Time Travelers Converge on Campus
On May 29, 2026, a crowd of about 150 people gathered in and around a colonial-style house on campus that belongs to Caltech's theater arts group, also known as TACIT. In one corner, visitors sat captivated by an attendee who claimed to have arrived from a future where whales have gone extinct. The group huddled together around her hand-drawn book of animals that no longer graced the world. Another, who said she had come from a future in which reliance on fossil fuels had been eliminated, told a guest whose clean-energy start-up had just folded that the future still needed their work.
Inside the house, a quantum physicist fielded questions about time travel, and on the front lawn, a new guest arrived in a modified DeLorean before stepping out to ask the crowd, "What year is it?"
This was the scene at Caltech's Time Travel Gathering, hosted by TACIT and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech (IQIM). Unbeknownst to guests, the gathering had been seeded with improvisational actors as well as Caltech students who were trained to develop futuristic characters. Actual time travelers were invited too: The organizers created archival invitations to place in collections at Caltech Library and nearby at The Huntington for future generations to discover.
"My work is about making possible futures vivid enough that they can change what we do now, and often that means immersing people into simulations of alternative scenarios," explains Stuart Candy, a futurist who served as artist-in-residence this year at TACIT, and who originated and led the design of the event. "Something I've never had the chance to do until now is invite people from various possible futures to join us in the present."
The first time-travel convention was held at MIT in 2005. Stephen Hawking also hosted his own private time-traveler party in 2009, sending the invite out only after the party occurred since time travelers would not need advance notice. Hawking sat alone for several hours beneath a banner reading "Welcome, Time Travellers," while the champagne sat on ice. When nobody showed up, he declared this as evidence for the impossibility of traveling back in time.
Candy wanted to revisit this premise, but in a more participatory mode. He teamed up with Kari Coleman, an improvisational theatre director who previously taught at TACIT, and the two devised the production. The duo wanted to take advantage of perspectives in quantum physics that were not in circulation two decades ago, so they joined forces with IQIM's Spiros Michalakis, manager of outreach, who brought a rigorous quantum physics perspective to the proceedings.
"The mathematical foundations of quantum physics may allow for traveling ‘left' of time to a parallel reality and landing at a point in time that resembles our own past," says Michalakis, who is also a lecturer and staff researcher at Caltech. "That way we avoid grandfather paradoxes, in which one could go back in time and accidentally kill a grandparent before their parents are born."
At 7 p.m. on May 29, a long line of visitors of all ages queued up outside TACIT house, including Caltech faculty members, postdocs, students, and staff, as well as many colleagues and friends from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA.
Upon signing in, guests were briefed on the rules of engagement for the evening, such as talking to people they didn't arrive with, treating anyone they met who might be from another time as a guest, and other tips for making the experiment work.
The guests were also told to find their "entanglement group." In quantum physics, entanglement is a phenomenon in which many particles become linked to act together coherently without being in physical contact.
"We wanted to facilitate discussion as quickly as possible," Coleman said. "Turns out, requiring people to find an entanglement partner in order to get a drink at the bar is pretty effective."
Over the course of the evening, guests questioned time travelers about the futures they had come from, asked Michalakis questions about quantum physics, and sat with artist and hypnotist Marcos Lutyens for "inner time travel explorations." The assembled attendees were hosted by the event's emcee, actor Ahmed Best, whose credits include Star Wars' Jar Jar Binks and decades of theatrical performances.
Leading up to the event, Candy and Coleman ran workshops to help train a number of undercover time travelers, a mix of professional actors and Caltech students who attended the party without the guests' prior knowledge.
The workshops helped these participants select and envision the various futures that they could be coming from and develop their roles and motivations for visiting 2026.
"We wanted to provide cover for actual time travelers who could be tempted to attend, but who might not be thrilled about being the only ones there," Candy says.
Coleman adds: "This was an experiment in embodying different futures and bringing them into dialogue with groups of people in a party setting."
The evening ended with a musical performance by a traveler who had come from a future where live music had disappeared.
"I was very excited by how many people showed up," says Caltech theater arts director Brian Brophy, who, incidentally, once played a 24th centurycyberneticist in an episode of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. "The gathering really disrupted the TACIT house space in a good way. I've been bringing people together in fun ways in this house for 18 years but never on this scale."
Whether, or how many, attendees from future timelines actually reached Caltech that night is an open question. It is one the organizers say they can't settle.
For Candy, this uncertainty is not only an honest answer but an opportunity. "The act of opening ourselves up to alternative futures is significant because there are countless pathways available. What we bring into reality remains to be decided," he says.
Michalakis agrees that what we do today is ultimately what matters. "We want to build bridges of trust between creative minds across the sciences and the arts, so that if we ever do build a time machine to the past, we won't need to activate it," he says. "Let's be nostalgic for the future instead."
A modified DMC-12 DeLorean on the front lawn of TACIT House at the Caltech Time Travel Gathering.
Credit: Kari Coleman.
Spiros Michalakis fields quantum physics and time travel questions indoors.
Credit: Caltech
An entanglement group in conversation.
Credit: Kari Coleman
The event invitation, letterpress-printed and dated 02026, shown with a coin.
Credit: Spiros Michalakis/Caltech. Invitation and coin design: Michelle Constantine, David Delgado, and Stuart Candy.
Pictured Above: Spiros Michalakis and emcee Ahmed Best welcome guests from the front steps. Image credit: Heather Nusz. The banner was designed by Marcia Brown in the style of Stephen Hawking's.
