A. Merlocks's Blog: Time for Fantasy - Posts Tagged "fun"

Are there any references about time travel in academic literature? Here you have a rather incomplete compilation of research articles with unusual (perhaps even funny) titles (remember, not everything is what it seems and these are not works of fiction):

Temporal Anomaly Detection in Business Processes

Before and After: Temporal Anomalies in Legal Doctrine

Mental time travel in animals?

Evolutionary economics of mental time travel?

Involuntary (spontaneous) mental time travel into the past and future

Time travel with Oliver Twist

On emotionally intelligent time travel: Individual differences in affective forecasting ability

Making decisions with the future in mind: Developmental and comparative identification of mental time travel

Temporal anomalies in immunological gene expression in a time series of wild mice: signature of an epidemic?

Do apparent temporal anomalies require nonclassical explanation

Temporal Anomalies of Consciousness

Achieving sustainable mobility: everyday and leisure-time travel in the EU

Enriching network security analysis with time travel

Presentists should believe in time-travel

Mental time travel in animals: a challenging question

Virtual machine time travel using continuous data protection and checkpointing

Steering programs via time travel

Bananas enough for time travel?

In spite of the titles, most of these works are rather deep and cryptic; only the titles are funny. Enjoy!

Is it that time of the year already? Time flies even without... Time Travel. You may hate Christmas (you are not alone, think of Scrooge or the Grinch) or you may love it, but we all have to admit that Christmas is an inherent part of the western cultural traditions. If you are interested in Christmas through time you may enjoy these links:

Christmas through Time

Christmas through time: Medieval and Tudor

And, what about Christmas and Time Travel? How many times these two themes are set side by side in Literature?

Just a few examples:

The Time Machine, the Medical Man makes reference to Christmas at some point in Chapter I (in the 1960 film the connection is far more explicit).

A Christmas Carol, also features Time Travel and it appeared 52 years prior to the publication of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

Home in Time for Christmas, not even similar to the previous two.

A Time-Travel Christmas, short stories.




Also this essay:

The Ghosts and the Machine: A Christmas Carol and Time Travel by Pete Orford

Enjoy and feel free to add more!

Do you want to have a go at building a time machine? If you really want, you may be interested in the following (almost) patents:

"Method of gravity distortion and time displacement" [US 20060073976 A1]

"Method of space compression time dilation machine" [WO 2013088425 A2]

"Practical Time Machine Using Dynamic Efficient Virtual And Real Robots" [US 20090234788 A1]

"Traveling method" [WO 2012046284 A2]

More on this here:

Time Travel Patents: Here Are Four People Who Claim To Have Invented Real-Life Time Machines


But there are others:

PHT Corporation Patents "Time Travel" for Clinical Research

U.S. Patent No. 1

"Time Machine Software" (US 20080281766 A1)


This is an unrelated (or not) patent:

"Air board" (US 7210549 B2)


Of course, you also have:

STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine

and

The Time Travel Handbook: A Manual of Practical Teleportation & Time Travel

or John Titor:

JOHN TITOR TIMES

John Titor: a Time Traveller From The Year 2036?

Time Travel Institute



By the way, Doc (Emmett) Brown did not file a patent for his flux capacitor, or did he? The phrase "flux capacitor" appears in U.S. Patent 6,084,285:

Lateral flux capacitor having fractal-shaped perimeters

One in ten Americans (9 per cent) list the ability to travel through time as the futuristic invention they would like to have. This percentage is higher (11 per cent) in the age group 30-49 years and lower (3 per cent) for 65+. This is one of the findings of a new national survey by the Pew Research Center and Smithsonian magazine, which asked Americans about a wide range of potential scientific developments. See more results here:

U.S. Views of Technology and the Future

New Poll Reveals Americans' Predictions of the Future

Polls have become an indispensable way for governments and other institutions to try and determine public mood about certain issues. However, they are not always accurate. We know well that they have been wrong many times in the past; after all, polls are answers to questions. Surveys suggest that public opinion polls are usually wrong. However, this appears not to be the case with Time Travel. A recent (unrelated) survey completed by games developer Big Fish also showed that 11 per cent of Scots admit that they think about traveling back in time regularly. In fact, the survey reveals that 80 per cent of Scots would like to travel back in time. See more here:

80 per cent of Scots would like to travel back in time, survey reveals

The results of this survey appear to be directly affected by the works of Diana Gabaldon , more specifically Outlander .




