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Showing posts with the label time travel

Time Travel and Superposition in Dark

I was no more than four years old when our car got stuck on a snowy hill decades ago. Everyone but me went outside to push to get us out of the frozen road. More people gathered from other cars to help each other, and soon everyone was engaged in a small rescue operation. That certainly didn't mean I didn't help—as well as others pushing the car from the outside, I did the same from the inside. From the back seat, I put my hands on the front and pushed hard. In my defense, deep down I knew that what I was doing was kind of weird and useless. At the time, I just didn't know why. I was just ashamed sitting alone and doing nothing. Well, like they say, with age comes wisdom, and now I know that what I did was physically impossible, just like in the case of Baron Münchhausen—when he got himself and his horse he was sitting on out of a swamp by pulling his own hair upwards. And just like in an old expression about an absurd and impossible thing one can do—if I were to pull the bootstraps on my shoes up, lift myself into the air, and jump over the fence.

In science fiction, the word bootstrap is also used to portray the impossible task in all the paradoxes that are always hard to understand. Within time travel, the bootstrap paradox is a theoretical paradox that occurs when an object, information, or human is sent back in time and becomes trapped in the infinite cause-effect loop in which it no longer has a detectable point of origin. For a simple example, if I somehow send a copy of this very blog post to my younger self before I write it in the first place, the origin of the text becomes utterly unknown. It exists in the time loop, and I become just somebody who typed it in. Yet, the text will still have my own style of writing and my own thoughts written down and not somebody else's. Hopefully, you will not find this case implicitly weird, because weird in this blog post is yet to come.


I have been aware of the existence of Netflix's 'Dark' for a long time now, but due to its scientific background and complexity, I knew it required continuous binge time to watch it, and last weekend I finally decided the time was just right, and I swallowed all three seasons in just three days. Like no other TV show, it was solely based on time travel and quantum superposition, and... in a word, it was outstanding. With lots of characters to follow through both space and time, it did require full concentration, but thankfully, due to the fantastic direction, script, and performances of all involved, it was more than understandable and enjoyable, to say the least. It is impossible to continue this without spoilers, so if you are eager to watch it first, this is the point of this blog post to stop reading, and I advise it strongly.

Anyhow, Dark's premise is all about bootstrap paradoxes. There are multiple plotlines in the show heavily embedded in time loops, just like my example of this blog post traveling to the past. If that was weird, imagine what this kind of paradox, involving time travel of real people and their intertwined stories, could do to your sanity only as an observer. On top of that, season one passed with very few or no special effects, and there was no reason for that either. In Dark, all the post-time-travel effects are already embedded in the future, or the present, from where they traveled back in time. For example, Helge already had all visible face scars that were consequences of the Urlich's time travel. Also, the stories about the murdered woman on the bottom of the lake were already socially spread even before Katharina was murdered in her own time travel.


Even though Mikkel's time travel was the prime story behind the Dark, where he ended up being a father to Jonas, the main protagonist, for me the strangest and most ingenious bootstrap paradox is Charlotte, who was born in the future, traveled to the past as a baby, and became a mother to Elisabeth, who in her own future became a mother to Charlotte herself. The endless loop between them lies in the fact that they are both mother and daughter to each other. And even this is not the weirdest bootstrap compared to the entire Nielsen family. Martha's and Jonas' child, who is in the show the strangest character of them all, in his own time travel became a father to Tronte, who was Martha's own grandfather. This practically means that Martha's son was his own great-great-grandfather. In the aftermath, most of the members of the Nielsen family are practically the result of a direct or inherited bootstrap paradox and have to thank their existence to time travel itself.

To be honest, I was so perturbed and unsettled with all the relationships by the end of season two that I was not sure how they would come out of this at all. There were so many open loops with no indications how it could go any further. At that point, I thought that this show would go down the drain very quickly, or they must come up with something even more out of the ordinary to continue the story. And then, at the very end, in the last episode, came another Martha, who stood by the dead Martha and answered Jonas' question about where she came from exactly with "Die Frage ist nicht aus welcher Zeit, sondern aus welcher Welt". Well, I am not fluent in German at all, but I know a word of two, and in this case I knew very much the difference between Zeit and Welt. In the outcome, even before the subtitle showed up, I was left staring at the screen with my mouth wide open.


The final season introduced even more time travelers, both new and doppelgangers, but more importantly, the story started to unveil now with the introduction of the cause and effect of the quantum superposition mirrored in the macro world(s) and character's actions. In the quantum world, superposition means particles can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes if we try to observe the process. At that instant, superposition breaks into just one outcome of their many. Just like with the double-slit experiment of light behavior* or in binary superposition with Schrödinger's cat in the show explained by H.G. Tannhaus in one of the episodes.

The difference between the micro and macro worlds, with time travel involved, was that in the macro realm it was now 'possible' to act differently in the same time loop and in one pass to choose one outcome and in the other a different one. That allowed for the same superposition collapse, but in two time loops to create two different Jonas' and two different Marthas and to even further complicate the intertwining situations now with three worlds involved. In the ingeniously written ending of the show, as I expected, time travel loops were impossible to untangle, and the only outcome was, again with time travel interfering, to save one world at the expense of the other two and, by doing so, to prohibit any time travel in the original world.

The ending of two worlds disappearing was just perfect and beautiful, and the very last scene explains which of all characters survive existence and which ones were only products of either direct or inherited bootstraps and therefore not possible to exist in the final world.

* Reality of Double-Slit Experiment
https://www.mpj.one/2022/11/reality-of-double-slit-experiment.html

Strange world of physics and time travel at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/timetravel

Refs:

Dark refs:
https://www.thisisbarry.com/film/netflix-dark-the-bootstrap-paradox/

Technothrillers

You know that feeling with reading novels when your bookmark location is in the second half of the book and you find yourself turning pages faster and faster in order to find what happens next? If your reading interests coincide with mine, the most likely case is that you are reading either science fiction, spy or fast-paced action thrillers, or good and old adventure stories filled with espionage and politics in the background.


Well, that was before. Nowadays, if I wanted all that combined in a single novel, there's a new subgenre called technothrillers, and with some of them, especially with new authors in the self-publishing realm, and on almost all occasions, I found myself turning pages even faster. Three of those great technothrillers you could find are presented in this blog post. The premises are extraordinary, and all of them are borrowed from science fiction: smart robotic nanoparticles enhancing human bodies, evil artificial intelligence operating on Darknet, and one extraordinary idea of teleportation based on time travel.

Let's start with a nanoscaled interface between the human brain and computers. It has always been a holy grail to make this efficient ever since the invention of the first computer. Even now to create this post, I am using the old-fashioned keyboard to type the letters, checking for typos, taking care of the grammar, and rolling the mouse around the table for lots of other commanding purposes. "Interface" by Tony Batton is giving us all the potential outcomes of the system without all those helping gadgets only by using nanoparticles with remote access to everything with a CPU and with the thriller plot that is, in one word, outstanding. I will only add that I touched the icon for the sequel purchase just a couple of moments after I finished the book.


For the next technothriller in line, these three reasons were enough for me to hit the download button: DarkWeb & Net layers of the internet, villain AI, and automated corporations. It was amazing how all this, not so hard to imagine, near future inspired Matthew Mather to create this astonishing novel named "Darknet". Simply put, I felt that all that's happening in this techno adventure was as real as in any ordinary thriller. This reality, in one way or another, is really knocking on our doors, especially the part with automated corporations with no need for humans in roles of CEOs, CMOs, CTOs, and all the other C?Os. The scary part is that we don't even need supreme AI to take over, just advanced automation. The thriller part of the book is as perfect as the premise itself. Enough said.

Last, but not least, comes the boldest sci-fi premise in Douglas E. Richards' "Split Second". While at first it is not immediately comprehensible how time travel can be used for teleportation and then for the entire thriller story, it is quite simple really. I don't really like to spoil the book here, especially since the author kept the details from the reader for a big portion of the pages, but I have to say that it is an ingenious idea. I will just give you a hint to think about it: we are living in a universe with four dimensions by its nature, three spatial ones and time as the fourth. If we move along one dimension, i.e., up and down, we are not really moving left or right or forward or backward. We would be only using one spatial dimension and traveling forward in time. The other two spatial coordinates would stay the same. Similarly, the question from the book was, what if we were able to use only the time dimension and move just a fraction of a second forward or backward in time and NOT use spatial dimensions by doing so? Where exactly would our spatial coordinates be AFTER the time travel? Where would everything else be after our arrival? If you are intrigued, this book is definitely for you.


