It's Finally Friday: The Science of Steins;Gate

As I mentioned in a previous post, Steins;Gate is easily one of my favorite anime, due in no small part to my interest in the science of the show. As someone who is majoring in Physics and has a personal interest in many of the subjects of the show, I figured I might as well talk about just how much the science of Steins;Gate holds up.


The show's main topic is time-travel, which is achieved through the use of a vaguely explained microwave-based contraption connected to a cellphone and based on a particle accelerator. If this sounds ridiculous to you, that's because it is: sad as it may be to the aspiring mad scientist, there's pretty much no way any method of time travel could be accomplished in this way. However, there are some fascinating ideas brought up via this method that aren't entirely rooted in fiction.

If only all advanced physics was this simple.

First, it's made clear that the use of the aforementioned particle accelerator (specifically, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short) can accomplish time travel by utilizing microscopic black holes that are produced by the collider. This is based on an idea that was proposed shortly before the machine was first tested: namely, that the process of examining the collision of particles at speeds approaching the speed of light could create stable miniature black holes, which themselves could be dangerous. Thankfully, this was quickly debunked by both CERN, the organization in possession of the LHC, and other notable scientists; not only was the LHC incapable of producing unstable microscopic black holes, let alone stable ones, but said black holes would also be essentially harmless even if they were produced. But let's ignore all of that for now and pretend that the LHC could produce those black holes; could this actually lead to the development of time travel?

Now THIS is some hardcore science.

Unfortunately, the answer to this is once again a bit disappointing. I'll go ahead and cut down on the technical explanation and simplify things as best I can: microscopic black holes, unlike their normal versions, are almost guaranteed to be unstable, meaning that they're unlikely to stick around very long. Additionally, their small size means that they aren't likely to have any substantial impact on anything around them, unlike normal black holes. Whereas normal black holes have a strong enough gravitational pull that they can bend space-time, hypothetically allowing for a person to to travel forward in time while only a very small amount of time passes for the person, a microscopic black hole probably wouldn't be able to effect more than a few atoms of anything it came into contact with during its very short lifespan. Things get a bit more complicated when you start taking into account that time-travel in Steins;Gate utilizes Kerr-Black Holes, a kind of rotating black hole that lacks an electrical charge, but it's still basically irrelevant since miniature black holes would be useless for any time-travel experiments.

Pictured: what a microscopic black hole wishes it could do.

So while the time-travel of Steins;Gate isn't going to happen any time soon, there is one other neat bit of science discussed: the idea of turning the mind into data. This is partially based on the events of the series Chaos;Head, the show that came before Steins;Gate and the first entry in the Science Adventure series, but it's a big part of how time-travel works in Steins;Gate. Basically, the mind is converted into data, like the kind we store on a computer, which is then sent into contact with the previously discussed black holes: this causes the data to travel backwards in time and return to its point of origin, the person to whom the mind belongs. As crazy as this might sound, this isn't entirely (read: only mostly) nonsensical in terms of real-world science.

Like I said, only mostly.

The idea that the mind could be digitized, while pretty much entirely unproven, isn't outside the realm of possibility. The mind is, to oversimplify things, basically just a bunch of neuro-chemical reactions occurring in the brain that produce the electrical signals that the mind is composed of; if you could find a way to simulate and/or replicate those signals using a super-advanced computer, you just might be able to digitize the mind. Of course, there are more than a few problems with this, most of which revolve around the fact that the brain does not work like a computer and the mind is not just some kind of easily-programmable software. But even still, it just goes to show that even the craziest mad science might not be as impossible as you'd think.