and they had their first date a week later, at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
George had been considering college but waited until the deadline to decide whether or not to send in the application. He knew his father would talk him out of it, so he likely gave up.
Original 1985
George in 1985 before history was rewritten
George and Lorraine were married on December 7, 1958, and moved into Lyon Estates, their first child Dave was born in 1963. followed by Linda McFly in 1966 and Marty in 1968.
Despite these changes, By 1985, George stayed much the same as he was when he was 17.
George McFly
George McFly and Biff (Supervisor)
He was dominated by his now supervisor Biff, most of his colleagues and even his neighbours and even kept the same hair styler.
George did not develop the courage to stand up for himself or even for his wife, which depressed her so much that she became an alcoholic, a smoker and overweight. The story of George's life would be rewritten when Marty traveled back into the past.
JENNIFER PARKER
Claudia Wells
Jennifer Parker
Biographical information
Date of birth October 29, 1967
Age (1955) - Not yet born - Age (1985) 17/18 - Age (2015) - 47/48 - Age (2045) - 77/78
Physical description
Gender Female
Hair colour : Brown (Part 1), Red (Parts 2/3), Blonde (Series), Black/Pink/Blonde (Game)
Eye colour :Brown – (Green (Game)
Behind-the-scenes information
Played by
Claudia Wells (Part 1) - Elisabeth Shue (Parts 2/3)
Claudi Wells as Jennifer Part 1
Elizabeth Shue as Jennifer Part 2 and 3
"Jennifer was terrific, of course. He [Marty] was quite taken by her, even felt that he "loved" her in the most adult sense. She was beautiful and fun to be around and she loved his music. Yet somehow she was not quite as important to Marty as the musical experience.
Perhaps in time she would grow to be vastly more valuable to him, but for the moment Jennifer was of this world and his music was of the next. " —From Back to the Future by George Gipe (quote, page 5)
"Marty, one rejection isn't the end of the world."
—Jennifer to Marty after his audition
"How about a ride, Mister?"
—Jennifer to Marty after he returns from 1955.
How about a ride Mister
Jennifer Jane Parker McFly was the girlfriend, and later the wife, of Marty McFly.
Jennifer was the world's fourth time traveler and the third human one. She was the daughter of Danny Parker Jr. and Betty Parker, and the granddaughter of Danny Parker and his wife Betty Lapinski.
Jennifer in DeLorean Time Machine
Jennifer and Marty seemed to be "serious" enough for him to introduce her to his best friend, local inventor Dr. Emmett Brown, whom she first regarded as eccentric and strange.
Jennifer is mostly a positive person, knowing what to say to Marty if he needed cheering up, and wondering what happy life she might have in the future.
Biography
Jennifer was born in 1967 in Hill Valley, California. She was Marty's girlfriend, having met him at Hill Valley High School, which they both attended in 1985.
Sometime before 1985, Jennifer met Marty and started dating him, eventually falling passionately in love with him. She also became friends with Doc.
Lorraine Baines McFly
Lorraine Banies McFly - Lea Thompson
Biographical information
Date of birth : 1938 - Age (1885) - Age (1955) 17 - Age (1985) 47 - Age (2015) 77 - Age (2045) 107
Physical description
Gender : Female
Hair colour : Dark Brown (in 1955/1985), Blonde/grey (in 1985A/2015)
Eye colour : Brown
Behind-the-scenes information
Played by Lea Thompson
Lorraine Banies
"On Marty's right [at the dinner table] was dear old Mom, who was once very attractive and bright. Now, at forty-seven, she was overweight, drank more than was good for her and had more food on her plate than anyone else."— From Back to the Future by George Gipe (quote, page 34)
"Your father kissed me for the very first time on that dance floor." —Lorraine to Marty and Linda
"Biff! Leave him ALONE! Let him go! Let him go!" —Lorraine furiously trying to help George McFly, by attempting to pry an attacking Biff off the latter.
Lorraine Baines McFly
Is the mother of Dave, Linda and Marty McFly and the wife of George McFly. Lorraine liked the attention of boys when she was in school, and lots of them were attracted to her, including both George McFly and Biff Tannen.
lorraine Banies McFly at Highschool
Lorraine Baines and George McFly
Lorraine was not afraid to get what she wanted and often parked in cars with them. Lorraine could stand up for herself and the people she cared about, yet despite this she liked her men to be strong and able to protect her.
She liked thinking back to the "old days", often telling the story of how she originally met and fell in love with George. Lorraine liked to play tennis with her husband and they have been tennis club champions for the past six years by 1985. Lorraine's best friends at school were Betty and Babs, and she could often be found in Lou's Cafe gossiping with them.
Lorraine, aged 17, in 1955
Lorraine Baines at 17 in 1955
Lorraine Baines at 17 in 1955
Lorraine Baines was born in 1938 in Hill Valley, California, the eldest child of Sam and Stella Baines. She had five younger siblings: Milton (born 1943), Sally (born 1949), Toby (born 1951), Joey (born 1954), and Ellen (born 1956).
When Lorraine was in elementary school, she witnessed Biff Tannen punching George McFly, and told a teacher, Miss Hodges, about it.
She threatened to send him to a military school in Idaho, but a young teacher named Stanford S. Strickland intervened.
He believed that Biff could be reached with understanding and guidance, but he was proven wrong and later became a very hardened and strict discipliner.
Little else is known about Lorraine's life prior to 1955. What is known is that she had been smoking and drinking for a while, and had "parked" in cars with several boys.
As such, George was probably not her first boyfriend, Lorraine also caught the attention of local bully Biff Tannen but she never took a liking to him.
Original 1955 to 1985
Lorraine, aged 47, in 1985 before the history was changed
Lorraine in 1985
Lorraine in 1985
Lorraine originally met George McFly on November 5, 1955, when her father Sam Baines almost ran him over with his car. She felt sorry for him, before falling in love with him.
Lorraine Baines in 1985
They had their first date a week later at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance at school, which happened the same day as the famous Hill Valley Thunderstorm.
Back to the Future Prom Photo
Lorraine originally had an addiction to alcohol, which she developed as a teenager and carried into her adulthood.
Lorraine and George married on December 7, 1958, and moved into Lyon Estates where they had three kids, Dave in 1963, Linda in 1965 and Marty in 1968.
By 1985, she was depressed at how her husband could not stand up for her or himself infront of people like Biff, she had also turned to tobacco smoking and drinking alcoholic beverages on an everyday habit.
She would always tell her children not to park in cars with members of the opposite sex, under the false pretense that she never did that when she was their age.
Altered history
George and Lorraine before the kiss.
Back to the Future Prom Kiss
Her life changed in 1955 when "Calvin Klein" showed up in town. Unaware it was her future son Marty, who had traveled back in time in the DeLorean time machine and had accidentally interfered with her first meeting with George, as Marty had pushed George out of the way of her father's car and George ran away with his bike.
George escapes getting run over
She developed a crush on him. Marty knew he had to get his parents together to prevent himself, as well as his elder siblings, from being erased from existence.
Calvin Klein
Calvin Klein aja Marty McFly and Lorraine
"He's a dream!" —Lorraine Baines about Calvin Klein (Marty)
After finding out that Lorraine wanted a man who would stand up for her and protect her, these being qualities which George lacked, he came up with a plan where he would pretend to take advantage of Lorraine at the Dance, and the wimpy George would "rescue" her from him.
Marty was shocked when he found that Lorraine liked parking in cars with boys as, in 1985, Lorraine had told him that she found it terrible when girls did so.
Lorraine noticed that Marty was nervous and told him not to be in the situation of dating. Lorraine then kisses him incestuously, much to Marty's shock.
Lorraine with Calvin Klein parked
However, Lorraine stops kissing him on the sudden realization that the kiss somehow felt wrong. While still unaware of who Marty truly was, Lorraine said that it did not make sense and it felt as if she was kissing one of the men of her family, such as her grandfather or one of her brothers.
Marty clarifies her reasons of the kiss feeling wrong, assuring her that his feelings for her are purely platonic. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Biff Tannen showed up instead and tried to force his affection on Lorraine.
Biff Lorraine and George
Biff's underlings overpowered Marty, hitting him then forcing him into the trunk of a car. Immediately afterwards, George arrived, and delivered his rehearsed lines for Marty not to get fresh.
George was then shocked that the faked rescue had become real. Biff ordered George to beat it. George was about to do so, but momentarily remembered a lesson in "standing tall" from a soda jerk at Lou's Cafe.
