Fire up the DeLorean. It’s time to hit the space-time-continuum highway

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/12/2016 (3407 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re a naysayer who thinks there’s no future in time travel, it might be time to think again.

That’s because a group of scientists is generating headlines with a new interpretation of our universe that suggests the notion of hopping around the space-time continuum is a distinct possibility.

According to stories we partially understood, the researchers — Dr. Dirk-Andre Deckert from the University of California, and Dr. Michael Hall and Prof. Howard Wiseman from Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics in Australia — claim the idea of a parallel universe is not science fiction.

They presented their claims in a paper entitled Many Interacting Worlds Theory, based on the “Many Worlds Interpretation Theory,” which states there are parallel universes that interact with one another.

“The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” Wiseman is quoted as saying. “In the well-known ‘Many-Worlds Interpretation,’ each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realized — in some universes, the dinosaur-killing asteroid missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonized by the Portuguese.”

The bottom line, they say, is if multiple universes interact with each other, it would make time travel possible. Which means time travel is only a matter of time. Until then, however, you’ll have to waste time with today’s list of the Top Five Fictitious Time Travellers of All Time:

5) The Time Traveller(s): Bill and Ted

The preferred method of travel: A telephone booth

The time of their lives: In the 1989 sci-fi buddy film Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are a pair of dim-witted metalhead slacker high school students in San Dimas, Calif., who dream of starting a band, the Wyld Stallyns.

Tragically, they are about to flunk history class, which means Ted’s dad will ship him off to military school in Alaska. Enter Rufus (George Carlin), a time traveller from the future where their band (Why not?) is the foundation for a perfect society. To protect the future utopian society based on the music and wisdom of the “Two Great Ones,” Rufus and his time machine disguised as a phone booth have to help our heroes get a passing grade in their final history oral report. What are a pair of boneheads with access to a cool time machine to do?

Well, naturally, they travel through time and kidnap a menagerie of important historical figures for a totally radical history presentation. You will be surprised to hear hijinks ensue as Bill and Ted become besties with Napoleon Bonaparte, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud and Genghis Khan, to name a few. The movie, which spawned a lame sequel two years later, was blasted by big-shot critics, but 27 years later it’s a cult classic.

On its 25th anniversary, critic Hadley Freeman gushed: “Of all the delightfully improbable scenarios depicted… from Napoleon Bonaparte causing havoc on a waterslide to Billy the Kid and Socrates (a.k.a. ‘So-crayts, of course’) picking up chicks in a California mall … none would have seemed more unlikely on its release than the idea that one day, with much media fanfare, the public would be celebrating the film’s 25th anniversary.” So, dudes, it passed the test of time.

4) The Time Traveller: Ebenezer Scrooge

The preferred method of travel: Ghost

The time of his life: Along with being a cold-hearted miser who despises Christmas, Scrooge is one of literature’s earliest — though far from the first — time travellers. He’s been rated the No. 5 time traveller of all time by The Christian Science Monitor and Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, but we’ve bumped him up a slot because, well, it’s almost Christmas.

Most famously, Scrooge is the focal point of Charles Dickens’ legendary 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, which tells how the bitter man of business — “Bah! Humbug!” — is transformed into the kindest man on the planet after being visited by four spirits, starting with the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who sends the next three ghosts in a bid to redeem Scrooge.

In the book and the 1951 film — wherein Alastair Sim plays the definitive Scrooge — the cranky miser is whisked back several decades by the Ghost of Christmas Past, who shows Scrooge his life as a lonely schoolboy, the death of his beloved older sister, Fan, and his kind-hearted old boss, Mr. Fezziwig, who throws one heck of a Christmas party.

He also gets to see his mean-spirited self dumping his true love, Belle, because money has replaced his love for her. Spookiest of all is the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who zooms Scrooge forward a year, showing him a bleak future (Spoiler Alert: Things don’t go well for Tiny Tim) along with a tombstone bearing (dramatic pause) Scrooge’s own name. These ghost-powered jaunts cause Scrooge to repent, whereupon he is whisked back to the present and begins to party hearty.

Notes The Christian Science Monitor: “The tight-fisted businessman remains one of the most famous (time travellers), shaping our modern conception of Christmas and serving as a model for redemption.” To which we say: God bless us, every one!

3) The Time Traveller: The Terminator

The preferred method of travel: Naked

The time of his life: We would love to travel back in time and undo most of the movies Arnold Schwarzenegger ever made, with the exception of this 1984 classic, wherein Arnold, cleverly disguised as a human, portrays a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator that travels from 2029 to 1984, because it wants to get its hands on one of the original Macintosh computers.

No, sorry, the virtually unstoppable cyborg is sent back in time by Skynet, an artificial intelligence system that will spark a nuclear holocaust, to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) because her unborn son will one day become a saviour against the evil machines in a post-apocalyptic future.

