Possible Plot Hole??

Your Answers:

1 The height enables uncut acces to more towers, resulting in more energy to the device, which in turn enbales him to bypass the 10min window,imposed by ground access problems.

2 Even if they shut down broadcast towers, the device could supposedly use other sources of power, like he mentioned in the intro, garage door openers, TV remotes, etc.

3 That is true.

4 Yes,they were erased, because the past before them was changed, so they never came to be.

5 In my opinion, this movie was a great one, I enjoyed (nearly) every moment of it.

"I really hate it when they decide things like "everything you touch goes with you". You're touching everything, think about it."

Oh yes, so true. Not to mention, that we pretty much touch everything at least by chance => air molecules. So even jumping up wouldn't help, apart from it being extremely stupid a thing to do in a bank... ;-) Why would I think so? I can already hear some of You saying "but the time machine captures one moment of time since it's become active". Well... not quite. If we consider the machine's power cycle, it'd require a few moments to 'catch on' and examine the timeframe before using it. It's pretty much impossible to make a machine that'd catch a timeframe of infinitely small size (exactly as impossible as drawing a "dot" of an infinitely immeasurable diameter in mathematics - those brainiacs haven't figured that one out yet :P), and I do believe that in such a case we'd have a timeframe that's pretty consistently encompasssing the entire world... But I'd like to speculate / elaborate a bit further on the topic... ;-)

There are several time travel theories. One of them implies that once the device was set, everything - including the person/group willing to go back in time - would be reset to that time. No memories, nothing. This would seem to be the most plausible outcome, but it would keep us in a loop. More on that in a moment.

Another one tells us that whatever we remember goes back with us. Retaining whatever we were touching is simply an extension of this idea, but an illogical one. While it might be theoretically possible to 'remember', it wouldn't be so in the case of 'hold'/'touch'. ;-) Unless, of course, we're already talking about moving the traveller outside space-time transcontinuum, which would imply that we're already changing future by simply attempting the travel. That has many implications... ;-)

But tell me - how does one future result from the previous one? Backward time travel does seem like an easy topic, but it's also very, very dodgy. For example, it would be logical to assume that the 'past' we're experiencing after the travel is a sort of a loop that extends to the future, therefore it would be crucial for our 'original' to still make the travel in the first place (otherwise the continuum would be broken, and thus we come to the first possible inconsistency [further referred to as time paradoxes or simply paradoxes]).

The second one comes to mind a few lines back - duplicates and originals. If we see time-space as a continuum, as with each of those we can fold it in loops, however we would NEVER be 'coming back' to any place in time, if we were going to retain our memories, experiences and (possibly?) things we carry. Each time You fold a piece of wire or rope, You end up having TWO pieces of the same rope closely together - You don't end up 'merging' them with each other. Ergo - we would have a duplicate of our traveller, and one that shouldn't be seen by his original. This is imperative, since the outcome of the meeting might somehow change the should-be 'safe' future event of the original making the time travel, thus making the 'returned' traveller 'vanish' (he never got there on that time, it all never happened etc.), which would leave us with that meeting not happening, which would make it happen... We're in a loop, and that's the second paradox we encounter.

The third paradox is closely related to technical aspects of the time machine. Unless You fold the time-space continuum like a string, You would have to have some sort of a 'time wave' (name it accordingly) extending into the past in order to place our traveller back there. Third paradox - once we've travelled the smallest slice back from the moment the machine was activated, it wouldn't have been activated, so we're a split second before we push the button, and we push it... We're, once again, in a time-loop extending into infinity (or, more like, lasting a split second in both directions) for us. Not merry. ;-) Of course, if the device is supposed to break the continuum and act upon one specific place in time, we wouldn't be 'rewinding' time like a tape, we'd be folding it - and we're back to the 'duplicate / original' theory again, which is clearly NOT the case in the movie. ;-)

There's another time-travel movie, in which the traveller goes inot the future, for a change. I believe a lot of You have seen it (can't remember the title, though). It's a good movie, but it has a major flaw. Moving forward within the time-space continuum would require a time dilation device instead of a time travel device. In such a state, we'd appear to the outside world as if we were literally not moving for generations. Someone would've moves us eventually. And I don't believe natural disasters wouldn't harm us... ;-) There's no place on this Earth that I know of that would be left alone for 100 years, not to mention a few millenia... ;-P And if we decided to build a time travel device that would operate outside time-space instead, the effects would've been quite different from those depicted on the screen. ;-) There. ;-P


All that aside, I'd like to propose a nice time travel movie to see - "Primer" ( reffer to => http://imdb.com/title/tt0390384/ ). The movie, despite it being low-budget, tries to address quite a few time paradoxes we usualy encounter in poorly made flicks on the topic. Even though the camera man isn't well trained (his shadow can be seen in a few shots), the storyline is rather well thought-out, for a change. It may not be the best choice for those seeking easy action, as there isn't much action in the movie anyway. It does, however, ask a few valid questions, and even answers some. A couple of valid points are made, and by the end of the movie, they still stand. Weird, huh? :-> I must say that I was a bit skeptical at first, but when I chewed on... The movie isn't too easy (and that's my way of saying that You need to put at least SOME brains to "get" it) and it wouldn't be bad to blow the dust off of Your brain's lobes (especialy the ones holding information in regard to physics). In today's movie industry, it's a rare pearl. I mean, someone actually sat down, thought the idea over for a change, and came up with a pretty consistent plot. Well worth watching; I seriously doubt many people will complain about two hours taken from their bios they'd like returned...


Best regards to intelligent, THINKING people.
Egon_Freeman


PS.
Please excuse my grammar mistakes. English isn't my native language (I'm Polish) and I doubt that I shall ever get in terms with Your tenses' construction... even though I try hard to. ;-)

PS. 2
It's not intelligence that makes the difference, but how it's used. Also, for anyone wishing to contact me, feel free to write to egon [at] eter [dot] sytes [dot] net.