The top 10 movies about the multiverse according to a physicist

The top 10 movies about the multiverse according to a physicist

Post By Science And Technology films, multiverse, physics, science fiction

‘Groundbreaking’: Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in The Matrix

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I am a physics professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of 18 popular science books. While my training was in theoretical physics, specifically finding and interpreting unusual solutions to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, I have had a lifelong appreciation for science fiction and fascination with the manifestations of physics in culture. In my latest book, The Allure of the Multiverse, I apply my experience and interests to a study of the scientific debates and popular beliefs surrounding the notion of parallel universes and alternative strands of reality. Here are my 10 favourite films on that topic, listed chronologically, each chosen for being thought-provoking and fun.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Beyond the treacly aspects of this Christmas classic lies much worthy to chew on, including the question of what the world would be like if we didn’t exist. In theoretical physics, the hypothesised anthropic principle cordons off from all reality the realm of possibilities that eventually lead to conscious observers. Alas, unlike the film’s protagonist George Bailey, we have no guardian angel who might reveal to us what the universe would be like without humanity. But maybe, in George’s spirit, we might appreciate the fact of our existence as sentient beings on a fragile planet and take that responsibility seriously.

Back to the Future (1985)

Children dream about changing their parents. Through the wonders of a time-travelling DeLorean, Marty McFly inadvertently manages to make that happen. In physics, the feasibility of backward time travel is debatable. Might the paradoxes engendered by past-directed voyages, such as actions precluding the time traveller’s birth, make those impossible? Marty’s voyage to 1955 almost prevents his parents from falling in love, until he finds a way of convincing them to do so. He returns to his present-day 1985, to realise that he is in a parallel reality in which his parents are far cooler. Such a multiverse avoids paradoxes and offers hope to teenagers.

Groundhog Day (1993)

In quantum physics, actuality is a blend of different particle histories – as if denizens of the subatomic world need to try all possibilities to get things right. Eastern philosophy likewise stresses that reincarnation leads ultimately to perfection. Similarly, in this hilarious film, weather forecaster Phil Connors seems destined to repeat the same awful day over and over again, until he is able to cast aside his self-centred attitude and become more sensitive to others. In the process, he not only finds love, but also experiences ample time to master French, ice sculpture and the piano. Courtesy of a kind of multiverse of recurrence, he contains multitudes.

New Scientist Default Image — ‘Contains multitudes’: Bill Murray in Groundhog Day

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12 Monkeys (1995)

Inspired in part by the excellent La Jetée, 12 Monkeys offers a plotline like a twisted knot of wires. But does it constitute a single, consistent strand or contain loose ends? James Cole, its protagonist, travels back in time from an imagined 21st century to the 1990s to try to collect clues as to the origin of a devastatingly lethal pandemic. Although his superiors emphasise that the past cannot be changed, he seems at times to be affecting reality – only to be confronted with its apparent resilience. While the hope of him preventing the catastrophe ultimately vanishes, even in the final scene there are hints of alternatives.

Sliding Doors (1998)

Who hasn’t missed catching a train by mere seconds, and cursed the ensuing lost time? Yet if that delay resulted in avoiding an accident, it would rather seem a blessing. Brilliantly, through the magic of cinema, we see both strands of a multiverse in which the protagonist Helen alternatively misses and catches a tube train. In the former case she fails to witness her boyfriend having an affair, and persists in a state of ignorance. In the latter she does witness the affair, and soon meets Mr Right. Both strands, though, have common elements – marking the way to an astonishing juxtaposition of fates at the end.

Run Lola Run (1998)

If two versions of reality aren’t enough, try three. In this inventive German film, fate awards Lola three opportunities to save her boyfriend, who lost a whopping sum of cash and needs it to fulfill a task for a crime boss. Each time, she has 20 minutes to acquire the loot somehow and run with it across the city to her frantic lover. Echoing the butterfly effect in chaos theory, minute discrepancies lead to vastly different outcomes. While the first two attempts prove fatal, the third time’s the charm. Our passion for a multiverse, the film demonstrates, reflects our desire for multiple chances in life.

The Matrix (1999)

Cinema enables us to envision whole new worlds. Artificial intelligence bolsters that illusion. Imagine if an incredibly powerful, malicious electronic entity exploited our capacity to be fooled, and manufactured a false world for us to experience our lives. Meanwhile, it drained our bodies of energy for its own evil purposes. The film’s groundbreaking science fiction plot and special effects remain relevant to today’s discussions of AI’s capabilities and threats. Some thinkers speculate that the observable universe is a simulation. If so, its script writers, ensconced somewhere else in the multiverse, ought to win an Academy Award for most inventive screenplay.

