Doc Brown dreamed up the flux capacitor (in fiction)
On this day · 5 November 1955
On a fictional autumn morning in 1955, a bumped head gave cinema its most beloved piece of made-up physics: the flux capacitor.
In the 1985 hit Back to the Future, director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale built their whole plot around a fictional device, the flux capacitor, the heart of a time-travelling DeLorean. According to the film, eccentric inventor Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown conceived it after slipping while hanging a clock, cracking his head on the sink, and waking with a vision.
The in-story date Doc gives is November 5, 1955, the same day his young friend Marty McFly is accidentally stranded 30 years in the past. Fans treat the date as a cinematic in-joke, an annual moment to celebrate the eureka that, in the movie, made time travel possible.
“This is what makes time travel possible: the flux capacitor.”
The gadget is pure fiction, requiring an absurd 1.21 gigawatts and a DeLorean hitting 88 mph, yet it became a cultural icon. The film entered the U.S. National Film Registry in 2007, and physicists have even nicknamed real quantum circuits after Doc’s imaginary invention.
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