Word: electronic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...screen swirls with zippy images: a cocktail tumbler that mysteriously waddles on an airplane meal tray, a Tinker Bell electron that darts through our hero's thoughts, a vortex of digital effects that suck you into cyberworld, and a few Fellini moments, like the tunnel full of empty cars and the ghostly accordionist on a picturesquely creepy streetscape...
...have to go to a theater to see these apparitions. In fact, you can't. Quantum Project, a 32-min. epic about a physicist (perpetual star-of-the-future Stephen Dorff) who defies his Merlinish dad (blustery John Cleese) to find love with the proper electron (petrochemical-sunset-haired Fay Masterson), is the first medium-length, Hollywood-style movie made uniquely for the Internet. Just log on to sightsound.com as the Web faithful did at 12:01 a.m., Friday, when Quantum popped online. Pay $3.95 to rent or $5.95 to buy. Download for four minutes--or many hours...
...young physics graduate student named Hugh Everett was toying with some of the more bizarre implications of quantum mechanics. That theory, accepted by all serious physicists, says that the motions of atoms and subatomic particles can never be predicted with certainty; you can tell only where, say, an electron will probably be a millisecond from now. It could quite possibly end up somewhere else...
...Everett had another idea: when you locate the electron, he argued, the world splits into multiple universes. In each one, the electron has a different position--and all these many worlds, each equally real, go on to have their own futures. In this so-called many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe is incredibly prolific, since each particle in the cosmos produces a multitude of new universes in each instant--and in the next instant, every one of these new universes fragments again. Yet plenty of physicists consider this to be a perfectly valid idea...
...laws of physics permit time travel, even in principle? They may in the subatomic world. A positron (the antiparticle associated with the electron) can be considered to be an electron going backward in time. Thus, if we create an electron-positron pair and the positron later annihilates in a collision with another, different electron, we could view this as a single electron executing a zigzag, N-shaped path through time: forward in time as an electron, then backward in time as a positron, then forward in time again as an electron...