Einstein’s Minute. How Far Does A DeLorean Move When Travelling in Time?

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How far did Einstein travel in Back To The Future during the DeLorean’s first journey?

The answer that Doc Brown (and the authorial hand of Bob Zemeckis) is one minute, as in “The appropriate question is when the hell are they,” not Marty’s “Where the hell are they?!“

I think I’m with Marty on this one. Because for time travel to work, you also need to move through space. If the DeLorean were just a time machine, Einstein would not have moved in the one minute of travel, but the Earth’s spin would have shifted Marty, Doc and the rest of Hill Valley.

Hill Valley is a fictional place, but for a bit of gedanken, I’m going to go with the Puene Hills Mall, the filming location for Twin Pines / Lone Pines Mall in Hill Valley. It’s situated at a latitude of 33° 59′ 36.82″… let’s go with 34 North. At that latitude, the Earth’s spin speed is roughly 862 miles per hour. So Einstein’s one minute of travel takes him just short of 14.4 miles. 

This would put Einstein and the DeLorean in the middle of the Los Angeles River at Maywood, as pictured above.

Oops.

“Fun With Physics” doesn’t stop there! Because if the first jump had been 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds, then Twin / Lone Pine Mall would have been underneath him… and then Doc’s question holds because no travel in space was needed. Isn’t it? Well, to quote Monty Python’s Eric Idle:

“Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving, and revolving at nine hundred miles an hour. That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see, are moving at a million miles a day, in an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way”

…and so on out to twelve million miles a minute in the final verse. The DeLorean has to compensate for that. Grabbing the future results of the World Series is not thinking big enough; Doc Brown has invented the greatest logistics company in the history (and the future) of the world. Just get your shipping container to 88 miles per hour, and the goodies can be sent anytime, anywhere. Doc Brown unlocked the universe.

Marty’s “Where the hell are they?!” is the exact question to ask.