George standing up for Lorraine
George then stated (albeit shakily) "No Biff, you beat it. You leave her alone!" This enraged Biff to the point he then grabbed George's left hand. After initially being overpowered, George's grimace of pain turned to one of anger when he saw a laughing Biff knock Lorraine to the ground when she tried to help him.
Prom Kiss
An enraged George clenched his free hand into a fist, then bashed Biff in the face, knocking him out, and Lorraine fell in love with the newly-confident George. They kissed for the first time that night and history was back on track. By 1985, she was much healthier and happier than she had been in the original 1985.
McFlys in 1985
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To find out more fun Future Facts by clicking our Blogs below……….!!! Please Share …..
Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/3/31/ghostbusters-ecto-1
Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/17/ariel-leader
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history-jxrr4
Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history
Back to the Future - Detailed storyline
Back to the Future - How to generate 1.21 Giggawatts / Jiggawatts with Mr Fusion
What is a Fat Bike ? And where did the idea of Fat Bikes come from ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/10/fat-bike-what-is-a-fat-bike-history
The Time Paradox explained - Back to the Future
The Sinclair C5
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/9/sinclair-c5-
Mini Jeep Mini Review
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/minicoolsterjeepreview
Hoverboards - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/12/13/hoverboards-
How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/how-does-the-time-machine-work
The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/whydiddeloreanmotorcompanyfail
The DeLorean Motor Company - History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/deloreanmotorcompany
The Flux Capacitor - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/fluxcapacitor
Is Time Travel Possible ? And what would it take ? Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/istimetravelpossible
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DeLorean Time Machine Hire - Excellent Google Review for Sandstone Productions
David left us this review :
“What an amazing experience this was!
Chosen for our son’s 16th Birthday but due to pandemic ended up being an end of school celebration.
So easy to book, Mark knows his stuff and being a Back to the Future fan, the things we wanted he already had sorted.
Car is unbelievable, the level of detail is incredible, exactly like one in film.
Our son had an amazing drive around and did an incredible photoshoot around the town where we live.
So not only was it an end of school celebration to remember, he also has some fabulous photos to remind him.
Professional and friendly service and Mark only adds to the experience with his knowledge and interest of the film.
Would recommend for any celebrations but especially for Back to the Future fans”
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/backtothefuturedel...
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Back To The Future DeLorean Time Machine Hire
Are you looking for something really special to surprise your partner in the Future ?
Do you want one of the most Iconic Movie Cars to feature at your Wedding ?
Looking to make your event one to remember in the Future ?
To summarise Our Amazing Back to the Future package….
20 Driving Miles Included
Features All the Props, sounds, and lighting from Back to the Future
Photographs sent directly to your email
*Any photographs your friends, family and guests want to take are more than welcome
Staff Member stays with the DeLorean to answer any questions and operate the equipment
From 1 to 8 hours of exclusive access to the DeLorean Time Machine
Delivery and Collection charges (if outside our operational area)
Why wait for the Future …. You can make this a reality today !
Delorean Time Machine Hire
DeLorean Time Machine Hire “Great Scott” !!! ….
We have to tell you about this amazing experience !!!
Are you looking for something really special to surprise your partner in the Future ?
Do you want one of the most Iconic Movie Cars to feature at your Wedding ?
Looking to make your event one to remember in the Future ?
Why wait for the Future …. You can make this a reality today !
Time Machine Time Circuits
To summarise Our Amazing Back to the Future package….
20 Driving Miles Included
Features All the Props, sounds, and lighting from Back to the Future
Photographs sent directly to your email
*Any photographs your friends, family and guests want to take are more than welcome
Staff Member stays with the DeLorean to answer any questions and operate the equipment
From 1 to 8 hours of exclusive access to the DeLorean Time Machine
Delivery and Collection charges (if outside our operational area)
‘Wind the clock back’ … back to 1.15am on the 26th October 1985! Emerging from Doc Brown’s truck, the DeLorean Time Machine appears for the first time !
Remember that feeling …. Your amazement of how Doc Brown built a Time Machine …..out of a DeLorean !
Well this experience can now be yours……
Feel that adrenaline rush ! Relive that excitement by travelling in your very own Time Machine , one of the most Iconic Movie cars of all time !
Why wait for the Future, book our unbelievable ‘Back to the Future Car Experience’ today for your Special Occasion.
So how does the package work ? and what is included in our DMC package ?
New for 2022 our DMC Package features :
‘Surprising them by arriving at a lovely Marina side restaurant’
Just as they are finishing their meal we ‘Arrive in Style’ with our Time Machine
complete with lighting, sounds and props from the film.
After taking photos of their sheer amazement of having a ‘ Time Machine Delorean to themselves ‘ …
‘We set out on our (upto) 20 mile round trip, stopping off for more Time Travel photos along the way ‘…..
‘Experience the feeling Doc Brown and Marty McFly had in Back to the Future 1, 2 and 3’
‘The reaction from the public is amazing ……! they will feel like a film star !!! ‘
‘Inside the Time Circuits, Flux Capacitor and Time Machine equipment brings the experience to life’
‘After our Time Travelling adventure driving tour is finished, we return to amaze your family and friends waiting at the waterside restaurant.
Back to the Future experience
Q & A
What if my location is outside your area ?
If you live outside our travel radius, there’s no need to worry, You can now visit us in Southampton Hampshire.
Experience our packages from 1 to 8 hours
If I want to treat my partner but have not decided on a date, can I still book ?
Yes, Our DeLorean Experience and Ghostbusters Ecto 1 C Hire Packages can be now purchased with gift vouchers.
Can anyone else travel in the DeLorean
The DeLorean is a 2 seater sports car, so just one person.
The hirer and their partner both have full access to the interior, family and friends are more than welcome to take as many photographs as they would like (But will not be able to sit inside).
They can to book a time and date suitable for them. (Vouchers are valid for 1 year from purchase)
How long can I hire the car for ?
You can hire for a long as you wish, we can provide 1 hour packages upto 8 hours, or display use over a weekend or week.
Our staff will stay with the DeLorean to answer any questions you guests have.
“ So who you are going to call ? …..”
Sandstone Productions on 07590 196750 or email mark@sandstoneproductions.co.uk
HIRE ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC MOVIE CARS OF ALL TIME .... THE DELOREAN TIME MACHINE
From the DeLorean Motor Company the DMC-12, experience Doc Brown and Marty McFly’s Time Travelling DeLorean in your own adventure....Set the Time Circuits and jump into the “Future’ …. or was that the past ? .....Your Destiny is here ....
One of the most Realistic Back to the Future DeLorean Hire DMC-12 Time Machines available to hire in the U.K -
We bring our personalised immersive BTTF DeLorean Hire experience to you ……
More Fun Facts and Questions and Answers on the DeLorean
What was the Top Speed of the DeLorean ?
88mph ! Only joking it can actually reach 110 mph
What is Special about the DeLorean ?
DeLorean DMC-12, an innovative sports car, produced from 1981–83, with gull-wing doors and stainless-steel body panels. It should have been the commercial coup of the century, leading to massive worldwide sales. For this was the car chosen to star in the blockbusting Back to the Future film trilogy
Why did Doc Brown use a DeLorean ?
hen asked by Marty as to why he chose a DeLorean, Doc explains that if he was to build a time machine, he needed to “do it with style.” Moreover, he also mentions that the DeLorean's stainless steel construction facilitates temporal displacement, hence making time travel in the Back To The Future movies possible
Was the DeLorean a Manual ?
Two transmissions were available for the DeLorean: a 5-speed manual and a 3-speed automatic, both with a final drive ratio of 3.44:1.
How Many DeLoreans are still on the road ?
Approx 6500
With just over 9,000 produced, an estimated 6500 remain on the road today. But it was 1985's "Back to the Future" that electrified audiences, cementing the DeLorean's place in American pop culture
Who owns DeLorean ?
British-born mechanic Stephen Wynne purchased the rights to the DeLorean name and remaining parts inventory in 1995. Since then, the company has provided service to the 6,000 DeLorean cars still in existence from its home in Humble, north of Houston
Are DeLoreans good cars ?
Yes, if your willing to put allot of Time, effort and money into these iconic cars, just do not expect supercar performance !
Are DeLoreans still made ?
