s mazuk

lonelysandwich:

“Bill and Ted Bend Time and Space to their Will”

Okay, granted, I’m no physicist. I get that the phone booth portal transported the dudes through neon purple time tubes, and that they could bring artifacts and people along with them. Same theory as “Back to the Future”.

But I could never wrap my puny mind around this part of the movie. So all they had to do to change the present was to intend to do something in the future? If that’s all it took, I’d be rich and ripped and probably even a little taller.

Someone please explain to me why this is good science.

Bill and Ted exploit their use of a time machine in order to make their decisions affect the past instead of the future. Just their intent isn’t what actually places the keys there, it’s the fact that in the future the duo went back to the past, stole the keys, and placed them in the bushes earlier so that their present selves could use them at the right time.

Since we commonly imagine the future to be uncertain, there’s the question of ‘what if they didn’t get the keys, like maybe they failed the report, a medieval knight killed them, or something else just generally stopped them from following through on their key-stealing future promise?’ But by the Novikov self-consistency principle (it’s a real thing, look it up), it is simply impossible for them to not go back and get the keys. They must do it, since it’s already occurred and no paradoxes can be created.

A greater implication of this scene is not examined in the movie, and had to be ignored in the next. There can never be a history where Bill and Ted do not steal the keys and fail to pass the test, since they do get the keys and Rufus comes from a future where they must have succeeded. By the Novikov principle, it’s the only future that could exist given the very first scene of the future; the whole story of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey is made pointless, since De Nomolos never could have changed anything.

An even greater meaning to this scene is left out. By constructing events in the future that they now are relying upon in the present, they’ve made their present into a past of the future of two days later. The present decisions of Bill and Ted become locked by those keys from the future. Just as there was never a history where there was not keys behind the sign, there’s no history where Bill and Ted decided to look somewhere besides the sign, and their actions had been set since the start of the movie due to the basic laws of time travel. Bill and Ted never bent space and time to their will. Space and time bent Bill and Ted’s will.

I tried to post this as an ‘answer’ but the box didn’t hold it for some strange reason.