Speaking as someone with a degree in physics I've been really impressed with this show so far. This week particularly. I realise that most viewers won't understand what the characters are talking about half the time, and some viewers will smugly think they understand but actually don't. This show is not giving us standard nonsensical Sci-fi babble like you might see on doctor who. The ideas they talk about are genuine philisophical and physical problems thrown up by quantum mechanics. The machine itself is at least theoretically possible, although I'll concede that it is absurd that a thing with such power might exist.
I'd go so far as to say that the plot around Lyndon's code which allows the machine to accept many world's into its algorithm is nothing short of masterful. The machine is not magically seeing into other parallel universes, instead it's creating a simulation of possible pasts that could have converged on our present by extrapolating back from present conditions. The machine cares not whether what it's seeing is accurate or not, it simply calculates. It's not too different to saying "okay, there's a cricket ball on the floor in my living room, my window is broken, and my son is in the garden with a cricket bat looking sheepish, therefore I can extrapolate back into the past to work out that my son probably broke my window". Except the machine uses data at the quantum level, and unimaginably vast amounts of it.
Lyndon's idea was basically to make the code so that the machine can simply disregard working out a solution to the problem of whether Schrödinger's cat is alive or dead. Instead it simply picks an option at random as it interpolates back in time. That this might make the picture clearer than running a code which has the burden of assessing the state of the metaphorical cat for every quantum interaction through history is a stroke of inspiration. The only problem then is that what the machine calculates won't be the past that we actually lived. It'll show us a past that might have been - hence why Forest says that every time they use it they'll get a different Jesus. In a sense he's right to call it a "party trick". What use is having a machine that shows you what could have happened in the past (or what could happen in the future for that matter) but out of an infinite number of possibilities?
That writer Alex Garland has managed to weld these Qunatum Physics conundrums into something genuinely emotional is impressive. Watching Forest slowly witness the clear image of his daughter's face appear through the fog gave me chills. He stands there knowing that what he's seeing isn't real but it feels so real that he can't resist connecting with it. As he says: "It's dangerous because it's seductive". This is simply Sci-fi of the highest order.
Sadly, I don't think you'd properly understand this show unless you actually know a thing or two about physics. Hence why some of the professional TV critics' reviews have been mixed (and some of the IMDb-ers' reviews, unaware of their own ignorance, have been scathing). Perhaps making a show too dense for someone without specialist knowledge to understand is a fault in and of itself. For me though, I'm just delighted that we've reached the point where a TV programme can strive for the same unpopular realms as art film and yet still be commercially viable. Barely 5 years ago that would have been nearly as unthinkable as the existence of Forrest's machine.
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