HSCI-272: Designing a Time Machine

This is a team taught class exploring the nature and experience of time. The science fiction of time travel has greatly enhanced the thinking about the nature of time and the role of time in the sciences and in art. Broken into three topical modules, we wondrously explore the conceptual intersections of the neurology, the psychology, and the physics/mathematics around the thread of fictional time travel. In the first and second modules, we study the brain as a time traveling machine, analyzing biochemical arguments ranging from short term synaptic plasticity and dependent networks, to the way the brain creates the experience of past, present and future. In the third module we will explore special relativity arguments regarding time dilation and length contraction, and discuss new research on the role of computational fitness driving the flow of time. We will analyze time travel using novel ideas regarding the black and white holes of general relativity, and multiple time dimensions. Throughout the class we will reflect on how artists have explored the complexities and paradoxes of time travel, and in the final project of the class we will encourage students to find creative applications for the theoretical content of the class.