It is a very special Lego set because it was a gift from The Morgans -her most recent host family, with whom she shared some fantastic months.
While building this set, it was impossible not to reflect on a topic of such fundamental importance: time -the past, the present, and, of course, the future.
A stainless-steel car. Two gull-wing doors. A flux capacitor. And a digital display showing a date that may belong to the past, the present or the future. Few cars in the history of cinema are as instantly recognisable as the DeLorean from Back to the Future.
When Dr Emmett Brown unveils his extraordinary invention to Marty McFly in 1985, an unsuccessful sports car becomes something infinitely more fascinating: a machine capable of travelling through time.
All it needs is enough energy, a destination programmed into its circuits and a speed of 88 miles per hour. Then the impossible happens. Time becomes a road. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the DeLorean is not where it takes Marty and Doc. It is the question it leaves behind. What exactly is time?
Human beings have been trying to answer that question for thousands of years. We have observed it, divided it, measured it and filled our lives with devices designed to tell us precisely where we are within it. And yet time remains one of the strangest dimensions of human existence.
So today, instead of travelling from 1985 to 1955, perhaps we can use Doc Brown's DeLorean for another journey. A journey through the history of time itself.
Long before humans invented clocks, nature already provided them with one. The sky. The alternation between daylight and darkness created perhaps our most fundamental unit of time: the day. The phases of the Moon provided another regular cycle, while the changing position of the Sun and stars helped societies recognise the seasons and eventually organise years.
For early agricultural communities, understanding these cycles was essential. Knowing when winter was approaching, when rivers might flood or when crops should be planted could mean the difference between abundance and hunger.
Timekeeping therefore began not as an abstract intellectual exercise but as a matter of survival. Ancient civilisations gradually transformed astronomical observation into increasingly sophisticated calendars. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Maya, Chinese and many other cultures developed ways of organising the cycles they observed in the heavens.
The movement of celestial bodies became humanity's first great clock.
One of the simplest ways of measuring the passage of time was to observe shadows. Place an object vertically in sunlight and its shadow changes position as the Earth rotates. From this principle came the sundial.
Ancient Egyptians were using shadow clocks thousands of years ago, while later Greek and Roman societies developed increasingly sophisticated sundials. The principle was beautifully simple. No gears. No batteries. No electronics. Only the Earth, the Sun and a shadow. But there was an obvious problem.
What happens at night? Or when clouds hide the Sun?
Humanity needed clocks that did not depend upon the sky. One answer was water. Water clocks appeared in several ancient cultures. The Greeks called them clepsydrae, from words meaning roughly water thief. Instead of observing the Sun, people measured the controlled movement of water from one container to another. Suddenly, time could be measured indoors.
And at night. The passage of water became the passage of time. Clepsydrae were used for many purposes. In ancient Greece, for example, water clocks could regulate the amount of time available to speakers in courts.
There is something wonderfully modern about that idea. More than two thousand years before PowerPoint presentations and meeting timers, somebody was already being told: Your time is up.
Water was not the only substance that humans turned into time. Candles and incense could provide approximate measurements through their rate of burning. Later, hourglasses used the regular movement of sand through a narrow opening. Hourglasses became particularly useful aboard ships because they could operate independently of the motion of the vessel. But all these devices shared the same fundamental idea. We cannot see time itself. So we measure something else that changes.
A shadow moves. Water flows. Sand falls. A candle burns. And from those changes, we construct time.
During the Middle Ages, mechanical clocks began transforming European towns. From roughly the late thirteenth century onwards, large weight-driven clocks appeared in towers and public buildings. This represented an extraordinary cultural change. Time was no longer something visible only in the movement of the Sun or experienced through natural rhythms. It could now be heard.
Church bells and town clocks divided communal life into increasingly regular intervals. Hours became part of the architecture of society. Eventually, clocks became smaller. They entered houses. Then pockets. Then wrists. And as clocks became more accurate, human life became increasingly organised around them.
Work begins at a particular hour. A train leaves at a particular minute. A lesson lasts a specified amount of time. A football match lasts ninety minutes. Modern civilisation gradually became a civilisation of the clock.
One of the great advances in timekeeping came from studying something apparently simple: a swinging object. Galileo Galilei investigated the behaviour of pendulums around the end of the sixteenth century, although he did not build the first successful pendulum clock. That achievement is generally associated with Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who designed a practical pendulum clock in 1656. Its accuracy was revolutionary.
Where earlier clocks could lose significant amounts of time each day, pendulum clocks reduced those errors dramatically. Once again, time itself had not changed. What had changed was our ability to measure it.
