Period 1 Group 1: The DeLorean from Back to the Future (Colin Lee, Alex Silva, and Jacob O'Connell)

Seems like our first post is lost somewhere in the seas of the Internet, somehow, so I guess I'll just do double post here...

Marty: Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc, are you telling me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?
Doc: The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car why not do it with some style. Besides, the stainless steel construction made the flux dispersal- look out.



The DeLorean from the movie Back to the Future is a time machine that travels through time by the use of a flux capacitor and 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Once the car speeds up to 88 miles an hour, the capacitor activates, and consumes the massive amount of energy to pass into the space-time continuum and travel through time.
The flux capacitor is described as being the most important part of the time machine, as it is "what allows time travel."

That is as much information about the flux capacitor as the films give, and time travel in this matter seems pretty far-fetched, frankly. None of the lore references specifically references how the car travels through space-time not through wormholes or splitting the fabric of existence.

That said, there are some theories that suggest possible time travel. It has been said that entering certain black holes with no singularity can provide a way to get from one point in time to another. But for the most part, time travel is just a phenomenon that exists purely in fiction for now.

Part 2

After some research, things have gotten very confusing. The words "flux" and "capacitor" today refer mainly to electricity-related topics and are rarely used together. I'll explain:

A flux, in physics, is defined as "the rate of flow of a fluid, radiant energy, or particles across a given area." This concept has already been applied to electrical energy and magnetic energy. In electrical terms, it is the amount of electrical energy that passes through a perpendicular window (or if you're really technical, the number of electric lines of force that intersect in a given area). In magnetic terms, it is the amount of a magnetic field that passes through a surface. Given these two examples, and the fact that the flux can seemingly apply to any energy type, it may be that the DeLorean's flux capacitor may operate on an unknown type of energy. How this relates to time travel is still clouded.


A capacitor is a device that stores electrical energy by storing up electrons, then releasing them when an electrical current is applied. It can release all of this energy in a short period of time, which is an advantage over a battery, which must release its electrical charge over a long period of time. I guess this is what stores up whatever energy the plutonium reactor or fusion reactor produces, so as to release it all to break into the space-time continuum. Again, how this energy is used to do that is still unknown now.

Now that we know something about fluxes and capacitors, the DeLorean's flux capacitor seems a bit more plausible now. The capacitor releases energy, the flux uses it somehow. However, this is still a far dream in the modern day. We haven't found out how the flux really works yet, and it seems unlike that a person can cram ALL of this equipment into such a small space (1.21 gigawatts is the energy generated by a single nuclear reactor. That, and a capacitor that stores that much energy can't be that small either...). We'll see if this all works together next week...