Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Primer and Antigravity: The Bittersweet Accident of Time Travel

Okay so here's the deal: there are a million fan-made diagrams on the internet concerning the timeline of Primer itself, and some of them look pretty much the same. I've definitely noticed the pattern to which most fans of Primer agree that Abe and Aaron have been traveling in some sort of continuous loop. It's like a giant loop of life.

Now how exactly does this work? The film drops a lot of dialogue that physics nerds and engineers would probably appreciate, as they talk about the the reduction of mass through means of electromagnets, to which Abe and Aaron use a "weeble-wobble" to test their experiment. However, as you already know, they create a time machine, or a box that is capable of time travel.
But how exactly does that mistake pop out of thin air? Well, let's look at how exactly this works; when the electromagnets reduce the mass of the object itself, it travels in this continuum where the the mass decreases, and then increases in some sort of pattern. When it turns off, the weeble-wobble returns to its mass that it started in, and then when the contraption turns on, it reduces the mass in some sort of pattern that goes back and forth depending on the mass before it. The way that this is executed is that the weeble-wobble can leave the apparatus in the present, but the mass will always stay the same, but that depends on whether or not the contraption is on.

How does this work mathematically? I took the time to google "antigravity" in physics, for which the purpose of it is to reduce the mass of an object through means of rotating magnetic fields. The speed of the rotation is factored into the current of the magnetic field, measured in amps. The resistor of each rotation cuff is set to a certain Ohm per meter so that it reaches a certain voltage in order to reduce the mass. The connection between voltage and mass is suggested through the Law of Conservation of Energy, where the amount of work is factored by the net force of the object along with the amount of distance. This "x" amount of work is divided by the elementary charge in order to get the voltage of the magnets and the magnetic field.


1 comment:

  1. Great investigation into the science behind the movie but your post seems incomplete. So you investigated the anti-gravity aspect of the film and.... conclusions? Is it legit? More importantly, what do you think of script not caring whether or not you could keep up with the science? Clearly, they wanted to reach a wide audience but isn't making so scientifically dense and having important things said/done so quickly that you're likely to miss 1/2 of them a problem? Or is the film proof that more films should not worry about the audience so much?

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