To summarize this spoiler-less review, even though I liked and enjoyed all the stories the same, the plausibility of the background science fiction is always important to me, and with these three, "Darknet" is maybe something we could witness within our lifespans, and just for that fact, if I had to rate these three technothrillers, it would be my first choice of recommendation. As much as I would love to see something similar to the nano-sized robots floating in our bloodstreams, the "Interface" premise is still going to wait for a better understanding of our own intelligence and brain activity. The wait must also include significant nano-scaling of the CPUs as well. As for the time travel, if you ask me, this might stay in the fiction only for a very long time, perhaps even to stay in the realm of the impossible, but who knows, we might witness one-day time travel of the information data somehow if sending any mass back in time proves to be unfeasible.

Nevertheless, I truly enjoyed all the twists in stories, all the characters and their interactions and development, writing styles, and how everything unfolded at the end of all three novels. A warm recommendation goes without saying.

Books:
http://www.tonybatton.com/interface/
http://matthewmather.com/books/darknet/
http://www.douglaserichards.com/split-second

More thriller reviews:
https://www.mpj.one/2017/04/cotton-alex-will-travis-and-david.html

Time Travel

It's a well-known fact that our universe is, as far as we know today, a four-dimensional space-time continuum with three spatial coordinates and the time playing a role of the fourth one. We are perfectly capable of traveling backwards and forwards within the first three spatial coordinates, but is it possible to do the same on the fourth one? I am sure you would agree that it is not too exciting going up or down or left or right, but traveling through time could be something special. But is it possible? Let's explore all the theories, share some stories, and read about one connected hoax.


Well yes, like many of you, I also love reading sci-fi stories and watching great movies about time travel, but before I start upgrading my DeLorean with a brand new flux capacitor kit I can find online, let me tell you a story that inspired me to start reading articles and buying popular scientific books regarding the famous fourth dimension of our universe. It happened about 12 years ago when I was telecommuting with a Munich-based company developing software for interactive conferences for pharmaceutical companies. We did a great job, and I was asked to visit Munich for some software tuning and also for some socializing with my partners during the famous Oktoberfest festival. This is kind of a "conference" where instead of software driving the event, the only tool needed is, you guess, a great Bavarian beer. So, one night we went there and had a great time. I remember my visit didn't hit the main Oktoberfest night, but still the feeling was all the same. We were sitting in the big hall filled with lots of wooden tables, and I estimated up to 500 people in there. In one brief moment of insanity, I spotted a man enjoining his friends about 50, maybe 70 meters away from us. They were doing the same as we, drinking beer and having a good time, but what impressed me the most was his appearance, which hammered my head for a couple of moments or more. He looked amazingly like gray aliens portrayed in Fox Mulder X files aired at the time. He had a large head compared to his body, large black eyes slightly curved, a small nose and mouth, and not much of ears on the top of his head. Probably because of the large amount of beer, I didn't remember clearly what happened after, but I was probably in the center of loud laughter when I pointed my finger and said, "Look, there's an alien drinking beer!". I am sure the amount of beer I drank was responsible for the whole thing, but still, ever since then, I can't stop thinking that gray aliens are nothing more than just our future descendants traveling through time, visiting the past and enjoying good shows, like in this case the best quality of Bavarian beer, especially brewed for Oktoberfest.

Let's face it, we surely don't know how humans will evolve within the next millennium or more, but I am confident that one particular outcome could be just like grays! It's not far from reason that our body would evolve down while our head will be 'heading' in the opposite direction in the future, directly caused by fewer physical activities and more brain evolution toward rationality. Anyway, if I am a future human in possession of a DeLorean with a working flux capacitor from "Back to the Future", after visiting a couple of main historical events, I would definitely visit some great entertainments of the past.