Now, it appears the early plans may become a reality, as the company with official rights to the DeLorean name aims to launch an all-electric DeLorean DMC in 2022. The original DeLorean Motor Company no longer exists, though there is still a DeLorean Motor Company, which isn't affiliated with the car's original maker
Can you Buy a new DeLorean ?
new DeLorean? Ironically, enthusiasts have been able to buy an essentially new DeLorean since 2008 for about $65,000. We say “essentially” as they are built from approximately 80% genuine DeLorean parts from the 1980s that were acquired when British entrepreneur Stephen Wynn purchased the failing DMC
What is a DeLorean worth today ?
Dented one for around $25,000-30,000, while cars in good condition can easily be double that, fetching in the region of £40,000-60,000 on the classic car market today. If you bought a new DMC in 1982, the cost in today's money, adjusted for inflation, would be $60,000-plus
Why did the DeLorean not sell ?
Downturn and bankruptcy
The lack of demand, cost overruns, and unfavorable exchange rates began to take their toll on DMC's cash flow in late 1981. The company had estimated its break-even point to be between 10,000 and 12,000 units, but sales were only around 6,000
Are DeLoreans Fuel Injected ?
The DeLorean uses the Bosch K-Jet mechanical fuel injection system.
What is the 0-60 Time of a DeLorean ?
9.5 seconds, 10.5 seconds
What does a DeLorean Weigh ?
2,712 pounds
Are DeLoreans rare ?
The DeLorean DMC-12 is quite rare. It wasn't put into mass production despite its popularity after the film. Different sources state that production of the DMC-12 only numbered between 8,000 and 9,000 units
What is the Flux Capacitor ?
Where does flux capacitor come from? The flux capacitor is a piece of technology in the 1985 time-travel film Back to the Future and its sequels. Although it's described as the thing that makes time travel possible, the precise mechanism it works by isn't ever explained
What engine is in the DeLorean ? ( What Motor is in the DeLorean )
2.8 V6 PRV - Peugeot - Renault - Volvo - 135BHP
Are they making an electric DeLorean?
By all accounts, the new DeLorean will be fully electric. According to Italdesign, the new-look electric vehicle will be officially unveiled during the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance on August 21.
Who did DeLorean marry?
Cristina Ferrarem. 1973–1985
Kelly Harmonm. 1969–1972
Elizabeth Higginm. 1954–1969
Sally Baldwinm. ?–2005
What was DeLoreans downfall?
DeLorean's downfall, in 1982, came after barely 8,500 models had been manufactured. The firm collapsed in a welter of recriminations, lawsuits and the trial of its founder on drug charges
Time Machine hire
Enquire Today … why wait for the Future … Your DeLorean Time Machine experience awaits !
your Future is in safe hands with 25 years in event management backed up with excellent Google Reviews
Set the Time Circuits for your special event by calling us today to experience one of the most iconic Movie Cars of all Time ....
3 Easy Ways to book :
We need some information, like your event type and duration, date, location so please fill in our on-line enquiry form or email us or contact us.
Option 1 : ON LINE ENQUIRY FORM
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Option 3 : EMAIL US
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We reply and confirm our price
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You can confirm your booking with us, due to covid we have waved our deposit
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(if your event is cancelled due to covid / another lockdown within this 4 weeks period we give you a full refund)
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Great Scott !!! How to generate 1.21 Giggawatts (Jiggawatts) with Mr Fusion ...... in the DeLorean Time Machine
Sending you Back to the Future ! But how could Doc Brown invent, design, and build a Time Machine out of a DeLorean ? …. And could it be possible in the Future ? We explore the science behind this amazing Si/Fi Stainless Steel Car
🤯 1.21 Gigawatts: The Fictional Power of Time Travel
The phrase "1.21 Giggawatts" (often pronounced "jigowatts" in the film) is one of the most iconic pieces of fictional scientific jargon in cinema history. It represents the minimum power threshold required to activate the Flux Capacitor and initiate a temporal jump in the DeLorean Time Machine.
For your blog on "Is Time Travel Possible," this figure offers a perfect starting point for discussing the power problem of real-world theoretical physics.
What is a Gigawatt?
In real-world physics, a gigawatt (GW) is a unit of power.
The Breakdown: The prefix 'giga-' represents a factor of 109, or one billion. Therefore:
1 GW=1,000,000,000 Watts
The DeLorean's Requirement: 1.21 GW is 1.21 billion watts. This unit measures the rate at which energy is being transferred or used at a specific moment.
How Much Power is 1.21 GW, Really?
To put Doc Brown's requirement into perspective, 1.21 GW is an enormous amount of power, equivalent to the continuous output of a major electrical infrastructure:
Large Power Plants: A single, large modern nuclear or coal power plant typically produces power in the range of 1 gigawatt (GW).
Homes and Lightbulbs: 1.21 GW could power over 10 million 100-watt light bulbs simultaneously.
Vehicles: It would take the peak power output of thousands of modern sports car engines to reach this figure.
The Real-World Connection: Lightning
Doc Brown famously states that the only natural source capable of producing 1.21 GW is a bolt of lightning. This is where the film's science surprisingly aligns with reality:
MetricDeLorean RequirementReal-World Lightning BoltPower (Rate)1.21 GW (Gigawatts)A typical lightning bolt's peak power is often in the GW to TW (Terawatt, 1000 GW) range.Energy (Total)Not explicitly stated (implied to be short pulse)Total energy is relatively low (∼5 billion Joules) due to its short duration(microseconds to milliseconds).
The key takeaway is that lightning provides the necessary power pulse—the instantaneous rate of energy—to trigger the Flux Capacitor, even if the total sustained energy is not what a power plant would produce over an hour. This high-power, short-duration pulse is exactly what's needed for the fictional device to momentarily rip a hole in the space-time continuum.
The extreme power requirement of 1.21 GW serves as a brilliant cinematic shorthand for the kind of exotic energy source that theoretical physics suggests would be necessary to overcome the barriers to time travel.
We all know what Doc Brown said in the first movie.
"I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need".
Doc Brown
Hill Valley Clock Tower - Lighting strike Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
GREAT SCOTT !!! HOW TO GENERATE 1.21 GIGGAWATTS (JIGGAWATTS) WITH MR FUSION ...... IN THE DELOREAN TIME MACHINE
Your Built a Time Machine ….. Out of a DeLorean ! ….. We explore the science behind Doc Browns amazing Time Machine, starting with what is 1.21 Gigawatts and how can you generate that kind of Power …….
Great Scott! Marty: What? What the hell is a gigawatt?
1.21 Gigawatts was pronounced (on set) as it were spelled with a "j", as in jigawatts (or jigowatts)..
So, how much is 1.21 gigawatts you ask?
Well, a gigawatt is equal to one billion (10 9) watts or 1 gigawatt = 1000 megawatts.
A watt is a unit of power.
Your typical 100 watt incandescent light bulb draws 100 watts of energy, so 1.21 gigawatts would be able to light over 12 million 100 watt light bulbs. 1.21 gigawatts is also equivalent to 1,621,400 horse power
How does the plutonium in the BTTF car generate 1.21 gigawatts in less than a couple of minuets?
Well the meaning of power (the watt is a unit of power). Power refers to the rate at which energy is produced. Power can be one of several things. The most often way to describe it is the change in energy in a certain amount of time.
1 watt = 1 joule per second where a joule is a unit of energy. Horsepower is another unit of energy where 1 hp = 746 watts.
(roughly equivalent to the amount of energy it takes to lift a medium large apple 3 feet)
If energy is measured in units of Joules, and the time interval is in seconds the power would be in Watts.
What about the giga? Giga is a prefix for units that typically means 10 to the power of 9.
This means that 1.21 gigawatts would be 1.21 x 10 to the power of 9
This means producing a given amount of power in a limited amount of time is not an important problem.
If you have a battery that can store only 1 joule of energy : but will discharge in a nanosecond the power output will be a gigawatt, but only for that nanosecond.
A large marine battery can store 8 megajoules and could theoretically produce 1.21 gigawatts for .066 seconds.
Nowhere in the movies is it stated for how long the 1.21 gigawatts needs to be produced, but we can estimate an upper limit based on the properties of lightning.
A typical bolt of lighting contains about a gigajoule of energy and lasts for .2 seconds.
The dynamics of how the lightning was used to power the flux capacitor indicates that it was directly powered by the lightning and no storage battery was involved. We can therefore deduce that the maximum energy needed to create a temporal shift is 1.21 gigajoules/sec X .2sec = 242 megajoules.
