

If you’re talking about how dreadful the current state of your country is, you might joke that “if it gets much worse I’ll just have to build a flux capacitor.” It can also be used to suggest that a policy or piece of information is outdated, as if it’s throwing people back into the past, referencing the basic plot of the original Back to the Future, which sends Marty McFly from the 1980s to the 1950s. Some clever engineers, nodding to the film, have built contraptions they called flux capacitors-though these real-life fabrications have yet to achieve time travel.įlux capacitor is still mostly used in reference to the film and to time travel more generally. In physics, flux is the amount of something (like electricity) that’s passing through a given object’s surface and a capacitor is a device that stores electronic charge. Fox) to time-travel.Ī flux capacitor is a bit of fun sci-fi technobabble made up of two pieces of genuine scientific terminology. The flux capacitor was invented by Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and allows Marty McFly (Michael J.

It simply consists of a box with three flashing lights connected in a Y shape, installed in the film’s iconic time-traveling vehicle, the DeLorean, a short-lived sports car famed for its doors, which open up rather than out. Although it’s described as the thing that makes time travel possible, the precise mechanism it works by isn’t ever explained. The flux capacitor is a piece of technology in the 1985 time-travel film Back to the Future and its sequels.
