The Time Machine Factory [unspeakable, speakable] on Time Travel - TMF2024

Movies

Sunday 22 Movies @Cinema Massimo - Sala 2

Screening of the movie "Primer" by S. Carruth and the short movies "The Art and Science of Time Travel" by M. Reilly and S. Lloyd

20:00 

- Steeplechase

- Stag Hunt

- Pope Bans Time Travel Pilgrimages

by Michele Reilly, Andrey Kezzin, Seth Lloyd

Human stories about time travel are very ancient.  In the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, a king and his daughter go to visit Brahma in his palace in the sky, to ask about whether a particular prince would make a suitable husband.   They find Brahma listening to a piece of music, and politely wait until the music is done.    When they tell Brahma about their mission he says, `Alas, while the music was playing, millions of years passed on earth, and that prince and your kingdom are all now dust.'

These three brief movies, directed and created by Michele Reilly and Andre Kezzyn with scientific input from Dr. Seth Lloyd, explore different aspects of time travel.   The first, Steeplechase, takes its start from the grandfather paradox, in which a time traveler goes back in time and meets her grandfather when he is a young man.   By mistake or on purpose, she kills him: so he does not have children; so she does not exist; so she cannot go back in time to kill him.  How can that be?    Steeplechase tells the story of two scientists, Reilly and Lloyd, who create a time machine and loop backwards and forwards in time, with increasingly strange and violent results.

In the second movie, Stag Hunt, the same two characters are trapped in an infinite hotel: all the rooms are full, but when a new guest arrives, everyone just moves to the next room, leaving the first room free for the new arrival.       The scientists try to escape the claustrophobia of traveling through infinite time loops by exploring different possible quantum worlds, not all of which are innocent.

The third movie, Pope Bans Time Travel Pilgrimages, was based on work by students in a class, The Art and Science of Time Travel, taught by Reilly and Professor Lloyd at MIT.    In this work, the time machine created by Reilly and Lloyd has been put to use to explore historical and miraculous events of the past, with unexpected consequences.

The three movies won multiple awards at Cannes and at other film festivals, including New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.

- Primer

by Shane Carruth Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival in 2004

 

Coordination: Mariateresa Crosta and Marco Gramegna

 

Bio

• _{Seth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. He has performed seminal work in the fields of quantum computation, quantum communication and quantum biology, including proposing the first technologically feasible design for a quantum computer, demonstrating the viability of quantum analog computation, proving quantum analogs of Shannon's noisy channel theorem, and designing novel methods for quantum error correction and noise reduction.}

 

• _{Michele Reilly is a technical philosopher, engineer, mathematician, and artist who explores foundational questions in quantum physics and information theory. She collaborates with experts across disciplines to investigate longstanding problems such as closed timelike curves, black holes, and scalable quantum computing. Reilly’s research elucidates connections between quantum physics and machine learning, computation, and the nature of reality. Her interdisciplinary approach combines technical rigor with imaginative thought experiments.}