12 Minutes: Time Loops round and round
Could "12 Minutes" exist in a universe already theorized by physicists?
Greetings my good humans, and welcome to another edition of “The Science in Video Games” a newsletter where I take an aspect of a video game and I try to see what would it take for it to become a reality.
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This week we’ll be looking into Twelve Minutes, an adventure game developed by Luis Antonio and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2021. I have to share that the only reason this game appeared on my radar was because the three characters in the game are voiced by James McAvoy, Daisy Ridley and the almighty Willem Dafoe.
Nevertheless, the concept intrigued me since the whole game takes place in a small apartment shared by “The Husband”-voiced by James McAvoy and “The Wife” - voiced by Daisy Ridley. (no subliminal messages here, that’s how they are credited in the game)
I’ll try to keep this article as spoiler-free as possible but the main idea is that the events of the game happen over a 12-minute period which repeats over and over again. A key detail is that the husband is the only one who retains the information he learns in every loop. It is safe to say that major events happen every 12 minutes with the husband trying to find out more and more information. A small spoiler is that at some point in the course of the game, you’ll find a way to manipulate time and actually reverse it. Why am I mentioning this? Well, because this time loop and time reversal will be the focal points of this article.
Is there a possibility for an actual time loop in real life? How about reversing time? And since we’re talking about time travel, will it hold Back to the Future rules? Or Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure rules? I will try and spare you from the math as much as possible and try to analyze concepts like “Closed Timelike Curves”, “Quantum systems” and how time loops may explain black holes.
So time loops have been a subject of research by physicists and of course, we couldn’t get far when we discuss this without mentioning Albert Einstein and his equations of general relativity. The overarching principle of general relativity is simple. To put it in gaming terms, imagine you’re in the middle of an epic open-world game. You’ve got your character decked out in the coolest gear, ready to take on the biggest challenges the game developers have thrown at you. Now, this game world isn’t just a flat 2D map. Oh no, it’s a dynamic, 3D landscape with towering mountains, deep valleys, and everything in between. This is where Einstein comes in with his General Theory of Relativity. He looked at the universe and said, “This isn’t some flat, boring map. It’s a grand, 4D landscape of space and time!” (actual quote)
In our game, the terrain affects how your character moves. A steep mountain slows you down, while a downhill slope lets you pick up speed. Einstein said the same thing happens in our universe. Massive objects like stars and planets warp the spacetime around them, creating ‘hills’ and ‘valleys’ in the fabric of reality itself.
Having this reality (and mathematics) as a basis, mathematician Kurt Gödel discovered a solution to the equations of Einstein that would describe a rotating universe. [source] This universe is infinite but not constantly expanding and it rotates in such a way that every observer sees himself at the centre of rotation (Note: This is a theoretical universe). It was in this universe that “Closed Timelike Curves” were first proved to be possible. It is basically such a big curvature of the spacetime continuum that loops back on itself. These curves remain very confined locally and any object travelling in that loop never travels faster than the speed of light. This is important because another tenet of general relativity is that nothing moves faster than light so these curves do not violate that. So it is possible that the whole 12 Minutes universe is the theoretical rotating Universe of Kurt Gödel. Similar to Gödel's universe, the game's time loop allows the protagonist to experience the same period repeatedly, potentially altering the course of events and influencing the past based on knowledge gained from future iterations. This exploration of time manipulation and the resulting paradoxes adds depth and complexity to the gameplay experience.
Since the Closed Timelike Curves exist in a universe that is quite different from the one we can observe what about other types of time travel? For that, we have to travel to the world of quantum systems. Now while this sounds like we’re moving to another imaginative universe that’s not the case.
A quantum system is just a system that obeys the rules of quantum dynamics which is what happens to the real world when things get very very VERY small. Imagine a video game with multiple choices for your character but instead of choosing one choice, your character exists in all of them at the same time (at least until you look at him). In the same game, characters are also entangled together and one thing that affects one of them instantly affects the other one as well even if they are kilometres apart (or miles for our American friends).
Now that you have an idea about what a quantum system is we will travel to the very recent past of February 2023 and a group of Spanish researchers that managed to manipulate time in such a system. And when I say manipulate I mean, accelerate, decelerate and reverse the flow of time. As one of the researchers put it very bluntly in a statement in the journal El PAIS[source]:
“We have made science fiction come true!”
While I love the excitement that this statement creates, we are still a bit far away from this becoming a reality. Just so that you can understand the scale of the experiment the researchers did, they managed to change the state of a single photon that has passed through a crystal to the state of how it was before it began its journey. Exciting? Undoubtedly. Should we wait to see similar experimental results with a time-travelling human? Not any day soon. They managed to reverse the time on a particle with a single bit of information. Reversing the state of things not for just a single human but the whole planet requires an enormous amount of time and energy. But who knows, maybe the Huband, the Wife and the Cop live so far into the future that all this is possible.
What about other time-travel possibilities? There is something called a “Tipler Cylinder” proposed by astronomer Frank (you guessed it) Tipler. [source] This theoretical cylinder contains matter 10 times the mass of the sun rolled into a very thin cylinder. In order to time travel, this cylinder is spinning and a spaceship would be travelling around it in a spiral that would travel backwards in time. Would the house in “12 minutes” be in such a spaceship? Unlikely. In any way, we will need to make that cylinder infinitely long or find a material much more dense than we know. But maybe that… McGuffin that you find in the game (I’m trying to be as spoiler-free as possible) could be something that is so dense that could bend spacetime to such an extent that could create a Closed Timelike Curve. In order for that to happen this means that the object has an infinite density or to be made by an “exotic” matter.[source] I’ll leave that to you to decide how easy that would be.
At the end of the day a real-life time loop might not be possible and to explain the reason why I will refer you to a Reddit comment by user Drzowie that really gives an amazing comparison as to why time loops can’t happen. [source] “It is not possible for the same reason you can’t push on a rope (or string): such systems are unstable in too many ways. While a rope could, in principle, transmit negative tension no real rope can because the rope can just bend sideways instead. Likewise, there are too many possible outcomes from a closed timelike path (“time loop”), many of which are paradoxical or unstable.”
The paradoxes that he is referring to here are the common problems that we encounter in fiction. What would happen if you could go back in time and kill your grandfather? First of all, seek help if you want to do that, and secondly, your own existence would be in peril if you succeeded. There have been different methods for physicists to circumnavigate those paradoxes [source] with some of them even explaining the existence of black holes [source].
Have you played 12 minutes? Do you think I might be missing something from the reality of the game that would help us understand more things about time travel? Let me know in the comments below. Also, did you ever play a game and wondered what would it take to bring the events of the game into real life? Let me know in the comments below as well! And of course, don’t forget to share this article on your social media! [=
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