When the fifth article in our Primer discussion published, "TW" asked what Aaron intended to do with the large box he was building at the end of the film.
It is on one level a moot question. Overnight around the fourth day Abe and Aaron travel to the past, Thomas Granger appears from maybe three days in the future. His involvement causes an infinity loop, the end of future history, because he prevents the events which lead him to make that trip. Thus we can stretch time, from the moment the failsafe starts to the moment Granger departs, maybe eight or nine days. Aaron and Abe returned to the first of those days and spent that night at the party. They stand in the airport the day after that party, the day that Abe does not explain the workings of the machine to Aaron because his doppelganger has sabotaged his machine. That creates a second infinity loop overlapping the first; history is caught in a loop not longer than four days, one of which is in the past as Aaron leaves. If reaches this foreign location, raises funds, equipment, and workers, and has a box running in two days, he might enter it minutes before time ends and return one day to minutes after the machine started. He cannot do much, so it's not particularly significant what he hopes to do.
Is Aaron working on a "more powerful" device to send him further into the past? Everything we know says that these machines cannot transport anyone to a point prior to their activation. They do not travel through time, but create a temporal connection between two points. A bigger machine has room to transport more, but there are not very many uses for it. A large machine could temporarily duplicate more people. If at five in the afternoon a hundred soldiers came from the battlefield and traveled back eight restful hours to morning, then marched onto that battlefield, there would be two hundred soldiers there. Could you duplicate enough men to make a difference? Could you plan for that?. Under replacement theory you would have to ensure that the right men entered that evening to emerge that morning.
Is it really a time travel device? It could be carrying passengers to another dimension, which would make an interesting escape hatch for anyone fleeing from whatever might not be in that other universe. This, too, is problematic. Something would have to have happened while the machine was running which could be prevented if someone could duplicate himself in the past. It also means that there would be two of him in that other dimension. If he prevented the problem, his double would have no reason to leave.
Aaron might not be interested at all in the machine's temporal effects. Its output power exceeds its input power by about 6.25%; you could input a gigawatt and get back an extra sixty-two megawatts at no cost. Twelve in series would double power output, cutting costs of electrical generation in half. A judiciously designed system could become a perpetual power machine, the extra electricity tapped and the original power fed back to produce the same increase again. An engineer could easily get funding for this, if he has a low-level prototype that demonstrates the increased output. Aaron might be planning to profit from the more mundane aspect of his invention.
It is not completely clear what Aaron is building, but it does seem likely that it is another box. At one point he said that they should build one large enough for multiple occupants. He might not realize that his time is limited.
All of this is speculative; the film does not offer an answer. It's anyone's guess what he thinks he is going to do with it. He will be out of time before he does it.
Comments
I am not clear about something fundamental with the movie - - to make it logically work, did the guys from the future have to get in the box to go back in time and the guys from the past get in the box to take them into the future? The guys always had a period of overlapping coexistence once they got into the machine from either direction?
Thanks,
RicardoM
richardATdatanowllcDotCom
Thanks for the question, Ricardo. What they do is travel to the past and then (usually) avoid their alternate selves and wait for the moment to arrive when those alternates would also travel to the past. Thus they have duplicate existence for the day, which resolves when their divergent selves leave for the past.
If their divergent selves do not leave on schedule, it creates problems, discussed in other articles.
I hope this helps; thanks again.
--M. J. Young
I am not certain if one box being active inside of another is possible, but the movie does show one box folded up being carried back inside another, so if the active components or material which causes the travelling phenomena is non-interacting while not energized or has shielding on the outside or something which keeps them separated, etc., then is there a special capability of the carried, inactive box from the original timeframe? Does it have a special reference or "'home' box tag" in the sense that it was inactive and it had not been constructed yet?
If the carried box has special properties, then there may be a logical way out of the paradox above.
If boxes can be active inside each other due to shielding, etc., then a set of active, nested boxes could defeat the out of time problem referred to by the doppelganger issue - - there will be a ratio of reflections per box (I do not remember what they decided to call it at the beginning) - - the multiples per nested box as each is set with a slightly longer delay, closed, and run such that they reopen with enough overlapping safeguard to prevent asphyxiation. I am not sure if logically nested boxes would mean the ability to go further forward or backward - - the limit may be dependent upon the box which actually holds the traveller, and the nested boxes may not cause the phenomena to extend at all - - we end up with the intrinsic details of the phenomena.
Sounds like it is time for a sequel...
Ricardo--
I see what you're suggesting, I think. That is, if I'm in a box inside a box, I am moving backwards inside that inner box at one minute per minute, but the inner box is also moving back inside the outer box at one minute per minute, and thus presumably my relative temporal velocity is two minutes per minute.
There is a serious technical complication here, in that you would have to be inside the outer box after the outer box starts in order to start the inner box, but you could not escape the outer box without shutting it down. It will not help to start the inner box first, because then when you emerge from the inner box the outer box will already be at "prestart" and you will probably be at the future end (since you did not emerge from the outer box "before", that is, moments after, it was started). You cannot start the inner box remotely--the outer box is shielded against radio frequencies and if you have a hard wired connection through the wall of the outer box to the inner box you tie the inner box to the outside time stream or lose the connection.
It is of course also unclear whether being twice ungrounded would have the effect described. If we think of the box as a shield against the normal flow of time, having two shields against the normal flow of time would not cause you to move through time more quickly but simply provide more protection against the possibility of failure of one of the machines.
So I think not.
On the other hand, the technology has not been my prime focus, and the ability to accelerate travel to the past does not really change anything in the analysis given that however far or fast you can travel you are still limited by the fact that you enter the box moments after you turn it off and emerge moments after you turn it on, so even if that happened instantaneously it would still be a limit on how far into the past you can travel.
--M. J. Young
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