Dubious Metaphysics

I watched The Lake House today, or at least enough of it for me to claim I watched the whole thing. I missed five minutes of it in the middle while I was feeding the cat, and I missed about five more minutes when the glacial pace of events caused me to go channel-surfing before my entire central nervous system shut down from lack of stimulation.

But I'm not here to really trash the movie, which was decent as such movies go and I like Sandra Bullock as long as she doesn't get too New Joisey on me.

Mostly I'm just disturbed by the metaphysics. She's two years in his future, if I understand correctly. So when they sign their marriage certificate, he'll have to sign (say) November 8, 2008, and she'll have to sign November 8, 2010. I think that's illegal.

Or if they're smooching on a bench in this ridiculous overly-idealized version of Chicago (akin to but not as over the top as the Nora Emphrom version of New York) and they see a fatal traffic accident. John Q. Victim dies in 2008 according to him, and again in 2010 according to her. This, if it isn't illegal, ought to be.

Could she pass him winning lottery ticket numbers? Or the winners of the Kentucky Derby? I don't see anything preventing such a thing.

Maybe I ought not to think about it so much.


Strictly as an aside, I watched a TV show the other day where the narrator kept saying "Some scientists believe..." as a way of wrapping outrageous claims in objective respectability. "Some scientists believe that the laws of physics don't prohibit time travel." Huh? First of all, the "laws of physics" aren't written on tablets of stone like the Ten Commandments. Nowhere does it say "time travel is possible" and nowhere does it say "time travel is not possible"; you have to work out the implications of Special Relativity to know whether time travel is possible or not.

The argument was that since the laws of physics don't prohibit time travel, it must be possible. Well, the laws of physics don't prohibit me suddenly turning into Ethel Merman, so that also must be possible - and possibly even an improvement.

But mostly I'm ticked out the "some scientists believe..." line. Sure, some scientists will believe almost anything. The inventor of the transistor, a good rational scientist by any measure, believed in the inherent superiority of white people. The show needs to be more specific. Instead of "some scientists believe..." they need to quantify the matter. "Nine scientists believe that it is possible to travel in time into the past. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and six believe that it is not possible, and some were too busy covering their mouths and tittering to give coherent answers."

Did you ever see the "debate" on TV about the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax? The TV show lined the two sides up so it seemed that the numbers on either side of the question are the same, but they are not. You saw, in that one show, pretty much all of the "serious" representatives of the hoax theory, but you didn't see the huge number of people who disagree, including the four or five hundred thousand people NASA employed during the Apollo program. But the strange gimleted eye of the TV camera flattens the argument so every point of view had equal validity.