'Time Travel: Fact, Fiction, and Flux Capacitors'

The Lisska Center presents “Time Travel: Fact, Fiction, and Flux Capacitors” featuring Chloe Armstrong, Sylvia Brown, and Dan Homan and moderated by Diana Mafe. 

This year marks the 130th anniversary of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel “The Time Machine,” which added the phrase “time machine” to the popular vocabulary. It is also the 40th anniversary of the first “Back to the Future” film, which told viewers that a time machine could have style. But time travel has arguably fascinated humanity for as long as the concept of time has existed. Why is the prospect of visiting the past or the future so compelling? Is time travel theoretically possible? And what is the science behind the science fiction? Join us for a roundtable discussion with three expert colleagues followed by audience Q&A. 

Chloe Armstrong is associate professor of Philosophy at Denison University, where she teaches courses in history of mediaeval and modern philosophy, applied ethics, critical reasoning, and metaphysics. She loves the rigorous and imaginative ways philosophers approach big questions. (What is there? How can we know? What should we do about it?) These questions guide her teaching and research on 17th and 18th century science, science fiction, and philosophy. Her current research examines how metaphysical, material, and ethical dimensions of other worlds, real or imagined, offer ways to better understand our own. 

Sylvia Brown is associate professor of English at Denison University, where she specializes in 18th- and 19th-century British literature. Her interests include the origins of the novel, criminal narrative, the Gothic, Jane Austen, Disability Studies, Queer Studies, and science fiction. She is currently exploring the intersection of the Gothic and the detective story as well as writing a memoir about growing up in the South in the (post-) Civil Rights era. 

Dan Homan is professor of Physics and Astronomy and Director of the Data Analytics program at Denison University, where he teaches courses in astronomy, physics, computational science and data analytics. He studies active galaxies and relativistic jets from supermassive black holes using a variety of techniques, including radio interferometry, polarimetry, radiative transfer, and simulations. His research has appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Nature, and other journals.