How many gigawatts are needed to travel in time in Back to the Future?
It's easy to imagine why someone would want to travel back in time. Any human has surely thought about what it could be like if they could go back and change that one mistake they made or prevent a terrible tragedy from ever occurring. Or if you're Marty McFly from Back to the Future, just try to keep your mom from falling in love with you.
But going backward wasn't actually Doc Brown's intention when he finally cracked his theory of time travel! Apparently, he just wanted to send his dog a couple of minutes into the future and show off to Marty. As with many powerful things, however, once you let the dog off the leash, you better be ready to chase after it.
The concept of time travel has captivated our imaginations for centuries, but few time machines have captured the public's imagination and made it look as fun as Doc Brown's souped-up DeLorean DMC-12. Why a DeLorean? Well, if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style? The gull-wing doors and stainless steel body made it the perfect canvas for Doc's timeline tinkering. Plus, I think we can all admit it just looks really cool, especially those twin trails of flaming tire tracks when we hit the necessary 88mph.
It took Doc Brown falling off a toilet and getting knocked in the head to come up with the idea for the heart of his fiery machine, the flux capacitor. This Y-shaped gizmo is pulsing with energy, and like all hearts, it needs fuel to keep pumping. But time travel isn't your everyday commute - it requires something a bit more potent than gasoline. Enter plutonium, the high-octane fuel of temporal displacement. The nuclear reaction it creates is so powerful that they have to measure it in gigawatts (but pronounce it "jigawatts"). Great Scott!!!
So, time travel enthusiasts and Back to the Future buffs, put on your thinking caps. Can you recall the exact amount of gigawatts it takes to send the DeLorean hurtling through time?