Ok, ok, I know how ridiculous this sounds, so I will stop now and try to get back to the main topic. Let's try to summarize what we scientifically know about time and how to bend it. Throughout Einstein's theories, we now definitely know that the universe is built from the fabric that is bendable. It was first proven by a famous experiment during a solar eclipse, which showed the curvature of light from a star as the light rays passed by the sun. Arthur Eddington led an expedition to west Africa back in 1919 in order to take pictures of a solar eclipse with definite proof of dislocated stars located next to the sun's disc, caused by a curved universe caused by the sun's large mass. In other words, we definitively know that spacetime is bendable, but the physics of how and why it bends is a completely different story. According to Einstein, in lack of better knowledge of the universe fabric itself and lack of discovery that would prove existence of gravitons, we can't say for sure even that gravity is a force at all! It could be just a property of the space-time fabric that bends easily by mass. In other words, the universe could be just a large system of perforated roads for traveling particles with mass and energy waves. Maybe to describe it better with a metaphor, if we are a large mass traveling throughout space and we don't have enough speed and encounter a curved space around a giant star, we are doomed and will be simply captured into circular motion around the large star. The question is, of course, is it possible to curve the space that much so we can travel the curved path back or forth in time? Thanks to Einstein, we now have a great understanding of the physics of the big. There are mathematical equations that describe and predict all known and still not observed objects in our universe. We are also aware of boundaries like the ultimate speed of light for any particle with a mass, and even the physics of the wormholes and warp drives are mathematically plausible. The only problem is that we are too small to comprehend the great amount of (negative) energy required to establish a wormhole or a drive capable of curving the space instead of propelling itself. In many theoretical studies of wormholes, it is still unknown whether or not it is possible to create a stable tunnel through the fabric.

It seems that building large shortcuts in the universe is still out of our reach, probably because of the great energy needed and our lack of understanding the space fabric itself. The solution is probably waiting to be discovered within a quantum level of existence. Comparing to enormous space and large objects, ironically speaking, studying the science of small particles and energy waves is difficult because we are too big! Simply put, we are unable to monitor and understand small objects because our monitoring tools are too large in size. For example, if we are using an electron microscope, we would only be able to monitor objects much larger than the electrons we are beaming into; otherwise, we would be adding additional disturbance to objects we want to see. Studying the quantum world is only possible indirectly, like in giant accelerators where we are beaming two small particles and forcing them to collide and then learning from the snapshots taken from the clash. However, quantum mechanics is a scientific discipline we have been researching for a century or so, and while there are many things waiting to be understood, we have already learned a great deal about particle physics, electromagnetic waves, and the quantum microworld.


So, what do we quantumly know in regards to time travel? This is the story of searching for the ultimate theory that could be able to connect the microworld with the fabric of the universe itself and explain both the physics of micro and macro objects and their relations. We are still out of luck, but a couple of leading theories arrived in the previous century in the form of string theory and it's variations. What is common for all of them is that they compete with old particle physics either to replace it or to be built on it similarly to what theory of relativity did for Newton's gravity theory. String theory in the form of a membrane or M-theory suggests multiple dimensions and also the creation of multiple universes caused by collisions of membranes. The microworld in this theory would be capable of living and traveling through multiple dimensions and perhaps even universes. Now, how is this connected to time travel? It is important because of our efforts to find a solution to a so-called time travel paradox where traveling backwards in time would be potentially dangerous because of the butterfly effect, where a time traveler, by changing something even as small as killing a butterfly, would end in fatal disturbance of the future already happening events. So the additional question arises: if time travel backwards in time is possible by bending space, how has nature solved this paradox? Two solutions are proposed, wherein one the universe is blocking inconsistent events by it's nature, so it is simply impossible for you to go in the past and kidnap Hitler or kill somebody's ancestors in order to change history. If a future version of you visits a younger you, then it is simply impossible to prevent you later in the future not to make the visit in the first place, as this already happened, and it is nothing but a closed, inconsistent loop that is very hard to imagine. To complicated? Maybe, but check then the other solution where time travel actually places you in a different timeline or parallel universe with copies of you and others. The quantum world recognizes a so-called quantum entanglement where two particles share the same properties even located in two different locations in space, maybe in time, and perhaps even separated by two dimensions or branes. Does it look like 'Fringe' science to you?

Either way, traveling back in time seems to be impossible, blocked, or extremely hard. If you ask Stephen Hawking, the only proof we need is a lack of tourists from the future visiting us. Of course if you exclude my encounter with the Oktoberfest and gray alien from the beginning of this story.


