It's one thing to be light on your feet—quite another to be off them entirely. Gravity exists for good reason, and defying it is not something we should undertake lightly, so to speak. But antigravity has been a staple of science fiction since the days of H.G. Wells, and rumors of human levitation date back much farther than that. Can spiritual purity really rip someone's feet away from the Velcro of the planet's surface?
The Last Mimzy, a
Robert Shaye movie released this month by New Line Cinema, seems to think so. Based on a short story by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, writing under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett, the film takes place in three separate time periods: the present; a distant techno-dystopian future blighted by pollution and genetic drift; and an even more distant future where the flowers bloom, the buildings are swoopy arches of white concrete and human beings live in crystalline harmony with the forces of metaphysical nature. The green future is good, you see, and the polluted one is bad. Hmm.
Still, the people of the evil future are smart enough to know that something is wrong, and when their most gifted scientist discovers the secret of time travel, they hatch a plan to loot the past for the genetic diversity they've lost. Unfortunately, they can only send small objects backward in time. Nothing living can survive the journey, although organic molecules (e.g., polyester in the skin and guts of a stuffed bunny) pass through intact. We can glean some clues about the nature of the time-travel process, because fragile, brittle and crumbly objects can also pass, and so can delicate nanoelectronics and optical crystals. This means the temporal voyage doesn't involve extreme temperatures, excessive gravity, shock, vibration or getting hit with large sticks. What kills the living traveler? My guess would be some form of ionizing radiation. Gamma rays, maybe?
The message is the mediumThe time-travel process is also unstable; objects sent into the past have a limited lifespan and slowly disintegrate no matter how well they're cared for. Could there be atoms randomly jumping back to the future, like bubbles rising to the surface in a glass of soda? In some universes, tampering with the past is a good way to erase your own timeline (see
"Time Travel and Quantum Chaos", March 2002), but the great scientist doesn't seem too concerned, so either we're in a universe where the past can't be altered (implying that the future is predetermined and free will does not exist), or else the future is bleak enough that accidentally destroying it is an acceptable risk. Either way, the future contacts the past with a sort of trans-dimensional toybox, designed to lure and beguile young children and ultimately reprogram them to build a time machine of their own.
The morality of this mind control is highly questionable; even minor alterations in the structure of chemistry of our brains require both a licensed medical practitioner and the informed consent of the patient. Or, in the case of children, from the patient's parent or guardian. Slapping IQ enhancers into someone's brain may not be a bad thing per se, but in our time, Bub, it's considered polite to ask! It also seems weirdly unnecessary; why send toys that whisper in strange languages when you could simply send a robot capable of building the gate by itself? Or written instructions aimed at science-minded adults? But centuries of accumulated mutation may have made the people of the future both narrow-minded and amoral by nature, so perhaps we should cut them a break.
Anyway, the toys include levitating stones called "spinners," which are capable of hovering at a few inches in the air, and of rotating at a fixed rate, overcoming wind resistance with no apparent power source. Could they be bleeding energy from Earth's magnetic field? They look a lot like the Levitron toy, which uses magnetic levitation, except that the Levitron will eventually slow down, where the spinners never seem to. Also, the Levitron only floats in its own special fixture of permanent magnets, whereas the spinners work anywhere, regardless of the composition of the surface. From the look of things, this involves some kind of repulsive force that acts like electromagnetism or gravity (i.e., it drops off with the square of the distance), but what force it is I cannot say. I don't think it's anything we know about in 21st-century physics. But these are child's play compared to some of the other wonders the future sends back.
Improving the mind shouldn't always matterI have a question for the ether: In movies and comic books, why is high intelligence always linked to paranormal powers like telepathy and telekinesis? It's almost impossible for someone to become a genius without also gaining the ability to project her thoughts, lift objects with her mind or even fly like a superhero. It's a strange correlation; even if you believe in ESP, expecting it from a bright person is like expecting her to be a good singer simply because she's tall. I.e., the one thing has no obvious connection to the other. In fact, under the hard, cold glare of techno-futuristic science, I'd almost say the two are mutually exclusive.
First of all, this ability does not occur in nature. There aren't any plants or animals that can do it. It's very remotely conceivable that brain cells could be reorganized into some sort of field generator to produce an effect like this, but even if that were possible, it's very unlikely that the structure could also operate a normal mind and body. I.e., it wouldn't be a human brain at all. Nevertheless, the movie describes this as a natural human ability that has been slowly poisoned out of our genome by "pollutants" and now occurs only in rare, special children. But if that were true, shouldn't levitation have been the norm in preindustrial societies? Wouldn't a little detail like that have found its way into ancient writings and artwork?
I could go into a lot of detail on other issues in the story, both major and minor, but I won't. I'm certainly not knocking the movie; it provokes serious thought on interesting issues, and it certainly serves the main function of cinema: to entertain. But while a story like this could have been based on realistic science, or on speculations that were at least not known to be wrong,
Mimzy falls back instead on a predictably Hollywood mix of Green-themed cautionary tales, Asian mysticism, digital effects and kid power. The result may be pleasing as fiction, but—with all due respect to Messrs. Kuttner and Moore—as science, or even pseudoscience, it's pretty much moose drool. By all means go see it with your kids, just don't expect to be lifted out of your seat, or to leave the theater any smarter than when you came in.
Sources:www.imdb.com:
The Last Mimzywww.levitron.comWil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, To Crush the Moon. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available as a free download.
