Despite the use of statistical mechanics, human understanding of the arrow of entropy and time has begun to appear. But we have to admit that human beings still know very little about the concept of time. The shortest time interval that humans can currently measure is .47×2 10-19 seconds – which is still far from the Planck time of the order of 10-43 seconds. Therefore, although human beings have made some achievements in the first to third dimensional spatial dimensions, they know almost nothing about the three temporal dimensions of the fourth to sixth dimensions.
However, the human imagination has long jumped into the dimension of time. Travel, travel, and reverse in time and space are endless in science fiction movies. Recently, films related to time travel and reversal such as "Hello, Lee Huan Ying" and "Creed" have been greatly successful. Whenever we watch a time travel movie, we may have some brain-burning questions: Can the ending of the story be changed? Do humans have free will? Do different parallel worlds exist corresponding to different possibilities? Can these parallel worlds be connected to each other?
In fact, different movies give different answers to these questions - each movie sets its own rules of time and space. When you have thoroughly eaten the rules of time and space of a movie, the story told by this movie will come to light. This push will show you how to use the three dimensions of time to grasp the time and space rules of each time travel science fiction, so as to avoid the embarrassing scene of two brushes and three brushes and a confused face, and make a science fiction king who understands with one brush.
Before we get to the point, we need to understand what the fourth to sixth dimensions really are. The dimensions we can recognize and speculate about in life are five in total—three dimensions in space, a dimension in time, and different possibilities at the same time. The first four dimensions are well known, and the dimension of "possibility" is actually well understood. For example, when you are hungry, someone takes a sausage and an egg and tells you that you can only pick one to eat. Then the end of the story, it may be that you take the sausage, it may be that you take the egg, of course, it is also possible that you forcibly snatched the sausage and the egg - this is the different possibility at the same time, that is, the fifth dimension.
Now, let's build a planar Cartesian coordinate system. In this coordinate system, the ordinate represents time, which we call the fourth dimension; the abscissa represents different possibilities at the same time, which is the fifth dimension. The dimensions of the three spaces are ignored by us first. This allows us to analyze higher dimensions individually.
Now, let's draw this coordinate system on a piece of paper. Then we fold the paper in half and poke a hole in the fold overlap of the paper; next, we spread the paper out, and we will find that there are two holes in the paper, marked A and B respectively- yes, when the paper is folded, my light poke can make point A "cross" directly to point B without passing through other places on the paper. It should be noted that when we fold the paper, the paper is no longer two-dimensional, because after the paper is folded, before the paper is folded, the whole paper is not in a plane, but expands into three-dimensional space; and the possibility we draw on the paper, the time coordinate system, should also be the same as the paper, and then expand another dimension, and this expanded dimension is the sixth dimension: "space-time travel dimension" - it can help us to cross directly from one point in the five-dimensional space to another.
Although in most films, the characters and perspectives exist only five dimensions for the vast majority of the space. But it is through this sixth dimension that the characters in science fiction films use strange "tools" such as time machines, wormholes, and wellheads to travel from the modern to the past, from one parallel world to another. This is the "eye-catching" of many spatio-temporal science fiction movies, and they are often the key points of plot advancement. For the convenience of everyone's understanding, the traversal events on the probability-time coordinate chart in this article (that is, the events of the sixth dimension) are all represented by dotted arrows (such as the figure on the top right).
The body is on
Although in the ocean of spatio-temporal science fiction, "Creed" is one of the more brain-burning ones; its portrayal of the temporal dimension must be the simplest one. In Creed, there is only one possibility at a point in time. All the characters travel back and forth only in the four-dimensional space, and there is no fifth or sixth dimension at all. The trajectory of the entire film in the possibility-time coordinates is shown in the figure below right.
There is only one possibility at the same point in time, which means that people can neither change the past nor the future. So, like "If you travel back in time and shoot yourself at that time, didn't the one who came from the future and shot you die a long time ago?" Why can I still shoot? Such a paradox is impossible, because any act of traveling back in time to change it would be prevented by the laws of physics. Even if a person goes back in time, the so-called "changes" he makes are the cause of the corresponding status quo, which leads to a cycle of causal laws– this is the famous Novikov principle of self-consistency. This principle is followed not only by "Creed", but also by films such as "Twelve Monkeys". However, the way the characters in "Twelve Monkeys" return to the past is not to reverse time, but to travel directly back to the past, and their trajectory in the possibility-time coordinates is shown in the figure below the right. (The dotted line means to cross directly, as mentioned above)
However, even if there are different possibilities at the same time, the novikov principle of self-consistency may be true. But in this case, in order to achieve a closed loop of cause and effect, the characters can change the course of the story, but they cannot change the ending of the story. To give a simple example, if you don't do well in theoretical mechanics, you cross over to the exam and redo the exam, and even though you fill in a different answer than the last exam, you end up taking the exam again.
That is to say, if you cross from point A in five-dimensional space back to point B, then the path between A and B can be changed, but the two points of A and B cannot be changed, and after crossing from point B and over time, you will definitely return to the original point A - we call it "the boundary conditions that define the whole story from B to A". This principle is followed in the 1960 film The Great Shift in Time and Space.
