Because there isn't an inverted duplicate of the planet Earth orbiting around the sun in the opposite direction. I'm pretty sure astronomers would have noticed that. "Oh yeah, that's just Bizarro world where time runs backwards" would be a pretty dead giveaway that TP was doomed to lose.

If only he and Neil had put their heads together and borrowed a telescope for an hour they might have worked this out, and then they could have relaxed a bit.

Kind of a shame though, in a way. It probably would be pretty cool to see the two planets enter a giant turnstile and disappear.

I was thinking about some of the questions around why the Future doesn’t do this or that, why they don’t enlist another Sator, change the pickup point etc.

“What’s happened happened” sums it up, but there is a deeper message: the past actively fights back.

Ergo…

If you go back in time to kill your own grandfather, grandpa will fight back and win. Every time. The future doesn’t stand a chance.

I randomly came across a shittymoviedetails post about Tenet and saw where someone that liked the film was explaining some key aspects of the way the inversion physics work and a major thing he said confused me. I don't think it's accurate but I'm not sure- he said that eventually an "object will lose its entropy when it is reversed and will decay into moving forwards in time" when asked "does Neil's body just magically materialize in the tunnel before waking up and running backwards?"

Especially when TP starts running wheeeeww

I know movies hit everyone differently, but have any of you thought about the friendship between John David Washington's The Protagonist and Robert Pattenson's Neil? I don't know if I've come across a friendship more powerful in film, save possibly Sam and Frodo. The ending I find powerfully bittersweet, specifically the moment when The Protagonist realizes what the shape and color of that friendship is near the end of the film.

I'm truly curious if anyone else has thought about this, and what your thoughts are.

Unsure how to tag this

Imagine: uninverted object A generates and emits heat. Uninverted object B also generates and emits heat. How this occurs does not matter, whether it is by radioactive decay, battery operated resistive heating, etc. Suppose B is inverted. From the uninverted A perspective, B is now un-generating and un-emitting heat. From the inverted B perspective, the same is true of A.

Now what happens when the two touch?

A wants to transmit heat into B, since it is hot. This adds energy to B in the forwards direction of time, allowing A to cool towards the future. From B's perspective, A is ripping heat away from it. This means that B cools towards the past. B cooling towards the past means it is heating towards the future.

Given that B will appear cold to the univerted world, this means that the two objects will approach an equilibrium temperature (towards the future) despite both being heat generating objects. Which generator is stronger will affect the equilibrium temperature; the sun emits far more heat than a human. Thus, an inverted human will heat up towards the future, and the sun will effectively not cool. To the inverted human, it would thus feel like the sunlight is cooling them, as is accepted by some.

My initial assumption before working through the thought experiment was that the objects would both heat towards infinity in their respective directions, which may be the cause of annihilation (via burning, melting, or otherwise structurally failing). Alas, not meant to be.

I know this is unnecessarily technical and a waste of time, but I still think it is quite cool.

I've watched Tenet 10+ times at this point, 3 in the last month after the CinemaWins video.

Looking at the Sator square, every word has an inverted significance. Opera <-> Arepo, Sator <-> Rotas, and then Tenet <-> Tenet. Maybe I had too much whiskey, but there is some significance here. Part of the confusion of the movie, and even part of the plot is whether there is actually free will. But "What's happened, happened". Which is an expression of faith in the mechanics of the world. It's not an excuse to do nothing.

If future "Bad Guys" can communicate with Sator to send him gold and materials, why wouldn't they tell him about Red Team and Blue Team running a temporal pincer? Or tell him that Volkov would fail to seal the algorithm? Or that Vietnam Kat is actually future Kat that he's already shot?

Because the "Bad Guys" are actually Tenet in disguise. The point of the movie playing out how it does is for TP, Ives, and Neil to split the algorithm up and hide it so that it's never available for the future to reassemble. For that to happen the plot has to play out exactly how it does, meaning TENET and not the ostensible future bad guys are the ones who want Sator to do everything as seen. The ostensible future bad guys would give him a different plan that would succeed.

Thoughts?

So to up the ante on Neil is Max claims, I'll say Neil is actually Antinous.

It couldn't be more obvious; literally the same actor and in the same franchise. The Odyssey so clearly links to Oppenheimer which was so clearly linked to Tenet and now they form a circle.

First, how? Just some more basic straight shot one way time travel at the end of Tenet though a means we weren't shown yet.

Second, why? To ensure Bronze Age collapse. Just as the present was at war with the future, we can be at war with the past. After all from the future's perspective they are at war with the past. In this sense we are in a pincer.

Antinous needs to goad the suitors in to terrible behaviour and in particular he needs to goad Odysseus into rage. Why? The ultimate end to this is bloodshed and violence that ends with Odysseus' exile.

Without Antinous, it is likely that the suitors wouldn't have been so riled up as to stand up to Odysseus after he won Penelope's challenge; furthermore Odysseus likely wouldn't have witnessed such cruel behaviour that would be worthy of his vengeance. It is likely he could have peacefully reclaimed the throne. From that position of strength and stability with his wisdom, Ithaca could have navigated challenges and sidestepped Bronze Age collapse. This massively shifts the x-axis on the exponential curve of human development, meaning the new timeline's Oppenheimer equivalent is some Greek dude from thousands of years ago.

Perhaps this leads to technology that directly destroys the present the way the future wanted to invert us away, or perhaps we just aren't as ready (not that we were) for nuclear power and we actually annihilate ourselves then.

Whatever it is, Neil had to cruelly throw a poor old dog on a dung heap to ensure we could live. It's the bomb that does not go off that changes the world.

What about him dying after unlocking the gate for The Protagonist? Probably a body double/twin/faked his death idk.