Like you probably noticed, this post is more about traveling backwards in time, but it would be unfair not to mention the ease of traveling forward in time. We are doing it on a daily basis, and since you started reading this post, you traveled forward in time for a couple of minutes by now. However, jumping forward into some future destination in time is a different story, but thanks to the theory of relativity during fast flight of say 95% of the speed of light, traveling into the future is more than possible. So to speak. In theory, that is. Namely, it is a well-known thought experiment where a train is circling the Earth with a near to light speed for a period of 100 years. Time in the train could be slowed down by ratio of 1/5000, and their passengers would be older only one week compared to their fellow Earthlings, who got older one full century or so.

Like I said, easy. :-)

Time travel is not only popular in scientific circles or sci-fi stories. It is also popular among internet hoaxes. Back then, during 2000 and 2001, a guy named John Titor ruffled the internet audience of the time within bulletin boards and forums, claiming that he came from the year 2036 of his own universe into ours as a guinea pig of the government time travel experiment in his own future time. He was sent to retrieve some old computers they lost in their timeline. He even posted various images and schematics of his time machine based on contained micro singularities installed in the car capable of bending the laser beam toy and therefore the space-time itself. It was enjoyable how detailed it was, along with predictions of future nuclear wars, the CERN LHC experiment, the war in Iraq, etc. Don't miss this story in the below links. I am looking forward to the movie.

* Image credit
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092026/

Refs:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../STEPHEN-HAWKING-How-build-time-machine.html
http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/parallel-universe.htm
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/24/132932268/a-physicist-explains-why-parallel
http://www.quantumjumping.com/articles/parallel-universe/parallel-universes-theory/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1269288/STEPHEN-HAWKING
http://library.thinkquest.org/27930/wormhole.htm
http://www.h2g2.com/approved_entry/A6345407
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor

Schrödinger's Cat and Intelligent Movies

In short it goes like this: "There's a cat in a box... That has, like, a 50/50 chance of living because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box. Regular physics would say that it's one or the other. That the cat is either alive or dead, but quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously. It's only when you open the box that they collapse into one single event." This quote is me paraphrasing James Ward Byrkit, writer and director of the movie "Coherence" I've just watched. Although Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935, when he first wrote his famous thought experiment, invented pretty complex radioactive trap for the poor cat inside the box, I think that "vial of poison" and James' full description in the script is one of the best interpretation of the quantum paradox there is. The quantum weirdness is one of the most intriguing areas in science, that is still buzzing our minds for about a century now. I wrote about it a little last year in post Quantum Weirdness and when it comes to science, it was one of the posts I enjoyed writing the most in the past.


About 90 years ago, Niels Bohr, the greatest Danish physicist of all times, described the quantum mechanics perhaps with the best explanation ever since. He said something like this: "Quantum particle doesn't exist in one state or another, but in all of its possible states at once. It's only when we observe its state that a quantum particle is essentially forced to choose one probability, and that's the state that we observe. Since it may be forced into a different observable state each time, this explains why a quantum particle behaves erratically."* Well, describing the quantum behavior is a challenge ever since and because of Bohr who managed to do it first, all other explanations combined we call today "The Copenhagen Interpretation". The Schrödinger's cat is just Erwin's metaphorical attempt to put it closely into our world of big which we should understand better. But we will get back to the 'cat' later..

And relax, this is not going to be the scientific post or some nerdy brainstorming and (usually) utopistic ideas of mine. Instead it will be about movies. Yep. Just short glimpse of one of my favorite direction within Sci-Fi genre of movies. The one where, just like with reading books, you don't need any big productions, fancy and state of the art visual effects, expensive sets and VFX or famous actors to create great entertainment. This is a genre I like to call Sci-Fi for the brains. Like in the movie "Coherence", the plot is placed down to the real people, or to be precise into familiar settings. There is no space ships or vividly animated aliens or any villains for that matter. All you need is your imagination, little background knowledge and that's all.


I will show you now three movies I recommend warmly and without too much spoiling the films for all of you who still didn't have the chance to watch them. Couple of days before "Coherence" I have seen the blockbuster "Edge of Tomorrow". I liked it a lot, of course, but still, even though with great cast and effects, the story is nothing exclusive or new. It also provides expected closure and left no room for too much thinking or brainstorming over the story. On the other side, "Coherence" with it's relatively anonymous cast and script, that can easily fit within the set in some small theater or school gym, tried to exploit the very cat of mister Schrödinger's and provide one more Copenhagen interpretation, only this time with people in main roles and our own personalities instead of "vial of poison". It all started with simple dinner party and with ordinary people who eventually realized what might happen when you open the box. Is the cat alive or dead, or to be precise what is really happening when different possibilities emerge out of the box in the same time ... try to find at the end of the movie. It's not what you might expect and what we got used to in regular movies, but not every story has the happy ending. I guess in this one, the ending is like in quantum mechanics and like the cat from the century before, "Coherence" has both happy ending and ... not. You have to see it to understand. That's all I will say.