We now have two ways to power the flux capacitor:
The Flux Capacitor Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
1) Feed it directly from gigawatt capable generator or
2) Use a lower power generator to charge up a 242 megajoule battery.
A currently available 242 megajoule battery weighs a little over 200 pounds and is the size of a standard blue home recycling bin.
While this type of battery is not rechargeable and cannot deliver all of it’s energy in .2 seconds it gets us in the ballpark of what is needed.
On the other hand there are no gigawatt generators currently available that could fit in a container sized truck , much less a Delorean.
We therefore conclude that in standard mode the flux capacitor is battery powered for the .2 seconds or less it is in use and the plutonium generator does not need produce 1.21 gigawatts.
A micrometer-sized circulators that can be fabricated on a microchip.
We figured out how to integrate magnetic flux quanta — the smallest units of magnetic field — with microfabricated capacitors and other superconducting circuit elements, so that time-reversal symmetry can be broken.
This led to our new circulator proposal. As with conventional circulators, there is a magnetic field present. But because we can use just one magnetic flux quantum, our design can be microscopic.
See the design similarity: (left) the fictional flux capacitor from the movie and (right) a schematic representation of the proposed circulator. Tom Stace/Screenshot from Back to the Future, Author provided
We’ve nicknamed the device the quantum flux capacitor as its circuit diagram has a passing resemblance to Doc Brown’s mythical invention (which are for sale, sort of).
Sadly for history buffs, our design won’t help much in your DeLorean time machine: it doesn’t reverse time. But its magnetic field does break time-reversal symmetry as advertised and we expect these devices will find applications in future quantum technologies.
Even sooner, they may help in high-bandwidth communications environments like mobile phone base stations in very dense populations, or for ultra-high sensitivity radar where every photon of the electromagnetic field counts.
www.theconversation.com
Great Scott Doc Brown -
If we allow for a 24 hour recharge time for the battery then the generator only needs a continuous output of 2600 watts. No problem for an eccentric genius.
Paul Grimshaw - IT Architect in the Computer Industry (1983-present)
How many AA batteries would it take to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity needed to send Doc Brown’s Delorean back to 1985?
Let’s see, you can squeeze around 5A at 1V out of a decent NiMH AA cell, so that’s 5W.
To get 1.21GW you would therefore require 242,000,000 cells
NiMH AA batteries weigh around 30g per cell, so 242 million of them would total 7,260 tonnes!. With cabling that’s around the weight of a modern Navy Destroyer ship.
AA batteries are 14mm diameter and 50mm long. Allowing a little room for cabling, you can squeeze 100 batteries in 1000 cubic cm (1 litre).
So for 242,000,000 cells you would need 2,420 cubic metres. That’s about the size of 10 double decker buses.
So probably not the most practical of options.
Instead, ironically, capacitors would be a much better idea for powering a flux capacitor.
The Flux Capacitor
Not just any old capacitors, but some of the capacitors capable of outputting the highest powers as listed here:
SERIES CMX - Self-Healing Energy Storage Capacitors
The 3330CMX2205 looks particularly suitable, each one capable of outputting 100,000A at 3,300V.
So just four of these could generate a colossal 1.32GW - that’s more than enough to send Doc to 1985 AND power his heated car seats at the same time.
Weighing in at 49kg each, four of these capacitors weigh a mere 196kg - let’s round up to 200kg with some mounting brackets. Spacewise, the bank of four capacitors occupy 0.66 x 0.41 x 0.56m, so these would fit comfortably in the trunk, with room for a set of golf clubs to spare.
Did anybody spot the name of the capacitor manufacturer in the link? Yep, it’s General Atomics. So it may not be Plutonium, but it’s still Atomic powered!
Just the job. To be fair, these capacitors can only output this level of power for a fraction of a millisecond, but I’m pretty certain that’s more than enough time to get back to 1985 as long as the car is going fast enough.
Also they would be ideal for recharging by lightning ready for the trip back. As you can see in the picture, they even have a convenient warning on the front not to handle the lightning whilst it’s running through the cable.
On a slightly more serious note, capacitors are commonly used to provide very high power short duration energy bursts. One example is at the US National Ignition Facility, where they have 4,000 capacitors similar to those above, in this case to power their laser.
The energy stored is again released in a fraction of a millisecond, but this time at a power exceeding 1 TeraWatt. That’s a thousand times that used by Doc, and it exceeds the peak electricity demand of the entire US.
Scott Soloway - Degree in math and physics but majored in pinball
Paul Grimshaw - IT Architect in the Computer Industry (1983-present)
The lower thrust fusion rocket produces 187.1 GW of power. Ten of these plants would power all industry on Earth.
How Do You Get 1.21 GigaWatts For Your Time Machine?
DeLorean Time Machine
Nizmitz Class Aircraft Carrier
Is that a large amount of power?
Yes. Just for comparison, the nuclear power reactors in a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier produces 194 megawatts (1.94 x 108 watts).
Or perhaps you would like to compare this to the flying S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. With my calculations, I get a power requirement of 317 gigawatts.
S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarrier
First look at the DeLorean Time Machine Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
What Does Doc Brown Even Mean?
How much power does it take to travel through time?
Well, Doc said 1.21 gigawatts.
If I want to calculate the energy required for time travel, I will need the power (given) as well as the time.
How Long Does it Take to Travel in Time?
That's actually looks like a stupid question. Oh well. Let's take a look at the actual real life footage of the time machine (from the historical archives).
Time travel is possible if you get the car up to 88 mph.
Is this car going 88 mph? Is there any way to tell? Oh, yes. Yes, there is. All I need to do is to look at this car (a DeLorean) and use – video analysis. The clip isn't perfect, but I think it will give a good enough estimate. I can scale the video using the wheel base of 2.413 meters.
Time Machine being chased by VW Camper Van in Twin Pines Mall Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
Here is a plot of the position of the DeLorean in the first time travel (with the dog in the car).
The slope of this line puts the car's speed at 56.7 m/s (127 mph). Yes, that is faster than 88 mph. I'm not sure why the one frame repeated. Also, there could be a problem with my scale since it was rather difficult to see the car. Here is the next time the car gets to a speed near 88 mph (when Marty first goes back in time).
DeLorean Time Machine - Flux - in Twin Pines Mall Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
DeLorean being struck by lighting Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
Well that's not good. This give a speed of 29 m/s (65 mph). For this video, the car isn't quite up to 88 mph so this seems ok. I guess I should look at the last time travel speed (when Marty goes BACK TO THE FUTURE). Oh, actually there is not a good shot to analyze there. Oh well, the second shot is close enough to 88 mph, that I will just stick with that.
What about the time interval? For the first test, I looked at the time from just when the car started to shoot sparks until it "exploded".
This gives a time of 4.3 seconds. But wait !
What about the case when a lightning bolt is used to power the car? For that case, the time machine is only getting power for at most 0.46 seconds. So, there are two different time intervals for two different trips through time.
Time Travel Energy
Now that I have the power AND the time, I can calculate the required energy. Let's just do it (for both time interval estimates).
That's not so bad. I have an energy range with the high end just a factor of 10 higher.
Now, how do you get 5 x 108 - 5 x 109 Joules?
Doc Brown's first choice was to use plutonium. Although he didn't give too much of the details, I guess he was using Plutonium-239. Pu-239 is radioactive, but I don't think that's how it gave energy in this case.
Instead, I guess that there was some type of fission process that broke the nucleus into smaller pieces. Since the pieces have less mass than the original, you also get energy (E = mc2). The Wikipedia page on plutonium as the details, but let's just say that one Plutonium atom produces 200 MeV (mega electron volts) in the fission process (3.2 x 10-11 Joules).
Doc Brown refuelling the DeLorean Time Machine Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
Doc Brown Plutonium Case - Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
In a typical nuclear reactor (which probably wouldn't use Plutonium-239), this energy is used to increase the temperature of water to make steam. The steam then turns an electric turbine to produce electricity. Clearly, that's not happening here. I'm not sure what's going on - but surely it's not a 100% efficient process. I am going to say it's 50% efficient.
In order to get 5 x 108 Joules, I would need:
Since 1 Plutonium-239 atom has a mass of 3.29 x 10-25 kg, this would require a fuel mass of just 1.2 x 10-5 kg. That seems possible.
What about a lightning bolt? Could you get this much energy from lightning? According to Wikipedia, a single bolt of lightning can have about 5 x 109 Joules. That would be just perfect for the time traveling machine.
