At the Movies

Over the winter my boys and I have spent an extraordinarily large amount of time either watching movies, renting movies, or at the movies. Don’t look at me like that. There isn’t much else to do in a small town with no car, very limited out-of-town bussing, and 5 feet of snow on the ground. But, all in all, movies have really become a great bonding tool for us. We watch all kinds of movies. Action-adventure is our favorite genre. Superheroes, bad guys, lots of explosions. You know…”boy” movies. :LOL: I do try to make an effort at variety, throwing as many animated and feel-good movies in there as I can. We saw Finding Nemo this weekend. Even if you are an adult by yourself, go see it. Totally hilarious, great graphics (being a novice of Poser and Bryce, I found myself trying to figure out how they made some of the figures).
Anyway,

there was a point to this whole thing. One of my FAVORITE books of all time is FINALLY being made into a movie! I actually JUST read this book for about the 233593937845th time a few weeks ago, and I remember thinking that it really needed to be a movie. So, sitting watching the opening trailers at Nemo, here comes a trailer for Timeline! Woohoo! *Sitting on her hands, waiting very impatiently*
I suppose the premise for Timeline, being able to travel into parallel universes (a multiverse) by displacing our bodies through tiny particles called quantam foam, is pretty far-fetched. But in true Michael Crichton style, he makes it seem as believable as Jurassic Park. And doesn’t everyone, at some point, wish they could be somewhere, anywhere else? And since Crichton’s conceptualization doesn’t actually involve time travel, or changing history, I think it is all the more palatable. Here is a small excerpt from the book:

“The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn’t flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems – of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn’t pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren’t separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn’t a location, you can’t travel to it.”

Fascinating debate material. Yes, I realize this is all just a novel. I did some of my own research as well on this theory, and while it is nice and neat, it lacks a certain centeredness that might enable it to be believed. I actually found some interesting material linking the theory of the multiverse to back up the proof of the nonexistence of God. I swear I am turning into an agnostic before my own eyes, because the article just made me kind of shake my head. (Well, if there is a God, or Goddess, who says they DIDN’T create a multiverse?) Here is an entry from Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, that centers more on the question of “is our universe finite or infinite?” And one last site full of interesting research and theories (if you can stand the stomach-sickening design) is Interdisciplinary Studies in Theoretical Physics and Experimental Psychology. Are your eyes glazing over now?
I think a lot of my own fascination revolves not around the fact that I believe the multiverse theory, which I do not at all, but that I believe we as a people are poised on the brink of some vast new discovery. There are some out there that believe we have discovered everything that there is, that there hasn’t been a major discovery in so long that there aren’t any more out there. But people have thought that many time in history, and each period of complacency has been followed, like clockwork, with a precipitous boom in technology. I almost feel as if there is some kind of charge in the air, just waiting for this to happen again. And, thinking on the economic and political situation in the United States, it almost mirrors that of the state of the Roman Empire, just before it fell. IF political and power shifts are on the horizon, what better time for technology to rear its head once again? I only hope it will happen soon enough for me to see it.
Whoops. I certainly strayed off of the topic of movies, huh?