Sure, we’d love to see your time machine. Pop it round yesterday
We humans are too stupid for our own technology. Look at how we use smartphones — taking snaps of our breakfasts and sending misspelled insults to celebrities.
There’s no point in inventing a time machine, because we’d waste it on equally inane nonsense — travelling to the somme to grab a selfie in the trenches, or sending self-righteous tweets from the court of henry VIII to protest against the beheading of women: #stopTheChop.
even the theoretical physicists on Horizon: How To Build A Time Machine (BBC2) had no idea how they’d use it. One said she’d like to witness the end of the universe, because she always liked to know how a story ends. spoiler alert: the sun explodes.
another chap, a tubby Russian with a space telescope built on the revolving gun turret from a 19th- century warship, wanted to return to the Jurassic era: ‘Because dinosaurs are cool. no other human beings, what can be better?’
For a science documentary, this was ridiculously light on real science. We saw a lot of blackboards covered with scrawled equations, the mumbo-jumbo of physics, but nothing that bore any scrutiny.
One academic explained with the aid of a spotlight and some trick photography how, if she ran faster than the light beam, she could turn around and watch herself switching it on. This proved, she said, that time travel was possible.
But sound travels much slower than light. What if I hurtle back 230 years to see mozart perform? Will I be able to hear him as well . . . or will I have to hang around two centuries for the music?
Despite the infinite implausibilities, this documentary found plenty of professors who have obtained funding to explore ‘wormholes’ and ‘negative energy’. It was depressing to see how many amazingly intelligent people were completely wasting their careers and funding.
after a succession of increasingly deluded boffins, we met Professor Lee smolin, a man whose hippie drawl made Bob marley sound like a racing commentator. narrator mark Gatiss told us the Prof ‘takes the controversial view that Time is Real’ and time travel impossible.
This spaced- out guru was portraying common sense as revolutionary physics and it didn’t wash. The only sympathetic character was a childlike professor from the university of Connecticut called Ron mallett, who had dreamed of a time machine since he was ten years old.
he longed to travel back and tell his father, who died at just 33, that he loved him. now that’s what science should be used for.
The Finnish engineers of defunct mobile phone giant nokia were in general a more likeable bunch. Like most scandinavians, they believed in fair play and equal salaries — so, of course, they didn’t stand a hope in the cut-throat global tech market.
The Rise And Fall Of Nokia (BBC4) told how the inventive Finns came up with portable phones, text messages, ringtones, game apps, wifi and touchscreens, mostly while relaxing in the sauna.
They made so much money that, during the noughties, they were able to commission a $25 million factory in China, to ‘sweeten’ a business deal, and then leave it empty.
They also, quite by accident, helped to trigger a civil war in central africa, over the mining of rare metals used in phones, that has claimed five million lives.
all this was explained, unfortunately, in Finnish, with a great deal of jargon. an hour of subtitles about ‘ media saturation’ and ‘ concurrent engineering processes’ is really dull.