Donnie Darko (2001)

One of the most profound enigmas in theoretical physics is the concept of wormholes: hypothetical connections between otherwise disjointed sectors of the cosmos. Theorists have derived wormhole solutions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and demonstrated how they potentially could be used as time machines. In practice, nobody has a clue how to assemble the extraordinary amount of mass – including a special negative-mass ingredient called “exotic matter” – required to create such objects. Nonetheless, they serve as an effective plot device in this haunting movie about a troubled teenager who strives by means of time travel to save the world from imminent apocalypse.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Mention “multiverse” today, and many think of Marvel Comics and its incorporation of the concept into its blockbusters. One such recent hit resolves the question of whether or not there can be more than one Spider-Man. With jaw-dropping animation, the film follows the life of a boy named Miles Morales who, like Peter Parker in the classic comic series, finds himself bitten by a radioactive spider and granted extraordinary powers. In teaming up with an ageing Parker from another universe to stop the villain Kingpin’s fiendish plan, he feels inadequate at first. Wonderfully, the film shows how he finds confidence and saves the world.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Only one multiverse flick has bagged numerous Academy Awards, including best picture. Its plot is surreal and its acting exquisite. As in some of the previous films mentioned in this list, it features an improbable hero fighting to rescue reality amidst a plethora of competing timelines. In our universe, Evelyn Quan Wang runs a launderette, but in others she has mastered martial arts, crooning, cooking and other pursuits. Meanwhile, her estranged daughter has a powerful, nihilistic multiverse counterpart determined to destroy all creation by means of a singularity called the “Everything Bagel”. Remarkably, the film ends in self-awareness, family reconciliation and cosmic harmony.

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Cryogenic Industries Founder Pledges To Give Nearly All Of His More Than $400 Million Fortune Away To Caltech

Post By World Caltech, chemistry, philanthropy, physics, Ross M. Brown, science research, unusual donation

Engineer Ross M. Brown, who built and sold an industrial conglomerate for more than $400 million, is donating nearly all his wealth to promising mid-career chemistry and physics professors at a range of universities.

_By_{Richard J. Chang}_and_{Kerry A. Dolan}_{, Forbes Staff}

Caltech announced Friday morning that engineering entrepreneur and alumnus Ross M. Brown is donating $400 million to the university to support fundamental science research. However, there’s an unusual element to the generous gift, called the Ross Brown Investigators Program: It’s designed to support mid-career physics and chemistry professors–but the academics getting the financial awards won’t be at Caltech.

Caltech will administer the program, while an independent review board will choose eight fellows annually from more than a dozen invited universities across the country. Each chosen investigator will receive a $2 million, five-year fellowship. Caltech will administer the program until 2070, assuming sufficient returns on invested funds.

Brown, now 88, founded industrial conglomerate Cryogenic Industries in 1973 and sold it for a reported nearly $440 million in 2017. “When I finally sold the company, I had quite a bit of money to worry about. I sure as hell didn’t want to die with it. So, being a technical company, I was naturally interested in technical things. And I understood very deeply the breadth of technology that has transformed our lives,” he says. “In my career, I’ve relied very much on things that people had done 20, 30, 40 years before. And thank God they did it, because I couldn’t have done my job without it.“

This is the first large gift of its kind where the recipient of the donation will turn around and give nearly all of it to faculty at other universities. “Caltech won’t be eligible to receive any of the investigator awards, just because of the conflict of interest, nor will they be allowed to sit on the science advisory board. So it’s really Caltech’s general interest in science itself that has led them to get to where they are,” explains Brown, who graduated from Caltech in 1956 with a degree in mechanical engineering and obtained a master’s degree from the Pasadena, California university the following year.

Says Caltech Provost David Tirrell, “We would like to see people do new imaginative things in chemistry and physics that they might not have been able to do if they’d been restricted to the more conventional funding sources.” As part of the agreement with Brown, an external committee will evaluate the program every five years to see whether important scientific developments have come out of it. Caltech’s costs to administer the program will be covered by the gift, and the university will also receive about $1 million a year to support fundamental research in chemistry and physics.

Though Brown is charting new territory with this donation, he’s not the first to give a large gift with unusual conditions attached, notes Amir Pasic, dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. In 2005, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela gave Tufts University, their alma mater, $100 million for the school’s endowment. But the Omidyars stipulated that the gift be invested in international microfinance initiatives–programs that lend small amounts of money to the very poor.

