If you have heard anything about the German Netflix series Dark, you probably know that time travel plays an important role in the story. Over the course of the show’s three seasons, Dark tells an inter-generational story of the residents of Winden, a small German town that many of its own residents despise.
The show begins in roughly the present (the first episode debuted in 2017 but was set in 2019) but periodically jumps 33 years through time—following characters who travel through time.
And, like any well-written time travel story, it turns out that certain crucial future events have influenced past events, which have themselves influenced those crucial future events, giving rise to what is sometimes called a “causal loop,” or—as it is called in Dark—the “bootstrap paradox.”
Good and approachable. The show itself doesn't get too deep into theoretical explanations but does make you wonder about these things. I don't have any real physics knowledge/training past high...
Good and approachable. The show itself doesn't get too deep into theoretical explanations but does make you wonder about these things. I don't have any real physics knowledge/training past high school, and I've pretty much come to think of the time-travel and Big Bang questions mentioned here with an analogy I can't remember the origin of - man trying to explain God is like the people in a painting trying to explain how the artist paints them. They'd have such little ability to conceive of the things outside their framed 2D world that their attempts would be laughable. As such I'm more or less satisfied to think that time travel is possible, and we might even stumble upon a way to harness it someday (if we don't exterminate ourselves beforehand), but that we likely will not really understand how it all works. I suspect what we consider the universe is part of an even larger whole.
I've also found Marc ten Bosch's 4D Toys useful to help wrap my head around the concept of four-dimensional motion, and it might be useful here in conception of spacetime as well.
None of this is really necessary to enjoy the show, but it seems to have been a hit with the more technical crowd too.
Good and approachable. The show itself doesn't get too deep into theoretical explanations but does make you wonder about these things. I don't have any real physics knowledge/training past high school, and I've pretty much come to think of the time-travel and Big Bang questions mentioned here with an analogy I can't remember the origin of - man trying to explain God is like the people in a painting trying to explain how the artist paints them. They'd have such little ability to conceive of the things outside their framed 2D world that their attempts would be laughable. As such I'm more or less satisfied to think that time travel is possible, and we might even stumble upon a way to harness it someday (if we don't exterminate ourselves beforehand), but that we likely will not really understand how it all works. I suspect what we consider the universe is part of an even larger whole.
I've also found Marc ten Bosch's 4D Toys useful to help wrap my head around the concept of four-dimensional motion, and it might be useful here in conception of spacetime as well.
None of this is really necessary to enjoy the show, but it seems to have been a hit with the more technical crowd too.