Changing History

What changes would you make if you could go back in time? The right answer might be “nothing at all.”

Time-travel movies are entertaining and a bit mind-bending. They ask the question of what would happen if you could go back in time and change history.

Back to the Future tells the story of Marty McFly, escaping to 1955 in a car-shaped time machine and entering the world of his parents when they were teenagers.

The Terminator is a classic piece of science fiction, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a robot sent from the future to 1984 Los Angeles. His mission is to kill the mother of the man who would go on to be a hero.

Even the Harry Potter series dabbled in time travel. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry and Hermione use a “time turner” to try to save Hogwarts.

More recently, the superheroes of Avengers: Endgame use time travel to save the universe from a big, purple monster man.

Time-travel movies. They raise an intriguing question: If you could go back in time and change one thing, what would it be?

The Atlantic magazine (November 2019)...