Ah yes! When I mention the concept of "boundary conditions," you're sure to think of a very important one: standing waves. Many times, when you fix the two ends of an object or a field, the middle part of it will produce a standing wave. For example, the guitar strings fixed at both ends will produce standing waves and emit beautiful music; electromagnetic waves limited by waveguides will also produce standing waves, forming different TE and TM modulus; the movement of electrons in atoms is actually the embodiment of standing waves. The characteristic of standing waves is that they are not only fixed at both ends, but also have some fixed points in the middle (except for the lowest modulus), which we call stationary points.
The standing wave discussed above is the standing wave in the spatial dimension; but the movie "Hello, Li Huanying" generalizes the concept of standing wave to the dimension of time. What does this mean? Not only can the beginning and ending of the story be changed, but the key points in the middle of the story (i.e., the stationary point in the standing wave) cannot be changed! To take a simple example: if you and the ta have a love crystallization (legal) and then travel back in time, then you must first meet the ta, hold hands and get a marriage license - these are all essential nodes (stationing). Without any of these nodes (stationing points), the story cannot be advanced, cause and effect cannot be closed-loop, and the novikov principle of self-consistency cannot be established.
Of course, there is also an extreme case where causal closure can be achieved, and that is to stretch the time long enough. Imagine if you travel back to the pre-Qin or Three Kingdoms era, or travel to the ancient Greek city-states and make a big career, will the world pattern of today's world with many superpowers and powers, the modern history of China's rise, and the trend of economic globalization change because of the cause you did in ancient times? I'm afraid it's going to be hard. Because the development of human history has objective laws, even if you can dominate the world and restore the Han Room, it will only set off a wave in the ocean of history, and it will not be able to stop the historical torrent of Haohao Tangtang. Therefore, if you travel back in time, you may not be able to change the outcome of today, and the boundary conditions are still valid.
All in all, the above situations have one thing in common, that is, the advancement of the storyline can form a closed loop in the five-dimensional space. However, this is only a part of the view expressed in the time travel works.
Another part of the work argues that cause and effect can not form a closed loop, that events develop with many different possibilities, and that all possibilities have their own worlds and universes. This is parallel cosmology. In this theoretical context, if you break a precious instrument while doing an experiment, and you don't want to lose money, you cross over to the moment before doing the experiment, then you have a chance to re-do the experiment. But the universe you are in when you do this experiment well, and the universe you are in that you break the experimental instruments, are two different universes. So if you've done your experiments by traveling back in time, you've completely disappeared from the world where the instrument was broken and entered another world.
"Time traveler" is a typical film that supports parallel cosmology. The characters in the story travel back and forth to the past and create different possibilities. Although the concept of "parallel universes" is not mentioned in the film, it reflects one of the most typical characteristics of parallel universe theory - we can change the present and the future by changing the past.
Since the past is changed, the future will also change, so we have to pay attention to the phenomenon of chaos. Chaos is "extreme sensitivity to initial conditions", that is, small changes to the initial factors of the event, which will lead to earth-shaking changes in the subsequent results. The most typical of these is the butterfly effect proposed by Lorenz: a butterfly flapping its wings will cause a very large impact in another place far away, such as causing a huge typhoon. The movie of the same name, "The Butterfly Effect", is a story about chaos - a character who changes a small thing in the past will change his future dramatically.
In general, different parallel universes are independent of each other and do not interfere with each other. However, there are also some works that dare to break down the barriers between parallel universes, so that the characters of different parallel universes are intertwined and compose a wonderful story together. James Ward Bucott's self-written and directed "The Night the Comet Came" is one such film. The film's English title is also particularly thought-provoking – COHERENCE, which means "interference," a term in physics. Since parallel universes can interfere with each other, are they waves of high-dimensional space? If so, how are their wavelengths defined? Are they diffraction like waves in three-dimensional space? Although these questions are not yet answered by scientists today, in science fiction, we may soon see the answers of screenwriters and directors to these questions.
To summarize the above content, the classification structure of spatio-temporal science fiction is roughly as shown in the following figure:
Of course, not all space-time science fiction films belong to the above types. Moreover, with the development of human space-time brain holes, relevant science fiction works will surely reflect more and more diverse rules of time and space. The future story of the crossing is bound to become more and more wonderful and more wonderful
However, I believe that after you master how to draw the possibility - time coordinates, you will understand the time and space logic of the movie faster than the "melon eaters in front of the screen", so that in the exchange after watching the movie, you will receive the exclamation of the pot friends "Oh ~" and "Oh ~", and let them be full of gratitude and admiration for your answers. Of course, you can also use the knowledge of this article to create your own cross-over story – who knows if the next sci-fi guru will be you?
Of course, if you really have this day with unlimited scenery, remember to thank me
bibliography
Xu Lijun. The Concept of Time and Space in Science Fiction Movies[J]. Film Literature, 2007(12):20-20.
[2] Yang Pengxin, "On the Construction Principles and Formal Conventions of Circular Narrative Films", Contemporary Film, No. 10, 2018, p. 50
[3] Jiang Xiaoyuan and Liu Bing, eds., Our Scientific Culture: Science Loses to Superstition, Shanghai: East China Normal University Press, 2007
Leng Wei, Zhang Liping. Rational Reflection on the Phenomenon of "Crossing" in Film and Television: Discussing the Interlacing of Time and Space in Contemporary Film and Television Dramas[J]. Modern Audiovisual, 2011(10):66-68.
Source: Popular science is not huge
Edit: Aloysius
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.