Here we go again. The movie Predestination, which came out in UK cinemas on Friday, is the very latest in the long history of time travel films. There’s been more than 100 since the Terminator and Back to the Future franchises began 30 years ago – all of which are science fiction that have little to do with the science facts.
Like many of them, Predestination has its own engaging twist: Ethan Hawke plays a time agent who nips back through history to snuff out crimes before they can be committed. Like all of them it’s chronologically illogical: the split second a movie has someone monkeying with time you are doomed – predestined, you might say – to abandon the science and enter a plea of temporal insanity.
Things very quickly get very brain boggling. Consider this – if someone builds a time machine what’s to prevent them going back one minute and smashing it up before they first use it? Which means it never gets used – so how did it get smashed up. What prevents the whole parade of paradoxes thrown up by time travel to the past – becoming your own grandfather, killing Hitler before he starts World War Two and so on – is that they trash big laws of physics. And the Universe, as far as we understand it, likes to play by the rules.
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