“There’s an interesting visionary element to this gift in that it gets the university to think across institutions–and a way to emphasize that the scientific enterprise transcends institutions,” the Lilly School’s Pasic says of Brown’s gift.

The funding for this big donation stems from Brown’s sale of Cryogenic Industries in 2017 to Japanese firm Nikkiso Co. Cryogenic Industries, a conglomerate of eight companies, provided process equipment and servicing to the industrial gas and hydrocarbon industries, selling products such as gas liquefaction units, heat transfer equipment and a variety of cryogenic pumps. Brown owned about 70% of it; various employees owned the rest.

“At some point, I had to decide how I was going to give back. I didn’t want to pass it on to my children, because I might have a big risk of ruining their lives,” adds Brown–the father of seven children and grandfather of 16. “I’ve seen too many ‘trust-fund-babies’ to ever want do that to my kids! So they will get a modest amount, but not enough to ruin their lives. They were told that early so they have all struggled and led productive lives!”

How best to give away his fortune, though? Brown wasn’t sure at first. “I said ‘What can I focus on and take a little thing and make a difference there?’ So that narrowed it down fairly quickly to physics and chemistry, because those are the underlying technologies that all the rest of them are built out of.”

In 2018 he went looking for further advice and contacted Marc Kastner, then the president of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a nonprofit group with the goal of encouraging more charitable donations to science. Kastner, the Donner Professor of Physics Emeritus at MIT and a former dean of MIT’s School of Science, suggested that Brown consider funding mid-career fundamental science professors. Newly hired assistant professors of science at top research universities are well taken care of–typically with a $5 million startup package that they can spend on supporting graduate students, buying equipment and running their lab. “Once you get tenure, you’ve exhausted all those startup funds,” explains Kastner. These professors can get government grants, but Kastner says “it’s not enough to try something new and different.” The Brown Investigator awards are designed to enable the country’s most promising tenured physics and chemistry professors to take on bold initiatives. Kastner now chairs the science advisory board at Caltech that selects the Brown fellows.

Before Brown settled on Caltech as the host of his donation, he traveled the country, meeting with foundations as well as faculty leaders at universities including Columbia, Cornell, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, plus several campuses of the University of California. He settled on Caltech after a couple of years of discussions with the Science Philanthropy Alliance team. “I’m not a booster of Caltech. I went there, but that was 70 years ago,” says Brown. “It hasn’t changed much in those years. It’s still very small, very focused, and in line with the things I was interested in.” That lack of change, for Brown, is a good thing. He is betting that the university will continue to support innovative fundamental science research in the decades to come.

Over roughly 18 months of talking to people working in philanthropy, Brown says he grew concerned about the sector. He sees two problems. “One is mission drift. There is nothing really to keep the foundation on its original mission. All of them drift, some of them pretty badly,” he opines. “The second problem was this problem of overhead. In foundations, there is no salary they can’t pay, no fringe benefits that they shouldn’t have, no assistance that they can’t get along without, no big symposium in Hawaii that they shouldn’t go do. Overhead just gets, really, in my opinion, out of control. So that was the dilemma I was in.” He knew he wanted to avoid bloat. “We don’t really want to have a big foundation with a lot of overhead, because that just wastes money.” Then someone suggested having a university with aligned interests run the program–which would ideally solve both the mission drift and cost control challenges.

In 2020, Brown began testing out a smaller version of the investigators program, asking provosts at a number of high level U.S. research universities to nominate one tenured faculty researcher to receive the award. His family charitable foundation made two grants the first year, four the second year and seven the following year. Last year’s awardees included Columbia’s Tanya Zelevinsky, who studies spectroscopy of cold molecules for fundamental physics; Princeton’s Waseem Bakr, who works with ultracold quantum gases to realize scalable architectures for quantum computation; and Stanford’s Hemamala Karunadasa, whose research targets materials such as sorbents for capturing environmental pollutants and absorbers for solar cells.

Brown tells Forbes he is donating $200 million to support the Brown Investigators Program at the outset and the remaining $200 million–or more–will be a bequest. The funds are being transferred through multiple vehicles: his family foundation, a donor-advised fund and a direct gift.

He is bucking a trend in choosing to fund the physical sciences rather than life sciences. Citing information from the Science Philanthropy Alliance, Brown says “85% of funding in the United States for basic research of some kind goes to life sciences. Only 15% ends up in the physical sciences or non life sciences.” Kastner points out that government funding for the two areas leans the same way: “If you look at government funding, it’s also tilted very heavily towards biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health budget dwarfs the budgets of the agencies that support physical sciences.”