If you want, you can watch Outlander's Rupert & Angus discuss travelling through time:

Video: Outlander's Rupert & Angus discuss travelling through time

But if Time Travel is possible, what period of time would you travel back (or forward) to if you could? In a recent Economist/YouGov poll, voters were asked which 20th century decade they would choose to return to. A summary of the results can be found here:

Poll: What decade would you most like to time-travel back to?

The original study is presented here:

We still like Ike

As for Time Travel in the movies, Back to the Future (1985) is still considered the best by nearly 28 per cent of the voters. See more details here:

Poll: Top Time Travel Films

and the DeLorean is the best fictional gadget yet:

Back to the Future's DeLorean time travel car voted best fictional gadget from the movies

By the way, the novelizations of the Back to the Future-franchise films are still out there:

Back To The Future
Back to the Future, Part 2
Back to the Future, Part 3




And some people still use a DeLorean in their wedding day:

Where we're going, we don't need roads! Graphic novel fans stage Back To The Future wedding complete with DeLorean car (and a floral bouquet of Batman comics)

And if you want to know more about polls visit
Polls and Surveys. Enjoy!

The concept of a time machine is so alluring that it is frequently used out of context due to its momentary appeal. This post is a non-exhaustive compilation of non-fiction works that include references to time machines even if the central topic of the research study has little to do with time travel or time-machine devices. Most readers will find some of the titles funny, shocking, and/or intriguing. In fact, the contents of some of the works cited here are certainly odd. Let's start:

Reconfiguring Older Bodies in the Prison Time Machine (Criminology and Gerontology)

A Time Machine: New Evidence of Post-Materialist Value Change (Politics)

The evolutionary time machine: using dormant propagules to forecast how populations can adapt to changing environments (Biology)

Teaching in a Time Machine: The "Make-Do" Mentality in Small-Town Schools (Education)

Time-machine computing: a time-centric approach for the information environment (Computing)

Building a time machine for efficient recording and retrieval of high-volume network traffic (Computing)

The virtual time machine (Computing)

A time machine for text search (Computing)

Mr. Madison Meets a Time Machine: the political science of federal sentencing reform (Politics)

Surviving in the time machine suicidal prisoners and the pains of prison time (Criminology)

Leadership and the Art of Mentoring: Tool Kit for the Time Machine (Leadership)

The itty-bitty time machine: genetics of the cyanobacterial circadian clock (Biology)

The Forest Time Machine—a multi-purpose forest management decision-support system (Agriculture)

Arabian time machine (Politics)


Changing Past Behavior Without Means of a Time Machine: Effects on Future Behavioral Decisions (Cognitive Science)

The time machine: federated searching today and tomorrow (Computing)

It is clear that controversial titles grab more attention but also word-driven titles can grab the attention of prospective readers. If you are a non-fiction author, words like Time Travel, Time Machine can be used to your advantage. Enjoy!

Chronesthesia, the ability of perform mental time travel, is a controversial area of research. We can travel back in time, for example returning to childhood, through memory. We can generate future events in our minds, the ability of foresight. A different issue is whether these future events will actually take place. The ability to perform time travel is not restricted to humans, great apes can do it too:

Great ape foresight is looking great

How great is great ape foresight?

Great apes can defer exchange: a replication with different results suggesting future oriented behavior

Keeping track of time: evidence for episodic-like memory in great apes

and also birds:

Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays

Effects of experience and social context on prospective caching strategies by scrub jays

Can animals recall the past and plan for the future?

Worm holes and avian space-time

This research topic is controversial, no doubt about that:

The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?

Behavioural evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals

Mental time travel in animals: a challenging question

One thing is clear, authors of time-travel fiction can do it. But, even little children can:

Episodic future thinking in 3- to 5-year-old children: the ability to think of what will be needed from a different point of view

A recent new study looks into the details of mental time travel:

Neural Activity in the Medial Temporal Lobe Reveals the Fidelity of Mental Time Travel

How The Brain Performs 'Mental Time Travel'

A bit older:

Mental time travel - the neurocognitive basis of future thinking

What makes mental time travel possible?

Happy mental time travel! But be careful:

Schizotypy and mental time travel