Refuelllng the DeLorean Time Machine Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
Hill Valley Clock Tower being stuck by lighting Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
But what if lightning & Plutonium for an energy sources are just difficult to get hold of ?
Maybe batteries would be an interesting way to power this machine.
How many AA batteries would you need? From a previous post,
I already know that a high quality AA battery has about 10,000 Joules of energy. In order to get 5 x 108 Joules, I would need 5 x 104 AA batteries. Of course, that assumes that I could completely drain these batteries in just half a second. Damn, those things would get hot.
AA Batterys
Homework
Clearly, there are other questions. Here are some that I can think of.
How much space would a DeLorean need to get up to 88 mph? You can look up the time for it to get from 0-60 mph and assume that it has a constant acceleration.
At the end of Back to the Future, Doc Brown replaces the Plutonium energy source with a Mr. Fusion. Estimate how much energy he could get from a banana peel.
Mr Fusion Fuel Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
· If you watch all three movies in the Back to the Future series, there are several times that the car gets up to 88 mph. Use video analysis to check the speeds.
·
How long would it take current from the lightning strike to travel from the clock tower to the car?
·
Suppose that Marty is 1 second late on his start to get to the lightning wire. How much greater of an acceleration would he need to make it to the wire on time (assuming that over 88 mph works just as well as 88 mph)?
·
What if there wasn't a known source of lightning? What other ways could Doc get energy to power the DeLorean in 1955 (or whatever the year was)?
·
Assume that the energy needed to time travel was directly proportional to the mass of the object. Would the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier have enough power to go back to 1957?
Pushing the DeLorean to 88mph Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
S.H.I.E.L.D - Helicarrier
Carmen Drahl Former Contributor Science
Wheres Mr Fusion ?
To get some answers, I spoke with Egemen Kolemen. He’s a specialist in the control of fusion plasmas at Princeton University, where he is an assistant professor with joint appointments at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Egemen Kolemen, Princeton University (Credit:
Our Q&A is below, and is lightly edited for clarity.
Carmen Drahl:
Thanks for talking futuristic fusion with me, Dr. Kolemen!
In Back to the Future, the central time travel device was originally powered by plutonium, but this was replaced by the Mr. Fusion reactor.
Mr Fusion Home Energy Reactor Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
What’s the difference between how radioactive plutonium might generate electricity and how a fusion reactor would?
Egemen Kolemen: Radioactive plutonium produces energy by splitting up to smaller elements, which is known as the fission reaction.
In a fusion reactor, we combine small nuclei to make energy. Soon enough, we hope to move from fission to fusion technology just as Back to the Future II predicted.
This would help Doc Brown avoid troubles with the terrorists in the original movie— we use water as fusion fuel and you cannot make an atomic bomb with water!
CD: Mr. Fusion was able to generate power from household garbage— a banana peel, Miller beer, and even a beer can! What are the typical starting materials that are used in fusion reactors today?
EK: We use isotopes of the element hydrogen (known as deuterium and tritium) in current fusion reactors. There is enough heavy hydrogen fuel in sea water, H2O, to fuel the world’s energy needs for billions of years.
CD: In theory, could Mr. Fusion have been generating power by fusing together several different atoms or isotopes contained inside the garbage?
Mr Fusion ReFuelling
Or could the reactor only work by fusing deuterium and tritium in the garbage? In other words— could you generate energy from fusing many different nuclei?
EK: Theoretically, fusing elements lighter than iron releases nuclear energy. If a clever physicist could overcome the engineering problems, a machine like Mr. Fusion could physically make energy by fusing banana or beer which mostly consists of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. (It would even work for a beer can made of aluminum!). This is the process that happens in the core of large stars which is the birthplace of all the heavy elements in the universe.
Time Machine refuelled
However, as the elements get heavier, the fusion process gets harder and requires more energy to initialize and becomes less economical. That is why we use the isotopes of hydrogen, the lightest element in the universe.
Mr Fusion
There is no physics reason why you could not fuse many different nuclei.
Stars fuse many different elements with each other.
However, just as cars are designed to run with only one specific type of fuel (gasoline, diesel, etc.) to make them more efficient and economical, fusion reactors that work on preset fuels would be cheaper and an easier engineering challenge.
CD: Mr. Fusion was the size of a coffee maker.
That’s pretty tiny compared to the typical fusion reactor—
the experimental reactor being built in France will be over 5000 tons!
What are the challenges to making fusion reactors small?
EK: The fusion process happens when two particles hit each other each other at high velocity inside the reactor.
So, the energy production in a fusion reactor grows roughly in proportion to the volume (or the number of particles inside) of the reactor.
At the same time, the energy loss occurs mostly due to the drifting particles out from the surface of the reactor. As the reactor size gets bigger, volume which grows roughly as the cube of the radius increases much faster than the surface which grows as the square of the radius.
As a fusion reactor gets bigger the ratio of energy production to losses increases making it easier to produce net energy.
We use very strong magnetic forces to be able to confine the deuterium, tritium and electrons inside the reactor. If one can build superconducting coils that can produce much stronger magnetic fields (i.e. a stronger trap) than the ones available today, a smaller machine might be possible. This is an active research topic!
Interior of the National Spherical Torus[+]
CD: We’ve all seen car engines malfunction. Could Mr. Fusion explode in a mushroom cloud destroying everything in a 250 mile radius if something went wrong?
EK: Fusion is a delicate process that needs constant control. Unlike fission reactors, fusion cannot have a runaway chain reaction. If the “engine” malfunctions, the fusion process would stop immediately. So no explosion is possible. That is one of the many advantages of fusion energy.
CD: Mr. Fusion would have to be doing hot fusion, because cold fusion is a myth, right?
EK: There is no scientifically known net energy-producing cold fusion reaction.
CD: So since you do have to heat your starting materials to extremely high temperatures to achieve fusion, how cool can we make the outside of a fusion reactor—cool enough to safely attach to a vehicle?
EK: The wall inside the fusion vessel would be hot just as the inside of the car engine. However, the reactor would have a cooling system, similar to the radiator in a car, making the outside of the reactor at room temperature. The reactor would be as safe as the car engine.
CD: We still haven’t passed the break-even energy point in nuclear fusion— where we get more energy out of fusion than we had to put in. What gives you reason to think we’ll get there?
EK: We have been running experiments on many different fusion reactors all around the world and comparing the experimental data we obtain to computed simulations of the physics process.
We have been upgrading our simulation capabilities using new numerical methods and tools and checking against the experimental data.
At this point, we can reproduce and predict experimental outcomes in existing fusion reactors. We believe that our understanding of the physics and capability to simulate processes are advanced enough to roughly predict how a reactor will behave.
Based on this understanding, we designed the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) nuclear fusion reactor. ITER is under construction under an international collaboration, and it is expected to come online in a decade.
We predict that we will obtain 10 times more fusion energy output as the power we put in. As with any research, we can only know the exact answer after running the machine but we try to do our best to predict the reactor behavior.
CD: Thank you for your time, Dr. Kolemen!
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I'm an independent journalist specializing in chemistry, in particular the places where chemistry meets biology. I was a staff science writer at Chemical & Engineering…Read More
As a renewable energy source, cold fusion is potentially unlimited clean energy. But what is fusion energy, how does it work, and is there such a thing as cold fusion?
You may have heard about cold fusion, the idea that atoms can be fused together without using any significant heat or other type of energy and yet producing a great deal of energy.
This philosopher’s stone has been the object of the quest of many a modern-day alchemist, so we shall leave it to them.
Hot fusion, however, is real. It’s what happens inside the sun and other stars. Nuclei of atoms crash into each other at great speed, resulting in fusion and a great deal more energy released. Research and development into fusion energy is trying to create similar reactions here on Earth at over 100 million degrees Celsius.
The opposite of nuclear fission
Fusion energy, in a way, is the opposite of what we conventionally call nuclear energy – although fusion energy also deals with the nucleus of atoms. In current nuclear power plants, the energy comes from splitting the atom.
Fusion, as the name suggests, produces energy not by breaking atoms apart, but by fusing them together.
The real difference comes from the kind of elements involved in these processes. What we know as nuclear energy requires elements with big, heavy atoms like uranium or plutonium that can be split into smaller atoms.
However, uranium, plutonium, and their fission products are radioactive, which means that when they decay they emit ionising radiation, which in certain circumstances might be dangerous to humans.
