Museum of Science, Boston

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With physicist Edward Farhi. This presentation is part of the ongoing Science on Screen Series.

With only a few days left before their high school graduation, two most excellent dudes, Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Keanu Reeves) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Alex Winter), are on the verge of flunking history. Unless they can ace their final history report, Ted's dad will pack him off to a military academy in Alaska, meaning their band, The Wyld Stallyns, will come to a heinous end. Luckily for these wanna-be rock stars, a guardian angel from the future, Rufus (George Carlin), comes to them with a bodacious solution: a time-traversing phone booth in which they travel back to the past and round up personages of historical significance to help them with their report. Whoaa!

"Billy, you are dealing with the oddities of time travel with the greatest of ease" — Bill S. Preston, Esq. to Billy the Kid, rescued from a bar fight.

Join us before the film as Edward Farhi, a professor of physics at MIT and director of its Center for Theoretical Physics, unravels the "oddities" of time travel and weighs in on the question: Is travel through time physically possible? Dr. Farhi has studied the complexities of building a time machine, though not of the phone-booth variety.

Edward Farhi was trained as a theoretical particle physicist but has also worked on astrophysics, general relativity, and the foundations of quantum mechanics. His current interest is the theory of quantum computation. He was on the staff at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland before coming to MIT, where he joined the faculty in 1982. He has won three teaching awards at MIT and has presented his research at many of the world's leading physics research centers.

Fee: $7.75 for Museum of Science members, students, and seniors; $9.75 for the general public; free for Coolidge Corner Theatre members. Tickets are available in advance at coolidge.org or at the theater box office, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline.

Tickets: Museum of Science members, students, and seniors: $7.75; general admission: $9.75; Coolidge Corner Theatre members: free. Tickets are available in advance at coolidge.org or at the theater box office, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline.

With Science on Screen, the Coolidge Corner Theatre creatively pairs a feature film or documentary with lively presentations by notable figures from the world of science, medicine, and technology. The Science on Screen series is co-presented by the Museum of Science, Boston and New Scientist magazine and supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, with additional support from Gesmer, Updegrove LLP, and Richard Anders.

Side photo © Photofest.