Newton’s Apple Cut Scene
Time travel has been a trifling obsession of mine since the age of 8. In fairly short succession at that impressionable age, I was introduced to Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, the film version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Time Bandits, and reruns of The Time Tunnel TV series from the 1960’s. A cursory academic investigation soon followed with discovery of Einstein’s theories regarding relativity and potential forward time travel as well as Schrödinger’s Cat theory and other fanciful concepts dealing with worm holes, the multi-verse, and alternate realities. My developing brain spent a lot of energy meditating over the dreams of time travel.
In this short story, I wanted to indulge my inner 8 year old, without over-indulging. I did manage to touch on something I feel is often overlooked when considering time travel: the relation between space, as a location, and time travel. But other bits of the character’s time travel discussion were cut out of various drafts of the script.
The last draft of the script did have a few elements of tangent dialogue I didn’t cut until I began to illustrate the story, realizing they dragged down the pacing too much.
To indulge my inner child/ nerd, I present the cut script here. This would have gone on page 4:
INTERVIEWER
So, the machine can’t travel back to a time before the machine itself existed and without a record of the machine’s exact location, the machine can’t go back in time?
DR WEST
Exactly. Allow me to offer an illustration. At the base of my coat, the zipper latches. That represents the moment the machine will be activated. And the zipper begins to move forward in time. With each tic of the clock, the zipper, or the machine, continues to move forward in time along with everything on Earth and everything in the universe. At any point, we may manipulate the machine to move backward in time. Just as my jacket unzips, the hours peel away as the machine travels back. But the machine cannot travel back further than the initial clasp when the machine was first activated.
INTERVIEWER
The machine travels only backward, not forward through time?
DR WEST
The machine is a constant. It does not move through time. It is the contents of the inner capsule that are displaced. At present, it is impossible to influence negative-gravity in any meaningful manner or to predict the precise future location of the machine, but if future users of the device where to send a log of the machine’s future locations back in time with some helpful instruction, we might be able to use the device to travel into the future.
(…)
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