Back to the Future Darth Vader Credit : Universal Pictures Amblin Entertainment
Fusion energy instead is based on combining two lightweight atoms – usually hydrogen. When two hydrogen atoms fuse, they create helium.
So not only does fusion energy rely on the most abundant element in the universe, its byproduct can be easily used for medical purposes, or to blow up balloons.
Try pushing two magnets together
How do you fuse two atoms?
The challenge comes from the fact that the nucleus of an atom contains positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, as you will surely recall from your physics class.
Therefore, the nucleus of an atom will always carry a positive charge. Trying to combine it with another one with a positive charge is like trying to push two magnets towards each other. They will resist. This is why fusion energy uses the lightest atoms possible. But it is still very hard.
Inside the sun, fusion occurs because the immense gravity draws atoms together, creating extreme density and enormous heat, which makes the atoms collide with each other at great speed.
The force of gravity is much weaker on Earth, because of the relatively small size of this planet, and the temperature – despite global warming – is nowhere close to the heat of the sun. So how can we create similar conditions here for fusion to occur?
Hotter than the sun
The answer is fairly obvious. To make up for our lower gravity, you simply have to create a temperature hotter than the sun.
Six to ten times hotter, up to 150 million degrees Celsius. Here on Earth this tremendous heat will create the conditions to allow the hydrogen atoms to bump into each other, resulting in fusion and generating even more energy.
Sounds easy? There are quite a few details that need to be ironed out.
First issue: where could you create such a temperature, so that the heated substance wouldn’t destroy everything it touches?
Again, the solution is simple: don’t allow it to come into contact with anything. To achieve this, Russian scientists in the middle of the 20th century developed the tokamak, a chamber the shape of a hollow doughnut, surrounded by powerful magnets.
Inside this chamber, the hydrogen gas is heated to an extremely high temperature and transformed into a plasma state.
The plasma state is one of the four fundamental states of matter, in which the gaseous substance becomes ionised – because electrons orbiting the atomic nuclei are stripped away.
The ionised matter is electrically conductive and therefore the magnetic fields can dominate the behaviour of the matter. That is where the magnets come in.
Magnets can keep this electrically conductive substance from approaching the tokamak’s walls, hovering above it. Inside the plasma, the conditions are suitable for the atoms to bump into each other and to fuse, releasing energy.
The world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor – called ITER – is under construction in France, to prove the feasibility of thermonuclear fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy.
ITER is an international research and engineering megaproject involving the European Union, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US.
If successful, the facility will turn 50 MW of power inserted into the system – to initially heat the plasma – into fusion power output of 500 MW.
A lot of doughnut
The ITER reactor will be huge:
the ITER tokamak will be as heavy as three Eiffel Towers;
the structure of the 1 000-tonne electromagnet in the centre of the machine must be strong enough to contain a force equivalent to twice the thrust of the Space Shuttle at take-off (60 meganewtons, or over 6 000 tonnes of force);
there will be 18 D-shaped electromagnets around the doughnut-shaped tokamak chamber, each of them 17 metres high and 9 metres wide, weighing 310 tonnes, the approximate weight of a fully loaded Boeing 747-300 aeroplane.
270 million degrees Fahrenheit to ignite fusion—a full ten times hotter than the sun's core.
But how could we get that enormous energy out of the doughnut and safely channel it into our homes as electricity?
This is done via the main chamber wall and a region called the divertor, positioned at the bottom of the tokamak. The divertor controls the exhaust of heat, waste gas and impurities from the reactor and withstands the highest surface heat loads. The surface of the divertor is covered by tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point (3422°C).
In 2019, with the backing of the European Fund for Strategic Investments, the European Investment Bank signed a €250 million loan to the Italian research agency ENEA to help build the divertor and tokamak test facility. The plant will test various alternatives to exhaust the huge amount of heat flowing into the divertor component of a nuclear fusion reactor.
A glorified steam turbine
Researchers continue to look for alternatives, but as it stands now the whole process of transitioning the heat to electric power then becomes rather old-fashioned.
The heat received by the plasma-facing wall and the divertor will be used to turn water into steam, which will drive a steam turbine. divertor, positioned at the bottom of the tokamak“The scientific advances towards fusion energy are not likely to occur like the apple falling on Newton’s head,” says Istvan Szabo, a senior engineer in the European Investment Bank’s energy security division. “You need many more resources.”
Szabo concedes it is possible that tomorrow someone will come up with a completely different solution to harness fusion energy, or a different answer to the need for sustainable energy to power us into the future.
“There are other ideas to compress matter and fuse atoms. For example to use lasers or mechanical compression. And maybe someone will one day solve cold fusion,” Szabo says. “But testing these will all require immense resources.
Thermonuclear fusion is furthest along the research and development phase. It offers the most hope.”
Cold fusion remains elusive—but these scientists may revive the quest
The first public results from a Google-funded project reveal renewed interest in the long-sought but controversial nuclear energy source.
BY MICHAEL GRESHKO
PUBLISHED MAY 29, 2019
Sparking a controversy
Nuclear fusion occurs when pairs of light nuclei fuse together to form a nucleus of net lighter mass, releasing huge amounts of energy as described by Einstein's iconic equation E = mc2.
Inside the sun, hydrogen atoms fuse to produce helium and energy. If successfully harnessed on Earth, fusion could provide humankind with abundant, emissions-free energy—a huge boon to efforts to combat climate change. (As a byproduct, fusion on Earth might also help to address a global helium shortage.)
But getting fusion to work on Earth is tricky, since it's hard to get two nuclei close enough to combine; atomic nuclei are positively charged, so they fiercely repel one another, a hurdle known as the Coulomb barrier.
Crossing this barrier and realizing fusion power is possible at high densities and temperatures, if the nuclei are confined for a sufficiently long time. But to achieve these conditions, scientists seem to need large, expensive machines and huge amounts of initial power.
“What nature does with the enormous force of gravity in the sun's core is what mankind has been trying to do under controlled conditions in the laboratory,” says physicist Amitava Bhattacharjee, the head theorist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, one of the leading fusion research groups in the U.S.
“For the last 60 years we’ve been at this, and I think the progress has been enormous,” he adds. “But we still continue to have a challenge to make nuclear fusion power inexpensively available to people.”
But what if cleverly structured materials could somehow lower the energy needed for fusion? That's what chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons at the University of Utah thought they had achieved.
On March 23, 1989, University of Utah chemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced their "cold fusion" device to the world—sparking a scientific firestorm.
But for many, excitement quickly gave way to skepticism. Early outside attempts to replicate the results didn't turn up massive amounts of heat, nor did the setup appear to yield many high-energy neutrons, a signature of conventional nuclear fusion.
“In March 1989, everybody jumped on this topic, even serious fusion physicists (like me),” Hans-Stephan Bosch, the head of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, writes in an email.
“However, we didn’t find any positive result confirming their claims. Therefore we finished our work, published it, and closed the topic. My impression is that most physicists and chemists did the same, regarding cold fusion as an 'interesting' episode.”
Ever since, cold fusion largely served as a parable on the perils of irreproducibility. But a small group of researchers and enthusiasts has remained convinced that the phenomenon is real and nuclear in nature, though not necessarily the same thing as fusion.
This scientific circle still does experiments and reports its results in its own meetings and journals, though it has shed the “cold fusion” name for low-energy nuclear reactions, or LENR
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are a type of nuclear fission reactor which are smaller than conventional reactors.
This allows them to be manufactured at a plant and brought to a site to be assembled. Modular reactors allow for less on-site construction, increased containment efficiency, and enhanced safety due to passive nuclear safety features.[1]
SMRs have been proposed as a way to bypass financial and safety barriers that have plagued conventional nuclear reactors.[1][2]
Several designs exist for SMR, ranging from scaled down versions of existing nuclear reactor designs, to entirely new generation IV designs.
Both thermal-neutron reactors and fast-neutron reactors have been proposed, as well as molten salt and gas cooled reactor models.[3]
A main hindrance to the commercial application of SMRs as of 2015 is licensing, since current regulatory regimes are adapted to conventional nuclear power plants and have not been adapted to SMRs in terms of staffing, security etc.[4] Time, cost and risk of the licensing process are critical elements for the construction of SMRs.[5]
Some larger SMRs require more significant on-site construction, such as the 440 MWe 3-loop Rolls-Royce SMR, which targets a 500-day construction time.[9]
SMRs are particularly useful in remote locations where there is usually a deficiency of trained workers and a higher cost of shipping. Containment is more efficient, and proliferation concerns could be lowered.[10] SMRs are also more flexible in that they do not necessarily need to be hooked into a large power grid, and can generally be attached to other modules to provide increased power supplies if necessary.