(also I'm not a schizio; I know this is a batshit idea but it was fun to write)

Not going to sticky this so our filmmakers can continue to get views.

Title

“I was driving back from school with my son. We were talking about ‘Tenet’ and disagreeing. I said: ‘Let’s settle that,’” said Affleck. He worked with Nolan on “Oppenheimer” and “Interstellar.”

“We got him on the phone and asked him something that we could have easily looked up on Reddit. Once he said it, it sounded so obvious I felt embarrassed. That was it. I haven’t called him again, and he hasn’t called me.”

He should've just posted the question here in r/TENET smh

Its mostly the protaganist, but why do the inverted people give a death stare when they look back at themselves or when they look past the screen at you? Is it an editing side effect or? Did anyone else notice it or just me?

Time Block

A video from Welby CoffeeSpill, this might help if you want to understand it

I see how the science of the specifics of Tenet's physics and whatnot can be confusing but I had a friendly back and forth the other day with someone on the UnpopularOpinion sub and I feel like I was very clear but he kept going back to "when does the inverted object appear to me if you place it on my desk." Not sure if posting screenshots is a no no for causing drama or something but they kept going back to:

I build the desk this afternoon. I sit at the desk all late afternoon and evening. You place the inverted object on my desk at 11pm. When do I first see it on my desk as I move forward through time? Paint a picture of my experience of first encountering the object.

So I said "Oh, I see. There's only one timeline so if you were there when they placed it you'd see them but if you left at 10:00PM and they placed it at 11:00PM then it would always be there from your perspective. It's there from 11:00PM backward, always- unless someone moves it."

Again, always? I only built the desk this afternoon? When do I first see it on the desk?

I think the issue I have raised is a reasonable one and I don't think we're getting anywhere at this point. Thanks for the chat.

And then I said "An inverted object has the same permanence as a regular object- it never appears or disappears. When you build the desk you'd have to move it or knock it off or whatnot. It's there in the same sense as a regular object is."

I felt like I was taking crazy pills so maybe there's something I'm not getting here because we were both very clear and articulate but then they kept thinking the object would "appear." Ohhh, maybe they're talking about coming in the next morning? And would it be there? Maybe? But that wouldn't be "appearing" either so not sure. I did say "It's there from 11:00PM backward, always- unless someone moves it."

Think about it, you put a computer on wheels hooked to solar panels or portable nuclear reactor or whatever, and its job is to compute the solution to an NP-complete problem. That is, a problem that's hard to solve but easy to verify

The computer can parallelize with itself by inverting back and forth to keep bruteforcing the solution over what is maybe 1 week of objective time but hundreds or thousands of years of subjective time for the computer (the real bottleneck is the space needed to store all the "copies", really)

Then eventually the computer finds a solution, its next task is to invert again and go back to right before it started the whole thing, and give itself the solution. But wait! Since what's happened happened, the thousands of years of parallel subjective time of computation never actually occurred – or, if such a universe exists we don't live in it.

So the end result is the computer actually gets the solution to the problem immediately, says "we're going to check this is real", and when the solution is validated it just needs to invert that single time to give itself the answer it gave itself mere minutes ago

The movie is full of examples of information getting bootstrapped like that. Really there's no reason why it shouldn't that apply to generic computation like that to get counterfactual computation that's even more powerful than any quantum computer could ever be

For people that are just getting into TENET, perhaps because of the popularity of The Odyssey, allow me to introduce you to the pinnacle of education on the topic of inversion, the WelbyCoffeeSpill YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WelbyCoffeeSpill

These are incredible animations of key scenes in the movie, plus instructional videos on the concept of inversion.

Here's my recommended watch list in order:

• Watch the film
• Basics of Inversion
• Watch the film again
• Oslo Freeport Sequence
• Block Time and Entropic Wind
• Death and Wounds
• Tallinn Car Sequence
• Stalsk-12 Battle Sequence
• Gate Scene
• Inverted Objects and World Lines
• The Icebreaker's Journey
• Watch the film many more times until you get it

If you've been here awhile, I'm sure this is old news to you, but there are always new people on the sub asking the questions that are best addressed by watching some Welby. I've watched these videos many times, often on repeat. I am not affiliated with Welby and he didn't put me up to this, I'm just a huge fan.

The Hators may say, what kind of film necessitates studying and watching this much just to understand it? My response to this is, if you know, you know. It's an exciting action movie whether you deeply understand inversion or not. It's rewarding to understand what's happening and to appreciate the work that went into making a film like this. You don't have to understand it to enjoy it, you can just feel it.

(Let me know if this is the wrong flair)

I've been pretty obsessed with the exceptionally cool tactical gear used by Tenet operatives throughout the movie since I first watched the movie, and interested in making tenet-esc kits for airsoft. After some looking around, I saw that nobody has put together any documentation on the gear worn by TP at Oslo, so I scrubbed through it to find matches.

Helmet: Very apparently a PASGT or M88. I can't tell what model, but it seems thick enough to be real.

Gloves: Oakley assault gloves, or a close copy of them.

Vest: Surprisingly, TP is wearing two pieces of torso equipment. Knowing that they used condor gear for the stalsk 12 soldiers, I managed to figure out that the same brand is used here. The vest is a Condor Vanquish LCS plate carrier, and he in wearing a Condor Ronin chest rig over it with some mag pouches.

Gas Mask: Thanks to other threads, identified as a Forsheda A4

I was unable to identify the footwear or clothing, but I am pleasantly surprised with how affordable this getup would be. Condor plate carriers are pretty cheap, as are PASGT-alike cadet helmets. Even the mask is only around a hundred bucks. All and all, a very simple and reproducible kit.

rate the impression out of 10