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Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

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Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#3
> it’s a shame Doc didn’t equip the Delorean with Tesla electric motors when he visited 2015. That would have made things easier considering the Delorean was equipped with a working Mr. Fusion generator in 1885

He put flying car parts into it. Why the hell would he want some lousy electric motors?

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#4
post #2

There is also no way he could have met himself in the future. Edit: Unless the time machine was capable of visiting parallel universes.

Why not?

1. Marty leaves timeline to go to 2015 2. Marty meets Marty-F in the 2015 3. Marty returns to 1985 and grows up to be Marty-F.

Of course this means that he knew, but that's okay.

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#5
Well I saw the movie, and Marty did make it back to 1985. The problem is that the analysis assumes that every second in the film corresponds to a second in real life. That's not true, the shots overlap in real life but are shown after one another in a sequence to make showing what happened (possibly at the same time) more practical. This overlapping is often used in dramatic representations of real events in movies.

One hint is when the author notes that acceleration happens much more quickly during the few short shots when the speedometer is visible, i.e. the acceleration is much quicker compared to the assumed linear acceleration in-between those shots.

It would be an interesting project to analyse the sequence of shots and figure out which ones overlapped by how much, to make the time/distances/accelerations work out. [Edit: copyediting]

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#6
post #3

> it’s a shame Doc didn’t equip the Delorean with Tesla electric motors when he visited 2015. That would have made things easier considering the Delorean was equipped with a working Mr. Fusion generator in 1885 He put flying car parts into it. Why the hell would he want some lousy electric motors?

Was it working? I always thought Mr Fusion was damaged along with the time circuits when the Delorean was struck by lightning.

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#7
post #6
post #3

> it’s a shame Doc didn’t equip the Delorean with Tesla electric motors when he visited 2015. That would have made things easier considering the Delorean was equipped with a working Mr. Fusion generator in 1885 He put flying car parts into it. Why the hell would he want some lousy electric motors?

Was it working? I always thought Mr Fusion was damaged along with the time circuits when the Delorean was struck by lightning.

Mr Fusion at least had to have been working. Otherwise in 1885 they wouldn't have been able to power the time circuits. That said, that doesn't mean the flying cart upgrades were still.

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#8
post #5

Well I saw the movie, and Marty did make it back to 1985. The problem is that the analysis assumes that every second in the film corresponds to a second in real life. That's not true, the shots overlap in real life but are shown after one another in a sequence to make showing what happened (possibly at the same time) more practical. This overlapping is often used in dramatic representations of real events in movies.…

OP here.

You're probably right it's not all real time. I figured it wasn't completely unreasonable to treat it as such because when you watch it, most of it does feel RT and we pretty much see everything that happens in an uninterrupted way.

But for the sake of argument, even if the analysis is skewed a bit, it does suggests they were missing a lot of tracks. So if some of the sequence can be considered RT and some of it not, for them to reach the 88 mph in under 3 miles, probably a lot of it would need to be non-RT, which didn't feel right to me based on the way it's presented in the movie.

Totally agree it would be awesome to be able to figure out what overlaps. Thanks for the comment!

Re: Actually, Marty Didn’t Go Back to the Future: Graphing the Train Scene of BTTF3

#10
...but considering that they only need to fall from an height of 258.88 feet to reach 88 miles per hours Marty most likely did made it to the future! Unfortunately he then died instantly by hitting the the bottom of the ravine once he arrived to 1985. :(
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