Companies that are planning new nuclear units are currently indicating that the total costs (including escalation and financing costs) will be in the range of $5,500/kW to $8,100/kW or between $6 billion and $9 billion for each 1,100 MW plant.
The smallest nuclear reactor in operation today isn't from some startup or a cutting-edge nuclear agency: It's tiny, frozen Bilibino Nuclear Plant in Chukotka, Russia, where up to four different 12 MWe modular reactors have run since 1974.16 Dec 2019
Is it legal to own a nuclear reactor?
While they might un-nerve the neighbours, fusion reactors of this kind are perfectly legal in the US
Back to the Future Time Machine
Doc Brown The Flux Capacitor
Other questions are :
How can we generate 1.21 Gigawatts in real life, now that we're 20 years ahead of Doc Brown?
Was a bolt of lightning really the only way to produce 1.21 gigawatts back in 1955?
How can we generate 1.21 Gigawatts in real life, now that we're 20 years ahead of Doc Brown?
Was a bolt of lightning really the only way to produce 1.21 gigawatts back in 1955?
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To find out more fun Future Facts by clicking our Blogs below……….!!! Please Share …..
Ghostbuster - Ecto 1
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/3/31/ghostbusters-ecto-1
Cars of Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/10/the-cars-of-back-to-the-future-55-
Back to the Future Fashion
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/19/back-to-the-future-fashion-te2yx
Ariel Leader
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/17/ariel-leader
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history-jxrr4
Back to the Future Gadgets and Trends we have in 2021
Doc Browns Biography and the History of his DeLorean Time Machine
Marty McFly Biography also featuring Biff, George, Jennifer, Loranine
Back to the Future - Hill Valley History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/2/2/hill-valley-history
Back to the Future - Detailed storyline
Back to the Future - How to generate 1.21 Giggawatts / Jiggawatts with Mr Fusion
What is a Fat Bike ? And where did the idea of Fat Bikes come from ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/10/fat-bike-what-is-a-fat-bike-history
The Time Paradox explained - Back to the Future
The Sinclair C5
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2021/1/9/sinclair-c5-
Mini Jeep Mini Review
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/minicoolsterjeepreview
Hoverboards - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/12/13/hoverboards-
How does the Time Machine work - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/how-does-the-time-machine-work
The DeLorean Motor Company - What did it fail ? Or did it ?
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/whydiddeloreanmotorcompanyfail
The DeLorean Motor Company - History
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/2020/11/22/deloreanmotorcompany
The Flux Capacitor - Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/fluxcapacitor
Is Time Travel Possible ? And what would it take ? Back to the Future
https://www.sandstoneproductions.co.uk/blogtothefuture/istimetravelpossible
Hoverboards
Hoverboards - Are they Real ? Can I Buy one ? or are they for the Future ?
🛹 Blog Post: Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads... We Need a Hoverboard! 🏄
Headline: The Pink Powerhouse: Why Marty’s Hoverboard is the Ultimate Back to the Future Prop Experience
Here at Sandstone Productions, our DeLorean Time Machine is the star, the time-travelling vehicle that makes the impossible possible. But what's a journey to 2015 without the second-most famous piece of futuristic tech? We're talking about the iconic Mattel Pink Hoverboard from Back to the Future Part II!
This little pink powerhouse is more than just a prop; it's the ultimate symbol of the future we all dreamed of as kids. And trust us, it's one of the most popular items at every event we attend!
The Prop That Steals the Show
While the DeLorean provides the spectacular arrival, the Hoverboard is the item that gets everyone out of their seats and into a photo opportunity.
The Ultimate Photo Op: Paired with our detailed replica of Marty McFly’s jacket, hat, and self-lacing Nike Mags, the Hoverboard instantly transforms any fan into the time-travelling hero. Standing next to the DeLorean, Hoverboard in hand (or almost underfoot!), is a core part of the Sandstone Movie Car Experience. It's the perfect way to capture that "Future is Now" moment.
The Urban Legend: We love hearing the stories! The Hoverboard is famous for the decades-old urban legend (started by director Robert Zemeckis himself!) that the technology was real but was kept off the market by concerned parents' groups. Every time we pull out the prop, the debate reignites, adding an extra layer of magic and fun to the experience.
Why the Hoverboard Resonates with Fans
The genius of the Hoverboard isn't just its look; it's what it represents.
Freedom of the Future: It's the moment Marty ditches the old-fashioned skateboard for pure, frictionless flight. It encapsulates the sheer optimism and technological aspiration of the 1980s vision of 2015. It represents the ultimate, effortless escape.
The Details Matter: Our replica is chosen for its accurate detail, right down to the bright pink colour and the distinct Mattel logo. This level of authenticity is critical because true fans notice every detail, and we strive to provide the most immersive experience possible.
Signed by a Legend: We're incredibly proud that our Hoverboard (along with the DeLorean) was personally signed by screenwriter and co-creator Bob Gale during his visit! This piece now carries a truly unique piece of cinematic history and an official stamp of approval from the "Gatekeeper" of the entire franchise.
More Than Just a Toy
The Hoverboard is the perfect accessory to our DeLorean Time Machine. It completes the picture, bringing the fast-paced chase from Back to the Future Part II to life and giving every fan, from age 8 to 80, the chance to feel the excitement of a high-speed pursuit through Hill Valley.
Whether it’s displayed elegantly alongside the open gull-wing doors or being held up for a memorable photo, the pink powerhouse proves that sometimes, the simplest prop can generate the biggest buzz!
Hoverboards
Back to the Future Hoverboard
Every since Marty McFly's hoverboard, appeared in Back to the Future Part II it sparked off the question ….. Would we riding Mattel Hoverboards in 2015 ? well …
October 21, 2015, came and passed (the date Back to the Future II was set in), and still no pink hoverboard were floating around the streets.
Although some new toy products did get released, they did use the name Hoverboard, but didn’t actually Hover as they still had wheels, with flashing lights and Bluetooth speakers they has everything bar the long awaited ‘hover’ mode, so how could they call them Hoverboards ?
Fast forward to the end of 2020 and now people are searching for ‘Best Hoverboards in 2020, One Wheel Hoverboards, Seats for Hoverboard, even Bluetooth Hoverboards, but the problem is still the same, they do not levitate and require at least one wheel or two.
So what about a real Hover Board that can actually levitate off the ground. Is this something for the Future or can we buy one today ?
Well, Yes and No
Of course Hoverboards don’t work on water (in the film, but later you will see how one inventor made this happen). The thought of riding a floating skateboard board has been the dream of Si/Fi and Back to the Future fans since the film was released in 1989.
Lets explore the possibilities
How does a hoverboard work ? There are two main ways - either it could sit on a cushion of air, or use Maglev superconductors
But levitating skateboards are already here. They might not anywhere near as commonplace as the Back to the Future universe foretold, but that doesn't mean the tech will never reach the streets, or at least a few inches above them
Other gadgets from the the film did make it though such as : self-lacing Nike Mags, large flat screen T.V’s, google glasses ! But where are all the hoverboards, well ……
These 3 companies have made functional hoverboards, to varying levels of success.
Hendo Hover
Different types of Hoverboard
HendoHover
Hendo Hover. The company behind the hoverboard, called Arx Pax, is mainly focused on harnessing electromagnetic energy through its Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) system to create more sustainable, "floating" foundations for structures in the face of extreme weather.
Evolution of the Hoverboard
In 2013, (launched on Kickstarter) with a developer's kit the next year and showed up in its first public prototype form ,with none other than skateboarding legend Tony Hawks
The Hendo board is a fun side project that serves as a proof of concept for the MFA system. Hendo Hoverboard is one of Time magazine's 25 Best Inventions of 2014
The Hendo design uses disc-shaped magnetic hover engines located on the bottom of the board. These depend on an opposing magnetic field, found on a specialized surface below to provide lift.
Currently, this surface substrate needs to be a non-ferromagnetic conductor. Right now we use commonly available metals in simple sheets, but they were working on new compounds and new configurations to maximize the technology and minimize costs.