During the age of oceanic navigation, accurate clocks acquired another importance. They could help determine where you were. Sailors could calculate latitude relatively easily by observing the sky, but determining longitude was much more difficult. The solution required knowing the difference between local time aboard a ship and the time at a known reference location. That demanded a clock accurate enough to survive long voyages at sea.
In the eighteenth century, English clockmaker John Harrison developed a series of marine chronometers capable of maintaining extraordinary accuracy aboard ships. A clock could now help sailors determine their position on Earth. Measuring time had become a way of measuring space.
For most of history, time was local. Noon was simply the moment when the Sun reached its highest point in the sky. That meant noon in one town was slightly different from noon somewhere farther east or west. For centuries, this hardly mattered. Then came the railways. Suddenly, trains were travelling quickly between towns that used slightly different local times. Timetables became confusing and potentially dangerous. The solution was standardised time.
During the nineteenth century, railway networks helped drive the adoption of common time standards, and eventually the world was divided into time zones.
In 1884, an international conference established the Greenwich meridian as the principal reference for longitude. Humanity had begun synchronising its clocks on a global scale.
The twentieth century brought another revolution. Quartz clocks exploit an extraordinary property of quartz crystals: when electrically stimulated, they vibrate at highly stable frequencies. Those vibrations can regulate a clock far more precisely than many mechanical mechanisms. Timekeeping became cheaper, smaller and extraordinarily reliable. Quartz eventually entered watches, clocks, computers and countless electronic devices.
But scientists wanted still greater precision. And for that, they turned from crystals to atoms. Modern atomic clocks are among the most precise instruments humans have ever created. Instead of relying on pendulums or gears, they use extremely stable atomic transitions as their reference. The definition of the second itself reflects this extraordinary change.
Since 1967, the SI second has been defined using a specific transition of the caesium-133 atom: precisely 9,192,631,770 periods of the corresponding radiation. Think about that for a moment. Our ancestors once watched a shadow moving across a stone. Today we count phenomena associated with atoms. Yet we are still trying to answer the same basic question: How much time has passed?
And then physics made the story considerably stranger. For centuries, people largely imagined time as something universal -a great invisible clock ticking at the same rate everywhere in the universe.
Albert Einstein showed that reality does not work that way. According to relativity, measurements of time depend upon motion and gravity. Two clocks following different trajectories can eventually disagree. This is not science fiction. It is measurable reality. Even the satellite systems used for GPS must account for relativistic effects. Without those corrections, positioning errors would accumulate.
So although Doc Brown's DeLorean remains fictional, the underlying idea that time is not as simple or absolute as everyday experience suggests belongs firmly to modern physics.
Can We Travel Through Time? In one sense, we already do.
Every second that passes carries us towards the future. Relativity also tells us that sufficiently high speeds or differences in gravitational conditions can make different observers experience different amounts of elapsed time. Travelling into the past, however, is an entirely different matter.
No DeLorean waits in a laboratory. No flux capacitor has opened a road to 1955. And perhaps that is why Back to the Future remains so fascinating. Its time machine allows us to imagine doing something humans constantly desire but cannot actually do: return.
Correct a mistake. Meet people who are gone. See our parents when they were young. Discover what the world was like before we existed. Or travel forward and discover what happens after us.
The DeLorean transforms one of humanity's oldest dreams into an automobile. There was another stroke of genius in choosing the DeLorean DMC-12. With its stainless-steel body and extraordinary gull-wing doors, the car already looked futuristic when Back to the Future was released in 1985. Doc Brown even explains his choice with characteristic enthusiasm: If you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
And style it certainly had. The film transformed a commercially unsuccessful automobile into one of the most famous vehicles in popular culture.
Today, seeing a DeLorean immediately evokes lightning, flaming tyre tracks, 88 miles per hour and three glowing dates on a dashboard.
Past. Present. Future.
Perhaps there is one final irony. Humanity has become extraordinarily good at measuring time. We have gone from shadows to water clocks, from sand to pendulums, from mechanical gears to quartz crystals and finally to atoms. We can measure fractions of a second with a precision our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
And yet we still cannot control the thing we measure. We cannot stop a second. We cannot store an hour for later. We cannot return to yesterday.
Every clock humanity has ever constructed ultimately tells us the same thing: time is passing.
Perhaps this is why stories about time travel fascinate us so deeply. The DeLorean offers something no real clock can provide. A clock tells us that the past is gone. And so perhaps Doc Brown's greatest invention was not the flux capacitor after all.
Perhaps it was the possibility of looking at those three little displays -past, present and future -and imagining, just for a moment, that time was not something carrying us relentlessly forward.
Perhaps it was a road. And all we needed to choose was the destination.
More information: Back to the Future
when this baby hits 88 miles per hour,
you're gonna see some serious shit.
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