In the movie, which has spawned four less awesome sequels, Michael Biehn plays Kyle Reese, a soldier from the future sent back in time to protect Connor.

In the 1984 flick, Arnold’s cyborg zaps into Los Angeles in his birthday suit, steals guns and clothes, then systematically begins killing women named Sarah Connor, finding their addresses in the phone directory, which would be much harder today. In one of the most iconic scenes in film history, the Terminator is refused entry to the police station where his target is housed, causing him to survey the counter, then famously grunt at the police sergeant in his Arnold accent: “I’ll be back.” Moments later — BLAMMO! — he drives a car into the station and massacres the staff.

What you may not know is Schwarzenegger had trouble pronouncing the word “I’ll” and asked director James Cameron if it could be changed to “I will be back.” Cameron — bless his tiny little heart — said no. The catchphrase went on to be named No. 37 on the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 100 movie quotes. In naming Terminator the No. 6 time traveller of all time, The Christian Science Monitor chirped: “For Charlie Chaplin, it was the Little Tramp, for John Gielgud, it was Hamlet, and for Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s a leather-jacket-wearing cyborg assassin.” And, yes, he WILL be back.

2) The Time Traveller: Marty McFly

The preferred method of travel: A DeLorean sports car

The time of his life: For many of us Baby Boomers, nothing says time travel like the Back to the Future movie franchise, especially the first film in the trilogy, wherein iconic Canadian actor Michael J. Fox stars as small-town California teenager Marty McFly, who is sent back in time to 1955, where he meets his future parents in high school and — OOPS! — accidentally becomes his mom’s romantic interest.

Travelling through time in a modified DeLorean invented by his pal Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown — the core component of which was the legendary “flux capacitor” — Marty must ensure his parents fall in love or he’ll cease to exist, and he has to get back to his own time to prevent Doc Brown from being gunned down by Libyan terrorists, as apparently happened at the start of the movie.

Could happen, right? Oddly, some lists pick Doc Brown as history’s top time traveller, but that makes no sense to us, because Marty is the one who does most of the awesome driving through time, including using a lightning bolt to get back to the future where he finds (Hurray!) Doc Brown is still alive because he got Marty’s tip from the past about wearing a bullet-proof vest.

In picking Marty as the No. 1 time hopper, The Christian Science Monitor declares: “The greatest time-travel story ever told (no debate) put a 5-4 teenager into a magic sports car and sent him 30 years into the past, where he invented skateboarding and French-kissed his own mother.”

The movie was a blockbuster, raking in more than US$381 million worldwide to become the highest-grossing film of 1985 and bagging a host of awards. Sadly, the DeLorean company went bankrupt in 1982. Now, if we only had a time machine.

1) The Time Traveller: Doctor Who

The preferred method of travel: A blue British police box

The time of his lives: What with being an unbiased newspaper journalist, we should start by confessing we are mildly obsessed with Doctor Who. The truth is, we have been known to put a little bow-tie on our small white dog and jokingly refer to our furry pet as “The Doctor.”

So there’s that. The thing is, this is not unusual for Doctor Who fans — we are known as Whovians — who are more passionate about this TV series, one of the longest-running and most successful in history, than our wife is about buying do-it-yourself furniture at IKEA, if you can imagine that. For the uninitiated, The Doctor is a rogue Time Lord, a spacefaring and time-travelling humanoid alien from the planet Gallifrey who explores the universe in his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), a sentient time-travelling spaceship that is larger on the inside than the outside and is supposed to change appearance based on its surroundings, but is stuck looking like a blue 1950s-style British police box, because those were pretty common back in 1963 when the TV show first aired in the United Kingdom. The show, a huge cult favourite, originally ran on BBC One for 26 seasons, from Nov. 23, 1963, to Dec. 6, 1989.

There was a brief attempt to revive it with a TV movie in 1996, but it wasn’t successfully brought back to life until 2005. Since it began, 12 actors have starred as The Doctor, which is possible because whenever this Time Lord suffers some sort of accident that would kill a normal human, he regenerates into a new incarnation (and, surprise, an entirely new actor) taking on a new body and a new personality. What with all the time-travelling going on, The Doctor sometimes runs into earlier versions of himself, especially when they want to boost ratings.

The thing about The Doctor is he never travels alone. Over the years there have been an impressive array of “companions,” mainly attractive young women who help the doctor rescue the Earth from imminent destruction while wearing clothing that young male viewers find enticing, if you catch our none-too-subtle drift. Our favourite quote from the series? Try this: “You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell. Let’s kill Hitler!” The website Ranker.com rates The Doctor as the top time traveller ever. We’re not about to argue.

Like every week, it was extremely hard to narrow this list down. We would not be surprised if many of you would have come up with an entirely different list.

We’d be more than happy to discuss it with you. The next meeting of our Time Travellers Club is last week. See you back then.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca