Placeholder Content Image

In the new Disney Pixar movie Lightyear, time gets bendy

<p><em>Spoiler alert: this article explains a key plot point, but we don’t give away anything you won’t see in trailers. Thanks to reader Florence, 7, for her questions.</em></p> <p>At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, Lightyear, Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.</p> <p>Their only hope of getting off the planet is to test a special fuel. To do that, Buzz has to fly into space and repeatedly try to jump to hyper-speed. But each attempt he makes comes with a terrible cost.</p> <p>Every time Buzz takes off for a four-minute test flight into space, he lands back on the planet to find many years have passed. The people Buzz cares most about fall in love, have kids and even grandkids. Time becomes his biggest enemy.</p> <p>What’s going on? Is this just science fiction, or could what happened to Buzz actually happen?</p> <h2>Time is relative: Einstein’s big idea</h2> <p>Buzz is experiencing a real phenomenon known as time dilation. Time dilation is a prediction of one of the most famous scientific theories ever developed: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.</p> <p>Prior to relativity, the best theory of motion we had was Isaac Newton’s mechanics.</p> <p>Newton’s theory was incredibly powerful, providing stunning predictions of the motion of the planets in our solar system.</p> <p>In Newton’s theory, time is like a single giant clock that ticks away the seconds in the same way for everyone. No matter where you are in the universe, the master clock will display the same time.</p> <p>Einstein’s theory of relativity shattered the master clock into many clocks – one for each person and object in motion. In Einstein’s picture of the universe, everyone carries their own clock with them.</p> <p>One consequence of this is there is no guarantee the clocks will tick at the same rate. In fact, many clocks will tick at different rates.</p> <p>Even worse, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower your clock will tick compared to theirs.</p> <p>This means if you travel very fast in a spaceship – as Buzz does – a few minutes might pass for you, but years might pass for someone on the planet you left behind.</p> <h2>Time travelling forwards – but not backwards</h2> <p>In a sense, time dilation can be thought of as a kind of time travel. It provides a way to jump into someone else’s future.</p> <p>This is what Buzz does: he jumps into the future of his friends left on the planet below.</p> <p>Unfortunately, there is no way to use time dilation to travel backwards in time, into the past (as one important character talks about later in the film).</p> <p>It’s also not possible to use time dilation to travel into your own future.</p> <p>That means there’s no known way for you to travel into the future and meet your older self, simply by going really fast.</p> <h2>Time travellers above Earth right now</h2> <p>Time dilation might seem like science fiction, but in fact it is a measurable phenomenon. Indeed, scientists have conducted a number of experiments to confirm that clocks tick at different rates, depending on how they are moving.</p> <p>For example, astronauts on the <a href="https://nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">International Space Station</a> are travelling at <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures" target="_blank" rel="noopener">very high speeds</a> compared with their friends and family on Earth. (You can watch the space station pass overhead if you know <a href="https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">when to look up</a>.)</p> <p>This means those astronauts are ageing at a <a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/11/time-dilation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">slightly slower rate</a>. Indeed, US astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from whom Buzz in Lightyear gets his name, would have experienced a tiny bit of time dilation during his trip to the Moon in the 1960s.</p> <p>Don’t worry, though, the astronauts on the International Space Station <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20041117121920/https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp7/luletters/lu_letter13.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">won’t feel or notice</a> any time dilation. It’s nothing like the extreme time jumps seen in Lightyear.</p> <p>Aldrin was able to return safely to his family, and the astronauts up in space now will too.</p> <h2>To infinity – and beyond</h2> <p>Clearly, time dilation could have a serious cost. But it’s not all bad news. Time dilation could one day help us travel to the stars.</p> <p>The universe is a massive place. The nearest star is <a href="https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/nearest_star_info.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">40,208,000,000,000 km away</a>. Getting there is like travelling around the world one billion times. Travelling at an ordinary speed, no one would ever survive long enough to make the trip.</p> <p>Time dilation, however, is also accompanied by another phenomenon: length contraction. When one travels very fast toward an object, the distance between your spaceship and that object will appear to be contracted.</p> <p>Very roughly, at high speeds, everything is closer together. This means that for someone travelling at a high speed, they could make it to the nearest star in a matter of days.</p> <p>But time dilation would still be in effect. Your clock would slow relative to the clock of someone on Earth. So, you could make a round trip to the nearest star in a few days, but by the time you arrived home everyone you know would be gone.</p> <p>That is both the promise, and the tragedy, of interstellar travel.</p> <p><em><strong>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-the-new-disney-pixar-movie-lightyear-time-gets-bendy-is-time-travel-real-or-just-science-fiction-185137" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>.</strong></em></p> <p><em>Image: YouTube</em></p>

Movies

Placeholder Content Image

Frozen 2 becomes the highest-grossing animated film of all time

<p><em>Frozen 2 </em>has officially been crowned as the highest-grossing animated film in history, topping its predecessor <em>Frozen</em>.</p> <p>The sequel has amassed US$1.325 billion at the global box office in the first full week of January 2020, less than two months after its release. Nearly $450 million of that sum came from the US, while the biggest bounties made <span><a href="https://variety.com/2020/film/box-office/frozen-2-biggest-animated-movie-ever-disney-box-office-1203456758/">overseas</a></span> came from China ($118 million), Japan ($103.8 million), South Korea ($96.2 million) and the UK ($65 million). The earnings surpassed the records set by the original <em>Frozen </em>($1.28 billion) in 2013 and <em>The Incredibles 2 </em>($1.243 billion) in 2018. All three films are from Disney Animation/Pixar.</p> <p>In 2019, Disney became the first studio in the world to gross more than $10 billion at the global box office, thanks to high-performing titles such as <em>Avengers: Endgame</em> ($2.798 billion), <em>The Lion King</em> ($1.656 billion), <em>Captain Marvel</em> ($1.13 billion), <em>Toy Story 4</em> ($1.074 billion) and <em>Aladdin</em> ($1.051 billion). With <em>Frozen 2 </em>crossing the billion dollar mark, the studio is likely to see seven of its movies – including <em>Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker </em>– gross <span><a href="https://deadline.com/2019/12/disney-crosses-10-billion-worldwide-box-office-new-all-time-record-1202803824/">over $1 billion in a single calendar year</a></span>.</p>

Movies

Placeholder Content Image

Emma Thompson’s powerful open letter: “Why I quit”

<p><span>Two-time Oscar award winner Emma Thompson has acknowledged and explained why she refused to work with Pixar co-founder and former Walt Disney animation chief, John Lasseter, in an open letter to Skydance Media. </span></p> <p><span>Lasseter has previously been accused of sexual misconduct with female employees.</span></p> <p><span>Thompson quit the animated film project <em>Luck </em>last month after Skydance chief executive, David Ellison, hired Lasseter who was forced out of Disney just last year after owning up to “missteps” in his behaviour towards employees.</span></p> <p><span>In Thompson’s letter to Ellison, she wrote that she felt it was “very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct given the present climate”.</span></p> <p><span>“If a man has been touching women inappropriately for decades, why would a woman want to work for him if the only reason he’s not touching them inappropriately now is that it says in his contract that he must behave ‘professionally’?” she continued.</span></p> <p><span>“If a man has made women at his companies feel undervalued and disrespected for decades, why should the women at his new company think that any respect he shows them is anything other than an act that he’s required to perform by his coach, his therapist and his employment agreement?”</span></p> <p><span>Thompson also acknowledged the company would be paying Lasseter generously in the role he was given, “How much money are the employees at Skydance being paid to GIVE him that second chance?”</span></p> <p><span>She continued her letter saying even though she “regrets” having to quit the film since she desperately wanted to work with director Alessandro Carloni, she can “only do what feels right during these difficult times of transition and collective consciousness raising. I am well aware that centuries of entitlement to women’s bodies, whether they like it or not, is not going to change overnight. Or in a year. But I am also aware that if people who have spoken out – like me – do not take this sort of a stand then things are very unlikely to change at anything like the pace required to protect my daughter’s generation.”</span></p> <p><span>Thompson’s letter was first published by <em><a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-mn-emma-thompson-john-lasseter-skydance-20190226-story.html">The Los Angeles Times </a></em>and was confirmed for authenticity by Thompson’s representative.</span></p> <p><span>Lasseter’s hiring stimulated backlash, voicing that he didn’t deserve a second chance so quickly. Time’s Up, a non-profit organisation formed to rise against sexual harassment and gender inequality, said his hiring “endorses and perpetuates a broken system that allows powerful men to act without consequence”.</span></p> <p><span>Shortly after allegations against Harvey Weinstein emerged in 2017, Lasseter announced he was taking a six-month “sabbatical” from Disney and apologised “to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug” or any gesture that made them feel “disrespected or uncomfortable”.</span></p> <p><span>Disney revealed it was permanently cutting ties with Lasseter last June.</span></p> <p><span>When hired by Ellison, Lasseter said he had spent the last year in “deep reflection, learning how my actions unintentionally made colleagues uncomfortable, which I deeply regret and apologise for”</span><span> </span></p> <p><span>Ellison said Lasseter had been “forthright in taking ownership of his behaviour” and that he didn’t take the decision of hiring him lightly.</span></p> <p><span>What would you have done in this situation? Let us know in the comments below.</span></p>

Movies

Our Partners