Dimensions: 10" x 10" x 5" (25cm x 25cm x 12cm) - Individual Engine Dimensions: 4.5" diameter x 2" high (11.5cm x 5cm) -
Hover Height: 1/4" - 1/2" (1cm - 1.5cm)
Battery Life: 10-15 min
Charge Time: 1-2 hrs
Weight: 10-12 lbs (4.5 kg)
Payload: ~ 5 lbs (3 kg)
Hendo Hoverboard
Unfortunately, you can't just ride it anywhere -- but the system does actually allow riders to truly hover off the ground. It hovers 15cm above the floor, the battery lasts just a few minutes. And $10,000 (£7,500) a pop?
Version 2.0 of the Hendo launched in 2015, which was the last we heard Arx Pax about board development, as the company has focused on applying its MFA tech in other areas.
How does a real hoverboard work ? Levitation
Levitation using magnets seems simple - just put one magnet over another, same poles facing, and the top one will float. Voila, right?
Sadly, as we all find out this never works, this is due to something called ‘Earnshaw's Theorem’, a stable static equilibrium between two magnets is impossible. There have been a number of ways around this, but none have proven feasible enough for everyday applications. Until now.
Here’s where we get very technical (just for a few minuet) ……
Earnshaw’s theorem states that “A charged particle cannot be held [statically] in a stable equilibrium by electrostatic forces alone.” (Griffiths, p.115)
Earnshaw’s Theorum
Lenz’s law explains how eddy currents are created when magnets are moved relative to a conductive material. These eddy currents in turn create an opposing magnetic field in the conductor. The core technology called Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA™), focuses this field more efficiently.
Earnshaw's theorem states that a collection of point charges cannot be maintained in a stable stationary equilibriumconfiguration solely by the electrostatic interaction of the charges. This was first proven by British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw in 1842. It is usually referenced to magnetic fields, but was first applied to electrostatic fields.
Earnshaw's theorem applies to classical inverse-square law forces (electric and gravitational) and also to the magnetic forces of permanent magnets, if the magnets are hard (the magnets do not vary in strength with external fields). Earnshaw's theorem forbids magnetic levitation in many common situations.
If the materials are not hard, Braunbeck's extension shows that materials with relative magnetic permeability greater than one (paramagnetism) are further destabilising, but materials with a permeability less than one (diamagnetic materials) permit stable configurations.
You can go ahead and google both of these scientific principles, but to sum it up in regards to levitation: Lenz = Easy, Earnshaw = Hard.
The Hendo Hoverboard is a first-step product, a precursor to the broader implementation of the world-changing technology of MFA. It enables a new generation of lift and motion technology that will change the way we view transportation. Additional applications for MFA technology are virtually limitless - from business, to industry, to healthcare, and beyond.
Unlike magnetic levitation systems employed today, hover systems are comparably inexpensive and completely sustainable. Hovering modes of transportation are now possible and practical. Lifting a wide range of loads - whether it's a person riding a hoverboard (what we were all expecting) or a building riding out an earthquake (what we never imagined could be possible) - is all within reach.
Omni Hoverboards
Omni Hoverboard
Canadian inventor Alexander Duru’s Omni's hoverboard design takes a different route to get its passenger in the air, using a system of propellors to take to the sky -- it goes much higher than just hovering a few inches above the ground. It's closer to a drone than a skateboard, evoking less of a Marty McFly vibe and more like something the Green Goblin from Spider-Man might use to fly around.
Omni Hoverboard
In the course of 1 year Catalin Alexandru Duru, developed his first prototype before setting out to break the Guinness World Record for the longest flight on a hoverboard back in May 2015. He only needed to fly 50 meters (about 165 feet) to break the previous mark -- but he wound up zooming around for 275.9 meters (905 feet 2 inches) at heights of up to five meters (16 feet), obliterating the record in the process.
Omni Hoverboard Hovering above crowd
That mark was by a jet-powered rig, but Duru continues to hone his craft, taking it to France for flight demos and showing it off in a Hyatt ad to cap off 2016.
Specifications:
Aircraft type: eVTOL hoverboard prototype
Piloting: 1 pilot
Flight control: Unknown
Cabin: None, the pilot stands using snow boarding straps to keep your feet locked onto the aircraft
Flight time: 1.5 minutes
Propellers: 8
Electric Motors: 8
Batteries: 8 lithium polymer batteries, generating about 40 horsepower
Length: Unknown, possibly 2.5 meters wide (over 8 feet wide)
Landing gear: 4 fixed landing legs
Safety Features: Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP), provides safety through redundancy for its passengers and/or cargo. DEP means having multiple propellers and motors on the aircraft so if one or more motors or propellers fail, the other working motors and propellers can safely land the aircraft.
Resources:
Omni Hoverboards website
Omni Hoverboards Facebook
Omni Hoverboards Twitter
Omni Hoverboards YouTube Channel
Omni Hoverboards LinkedIn
Article: Video: Watch incredible footage of farthest flight by a hoverboard record set by Canada's Catalin Alexandru Duru, Guinness World Records, May 22, 2015
Video: Farthest flight by hoverboard - Guinness World Records, Guinness World Records, May 22, 2015
Article: Montrealer sets world record for farthest flight by hoverboard, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, May 23, 2015
Video: Omni's propeller-based hoverboard prototype (first test flight), Omni Hoverboards, May 25, 2015
Video: Omni's propeller-based hoverboard w/landing (prototype), Omni Hoverboards, June 18, 2015
Video: Canadian Develops Futuristic Hoverboard, CBC News: The National, Oct. 13, 2015
Article: Canadian inventor tests new prototype of record-setting hoverboard, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Oct. 14, 2015
Video: Training Before our flight in Paris, Omni Hoverboards, June 9, 2016
Video: Ball for the Portuguese Cup Delivered from the Air by a Man on a Hoverboard, Omni Hoverboards, May 29, 2017
Video: Brazil - Parintins Folklore Festival - Festival do Boi-Bumbá - do Caprichoso - Third night, Omni Hoverboards, July 4, 2018
Video: Hoverboard followed by Drone, Omni Hoverboards, Jan. 16, 2020
Lexus Hoverboard
Lexus Hoverboard
Car maker Lexus threw its hat into the hoverboard development ring, too, flexing its engineering muscles beyond the world of luxury vehicles.
June 2015, the company released a set of teasers claiming it had created a real life, rideable hoverboard, piquing interest with footage that appeared to show the board floating in an otherwise normal skatepark.
A video showing pro skater Ross McGouran shredding up the skatepark looked like Back to the Future's 2015 wasn't too far away -- but there were some caveats.
Lexus Hoverboard
Like Hendo, the Lexus board depended on a magnetic field to provide the hover power, so the skatepark was specially built for the ride. The smoke coming from the board wasn't just some cool add-on feature, either -- in order to work, its components were cooled by liquid nitrogen to maintain a frigid temp of minus 197 degrees celsius.
It keeps the board in place using “quantum locking” – a property of type 2 superconductors that overcomes the tendency of magnets to wobble off and repel each other, using a sort of magnetic, sticky “vortex”.
Unfortunately for hoverboard enthusiasts, custom magnetized skateparks aren't too common, and Lexus made it clear that the board wasn't going to be released for consumers. The campaign was just a flight of marketing fancy to prove Lexus has the capability of creating something spectacular.
These three innovators have scratched the surface of hoverboard tech, and, given time and development, show that the experience is at least possible
With future technological strides, what they began could eventually give everyone a shot at a real-life Marty McFly experience.
What about conventional thrust propulsion?
ArcaSpace (US Company) comes admirably close to the ideal with its ArcaBoard.
Arcaboard Hoverboard
It’s capable of hovering 1ft in the air, 36 electric propellers generating 200kg of lift controlled by onboard balancing tech to help stabilise it. You can even control it using an app on your smartphone,for a 3 minute run time
Arca Board - Hoverboard
The Flyboard Air is a jet-powered “personal aerial vehicle” capable of vertical take-off and landing. It can fly to 150 metres in height at 87mph. Emergency and military applications would be a the top of the list with a flight time of 12 minutes (but Zapata anticipates longer trips in the future).
This video perfectly explains everything we have covered in this Blog ….. So again ‘Hover’ on the link below and click to find out more……
So to answer the question
Are Hoverboards real ?
Well Yes, but not like it was portrayed in the back to the future II
So in 2022 we are still awaiting for Mattel’s bright pink Hoverboard to float into the future as some of the coolest transport you could imagine, and someday through these pioneers it may become a reality
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