The Hysteresis Loop
Some Friday thoughts – or an attempt to untangle one of those hysteresis loops…
I love science fiction! Especially stories about time travel.
As a child, I read Ilya Varshavsky’s short story “The Hysteresis Loop.” As far as I remember, he defined a hysteresis loop as the paradox that arises when a time traveller goes back and kills his own mother. I have just checked, though, and his definition is actually a little different, while the paradox I described above is known as the grandfather paradox. Let’s just say that the grandfather paradox and the hysteresis loop are one and the same ;)
As a child and teenager, I watched plenty of films in which someone meets their past self: Back to the Future, The Terminator, The Butterfly Effect. The classics!!!
Modern cinema leans so heavily on characters meeting themselves that it has all become rather predictable: Looper, Tenet (a great film, of course, but packed with plot holes), the currently airing Apple TV+ series Dark Matter (not about time but the multiverse, though it still counts), and so on.
In this post, I want to talk about the Back to the Future trilogy. To me, it is a masterpiece – a treasure that belongs to all humanity. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen it: everyone watches it, rewatches it, wears it out and quotes it.
Several things may explain its appeal:
- The two leads were cast brilliantly;
- It is remarkably fast-paced for a film of its era;
- The original plot is built around the paradoxes of many hysteresis loops that the heroes have to untangle;
- It is full of Easter eggs, references, jokes and more. Marty’s performance at the school dance alone is packed with references (Google is your friend);
- It made plenty of predictions about the relatively near future that might have come true (though most did not – the Lexus hoverboard is best forgotten, even if Nike did make self-lacing sneakers);
- I once saw a report – although I couldn’t find it again – that Robert Zemeckis had said he would never sell the rights to the trilogy, ensuring there would be no prequels, sequels, spin-offs or any of the other terms in the Kama Sutra of modern screenwriting (let us quietly remember The Terminator and Star Wars).
Most importantly, Back to the Future tries to remain rigorous about how events depend on one another – think, for example, of the joke involving “Twin Pines Mall” and “Lone Pine Mall.”
Even so, if we look closely enough, we can find a few inconsistencies.
One of them has bothered me since childhood. I couldn’t find an explanation for it (to be fair, I didn’t look particularly hard). Perhaps we can come up with a logical explanation together?
Does anyone know why old Biff, after stealing the time machine, travelling into the past, meeting his younger self and giving him the sports almanac, returned to the same version of the future? Surely he should have returned to a future where he was successful, rich and all-powerful.