The second Sci-Fi jewel in the same sub-genre is "The Man from Earth", written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman back in 2007. The science behind this one is biology and how, in its most divergent (and also on the edge of impossible) path, it might affect the very history of mankind. Or to be precise, explained it. The story focuses on John Oldman, the man who, due to some biological anomaly, doesn't age ever since he was born in Cro-Magnon tribal society 14000 years ago. Like any other science fiction, the movie doesn't try too much to explain the reasons of his presence and instead portraying his straggle to fit, ability to learn throughout time and adapt into different parts of the world and his everlasting crave to tell somebody his story. And this film is exactly what it is about - finally, the "old man" Oldman, currently university professor who's about to leave and start another loop, decides to share everything with a group of his peer colleagues. Well, he will learn that impossible stories like his one is not possible to be accepted that easily or at all. But the audience behind the screen will get great entertainment and possible solution for some parts of our own history, and especially, religiosity and it's main figures during the eons. Including Buddha and Christ. Oh yes, and don't expect the sword fights, mad scientists or any action at all, like it was in "Highlander" and it's, almost stupid plot with cutting heads off for the "prize". The set of this movie is only one small living room. The only thing you have to do is sharpen you brain cells before clicking the "Play" button.


Finally, the last one is "Primer", extraordinary film written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth. Shane was also playing the main character in the movie and the entire project finished with only $7,000. It's hard to say what science is behind this one. Probably the best bet is to use word "fringe" for this as the main theme and background technology is "time travel". The script is based on the one of oldest time travel paradigms. The one that doesn't include parallel universes and instead the time traveler is ending into his very own universe where the danger of "butterfly effect" can ripple the time stream and change everything. This is the most intelligent script and movie I have seen so far and before I watched I read some reviews before and remember this one: "Anybody who claims they fully understand what’s going on in ‘Primer’ after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar". Well, I am not either and to be completely honest I didn't manage to follow entire story and understand it after the first (and last) watching but more or less I got the almost whole picture from that only session.

The key point in understanding the science (fiction) behind "Primer" is to comprehend what is happening with the guy who enters the time machine and when he does in the first place why his major concern is to make sure that his parallel copy enters the box no matter what. The problem with this is well speculated in the article from Discover Magazine I read once, and in short, if time travel into past is possible, nature must have some mechanism in order to prevent inconsistent events like in this case non-entering the box by the time traveler after the loop is initiated. Confused? Maybe to better understand this paradox, take a look at this image***:


The hazard is obvious, if the "original" in its own blue timeline didn't enter the box at 6PM, the green parallel timeline would not exist in the first place. In other words, if "double" meets "original" and stops him from entering the box, the paradox is obvious and we can only imagine what happens if that "butterfly" occurs. That's why "the science fiction behind time travel" in recent years actively rejects this approach and involves another universe being destination for time travelers instead of the origin universe, which would explain consistency of traveling into past. Of course, we might ask what would happen if ALL "originals" from ALL universes decide to time travel? Whatever universe they arrive, the copy of them will be needed to enter the box in destination universe and we have the same problem again, let's call it "Multiverse Butterfly Effect"... Anyway, if you didn't see "Primer" or want to watch it again, try to comprehend this image first. It will help a lot.

These three movies, even though from the same genre and sub-genre, differ in used background science and I can't truly compare them with each other. So I can't favorite one of them but these are the movies I like to give thoughts again and again... They are not really made for just entertainment and for me, more memorable then regular Sci-Fis.

Images and article refs:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schroedingers_cat_film.svg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat
* http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/.../quantum-suicide4.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/
http://coherencethemovie.com/
** http://www.amazon.com/Wanted-Schrodingers-Magnet
http://manfromearth.com/
http://www.primermovie.com/
***http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_(film)
http://www.myvisionmyway.com/the-man-from-earth-minimalist-poster.html