Brown admits this is a bit of a gamble, given that it’s the first program like it. But he’s optimistic, saying, “If you can just get 25% of what you’re putting in being foundational for somebody else’s work later, to make my grandchildren’s life better, I’m for that.”

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The best science fiction films about time travel, by a metaphysicist

Post By Science And Technology films, physics, science fiction

“An example of an inconsistent time travel story” – Marty McFly (right) and Doc Brown in Back to the Future

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I am a professor in philosophy and joint director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Time at the University of Sydney. My research focuses on the nature of time and on our relationship with it. I work in the metaphysics of time in philosophy, but my work intersects with both physics and psychology. My next book will look at how our temporal experiences inform our preferences about where in time we want good and bad experiences to be located – for example, whether we should prefer that bad things are located in our past, not our future, and good things in our future, not our past. Below is my list (in reverse order) of some of my favourite time travel films. I’ve tried to include a range of films from different genres that explore different aspects of time travel – but be warned, discussing them properly means there are some spoilers!

10. Midnight in Paris (2011)

Unlike many time travel films, Midnight in Paris isn’t focused on the metaphysics of time travel. It has no interest in exploring how time travel works or what implications it has for how we think about time, free will and the past. It is really a film that explores nostalgia. It follows disillusioned screenwriter Gil Pender, who is visiting Paris with his girlfriend. Every night at midnight, he “catches” an old car that takes him back to 1920s Paris. This is an interesting time travel film because unlike many such films, it isn’t about wanting to change the past. Rather, Gil is caught up in the romance of the past, constantly thinking about how much better life was in 1920s Paris. He comes to realise that wherever we are located in time, we often pine after earlier eras, mistakenly believing them to be the golden age. It is rare that time travel films explore the idea that the past is somewhere we want to go, rather than somewhere we want to change, and that is why this film is on my list.

9. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

This is an example of what metaphysicians call a consistent time travel story – one in which time travellers don’t change the past, although they do causally interact with it. In inconsistent stories, the time traveller is depicted as altering the past so that it goes from having once been one way (a way in which there is no traveller present) to later being a different way (a way with the time traveller present). Since philosophers think there is no way to change the past in this manner, they take these stories to depict impossible (and hence inconsistent) things. By comparison, consistent time travel stories are those in which the time traveller has always existed at the past time; the traveller will no doubt causally interact with the past, and in doing so they will make the past be the way it always was.

There is a single scene in this film that alone makes it worth watching. Bill and Ted need keys to get into a building. They don’t have the keys, but they reason that as long as they will, in the future, be able to get access to the keys, they can travel back in time and leave their younger selves the keys. Moreover, they figure that the keys will already be there waiting for them if they succeed, in the future, in travelling back and leaving them. And they are. This is a classic illustration not only of consistent time travel, but of a time travel loop: the keys are where they are because they will put them there, and they will decide to put them there because that is where they now find them.

8. Back to the Future (1985)

This is a classic time travel film. I include it because it is an example of an inconsistent time travel story, in which, by travelling back to the past, Marty McFly accidentally changes the past and puts his parents’ relationship in peril. As a result, not only is the future that Marty knows imperilled, but his own existence and that of his siblings are jeopardised. After all, if his parents never become a couple, then they will never be born. Faced with his non-existence, Marty has to try to get his parents together to ensure the future of him and his siblings.

This is an example of the so-called grandfather paradox. If someone travels back in time and kills their grandfather before their father is born, then they themselves won’t be born – but, as a result, they won’t be present to kill their grandfather, and as a result they will be born and be able to travel back in time. Most philosophers think that the grandfather paradox can be resolved by noting that no time traveller will ever succeed in killing their grandfather even if they try. Since Marty almost accidentally succeeds in changing the past in a way that undoes his existence, this is an impossible story. But that doesn’t make it any less entertaining.

7. About Time (2013

This is a film about changing the past in myriad small ways. Tim, the protagonist, learns that he can go back in time and do things differently the second, third and fourth time around. This isn’t really a film about the metaphysics of time travel, though if it were, it would depict an impossible story. It is an exploration of what we value and what we would change. Tim discovers that in changing the past to protect his sister, he thereby changes the identity of his future child. He realises that the present is the sum total of all the tiny choices we make along the way; change the past and we change the present. Ruminating on what he values, Tim not only changes the past back to how it was, but learns to value the present for what it is.

6. Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

This is an amazing surrealist film. I don’t know if it really counts as a time travel movie; it might be better described as a universe-hopping film in which the body of Evelyn, the protagonist, is periodically taken over by a version of herself from a parallel universe. The film explores the idea of life choices, depicting a world in which every choice-point creates multiple universes in which different choices are made. It is a meditation on the startlingly different lives we might have had, had things only gone a little differently.

5. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

This is a great consistent time travel story. It depicts Henry, who, as an involuntary time traveller, lives his life largely out of order as he bounces around time. He is largely disconnected from others until he meets Clare, who is later to become his wife. The film explores the connection between Clare and Henry, who keep meeting each other at different times in their lives. Sometimes, an older Henry meets a very young Clare; sometimes, a much younger Henry meets an older Clare. The film is a rumination on the ways in which our lives intersect and on what it would be like to lead a life in which events don’t simply unfold from past to future, but instead one jumps around in time.

4. Interstellar (2014)

At last, a science fiction film. The story follows Joseph Cooper as he tries to find a wormhole through which humanity can escape a dying Earth. This film is unusual since it explores travel to the future, rather the past, via time dilation. What makes this particularly interesting is that it is the only film here that is even remotely scientifically plausible. It is the closest we are going to get to an investigation of the only kind of time travel we are ever likely to encounter.

Interstellar explores the effects of a supermassive black hole on a crew who go down to investigate a planet and come up only a couple of hours later, from their perspective, but find that 23 years have passed due to the time dilation caused by the massive gravitational effect of the black hole. Since time passes much more slowly nearer a black hole than it does outside of it, this is a way of travelling to the future (though without hope of return).

3. Tenet (2020)

This is definitely a film that bears watching a few times. It certainly takes the idea of time travel to a whole new level. Rather than simply having people travel to an earlier time, it incorporates the idea of objects and people who are “inverted” with respect to entropy, and hence are moving backwards in time in the same way that you are I are moving forwards. So, from our perspective, these people look they are doing everything in reverse, while from their perspective we appear to be moving in reverse.

It is a fascinating premise since we know that, in principle at least, these kinds of processes can be reversed. Our laws are time reversal invariant, which means that, for any process that can occur, the reverse process can also occur. In that respect, at least, the film gets the science right (though it remains much less easy to see how a device could invert the entropy of small local regions in the way that it does). This is another film that depicts consistent time travel. At one point, we not only have the protagonist fighting with a time-travelling version of himself, but fighting with an inverted version of himself too. I can see why it took Christopher Nolan some years to write, but it is well worth the watch.

2. 12 Monkeys (1995)

This is one of my favourite time travel films, and a fantastic example of a consistent time travel story. It also depicts a causal loop, which occurs when it is both the case that an earlier event causes a later event, and also that the later event causes the earlier one. In this instance, James Cole is sent back in time from 2035 to 1996 because in 1996 there is a deadly outbreak of a virus. He isn’t sent back to try and prevent the outbreak, since in 2035 they know that the outbreak occurred and that the past can’t be changed. But they want to find the origin of the virus to help develop a cure. Having looked at historical records, Cole believes that an organisation called the Army of the 12 Monkeys, headed by Jeffrey Goines, is responsible for disseminating the virus. As it turns out, the Army of the 12 Monkeys wasn’t the source of the epidemic. But here’s where the causal loop comes in: it turns out that Goines started the organisation because he heard about it from Cole himself. And of course, Cole heard about it because Goines started it. So we have a causal loop.

1. Predestination (2014)

This is my top pick. It is based on a story by Robert Heinlein and is a fantastic example of a consistent time travel story. Predestination is fascinating because although it appears to contain three distinct characters (two men and one woman), in fact there is a single person who is both her own mother and her own father. Jane (who as it turns out is intersex and has both sets of reproductive organs) meets and falls for a young man and bears his child. When he subsequently vanishes, she is heartbroken and her life runs off the rails. Later, she becomes a man, John, and he travels back in time to meet Jane.

The film explores the idea of free will and predestination. John remembers the events from the perspective of being Jane, but despite how painful those moments were, when he travels back as John, he meets Jane and fathers their child, then abandons her. To complicate matters, it turns out the baby that Jane bears is then transported back in time and left at an orphanage, growing up to be Jane (and then John). Thus, Jane’s very existence is a causal loop. She is both her own mother and her other father: she comes into existence from nothing. The film is a study in the ways in which we do, and don’t, have control over our lives.

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