How Doc Brown Really Invented Time Travel

In Back to the Future, Doc Brown claims that he when he woke up after a concussion, he drew a picture of the Flux Capacitor. He spent the next 30 years and his whole family fortune turning that sketch into a time machine. I’m not a doctor (and to tell the truth, maybe Emmet Brown isn’t one either), but I don’t think that’s how concussions and science work.

Let’s consider what we know about Brown:

• When we meet him in 1955, he thinks he’ll be able to ready Marty’s mind with a suction cup helmet.

• He seems to lack the professional standing or relationships one would expect of someone able to completely subvert the space-time continuum.

• He professes a strong moral opposition about using time travel to disrupt history, but quickly drops those qualms when tested.

“Doctor” Emmet Brown was working on a telepathy device in 1955, so the idea that his subconscious would pop out the idea for a flux capacitor is ridiculous.

The best explanation is that a Doc Brown from another timeline, or perhaps some other character*, used a time machine to give 1955 Doc Brown the idea of a flux capacitor. Maybe they used some sort of drug or hypnotism to incept an image of the flux capacitor and and understanding of its importance into Brown’s mind.

Maybe in some other timeline, Doc Brown encountered some time traveler from the future and managed to steal the time machine to make himself the inventor. Or maybe some time traveler from well into the future chose him in some strange history-altering decision. Or maybe Brown was able to invent and build the time machine in 2025, but decided he wanted to have more time to enjoy time travel, so he accelerated the process.

In Back to the Future we follow Marty McFly as he goes back in time and causes a new fork in the timeline. We don’t know how many versions of history happened before this, but it seems that Doc Brown was able to close the loop and send Marty McFly back in time in the new version of events where George McFly is cool and there’s only one pine at the mall. It must have been awkward for Brown to have to come up with excuses to befriend a young Marty who was not ashamed of his parents.

After the first movie ends, we can guess that Doc Brown makes repeated trips into the future to import technology from the future back to 1985. This is how we can explain the fantastical technological advances that happen by 2015 in the universe of these movies. “Government in 2015, According to Back to the Future II” by Lauren Girardin is just one of many articles about products in the movie that are well beyond our reach. Jackets that dry themselves? Hoverboards that actually do hover? Hologram 3D sharks on the town square? This is a world enabled by a meddling time traveler.

Maybe I’ve given this too much thought. (I could actually go on for much longer. I have more questions. When Marty returns to the future, does he gradually start to remember a childhood in the realty he created by going back in time, or does he live forever out of place? And what happens with the Marty we see traveling back in time at the end of the movie? Did the Doc Brown in this new reality make sure to send Marty off with extra plutonium, or…? And how does the photo of to the McFly kids keep changing? Surely that’s an example of quantum attachment…)**

Time travel is a wonderful topic to think about. Movies like “The History of Time Travel” and “Primer” provide some very dorky deep dives, but the charm of young Michael J. Fox (and the lovable weirdness of Crispin Glover) makes Back to the Future uniquely compelling.

Make time travel possible for yourself. I made some paintings of the flux capacitor in various stages of activation and also created a version that’s a bit more bioengineered.

I’d also like to thank a few podcasts for recording Back to the Future episodes. Thank you Blank Check with Griffin and David, Unspooled, and Back to the Future Minute for keeping my ears amused while I made these paintings.

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Oscillation Overthruster from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

*Maybe it was Buckaroo Banzai who created the Oscillation Overthruster which clearly uses the same principle to cross dimensions.

(The two movies had the same producer.)

**Yes, I know that Back to the Future is just a fun movie that maybe doesn’t have the same nostalgic resonance for people from other generations. And yes, a lot of what is in the plot of the movie came about haphazardly (the time machine was going to be a refrigerator, but then the producers realized that would lead to lots of kids dying). But we can always learn more by analyzing even the most frivolous art.