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up vote 9 down vote favorite

I asked why the speed was 88 MPH, and it made a lot of sense.

Now I want to ask: Why does the Flux Capacitor need 1.21 jigowatts to travel in time? Is this a magic number?

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Cross-posted (sort of) to Physics – David Zaslavsky May 2 '12 at 0:11
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Note that "jigowatts" is the way the word was spelled in the script, and is considered a correct spelling for within the movie. – Beofett May 2 '12 at 14:24

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

Lightning strikes deposit somewhere on the order of a few Mega-Joules, not enough to power a flux capacitor, but it seems that the peak power of a bolt is about 1 terrawatt, a thousand times too large; you'd fry the delorean with that sort of energy.

It appears that 1.21 Gigawatts is roughly the energy of a nuclear power unit, though this sort of unit would be made of several rods, many more than those that fuel the Flux Capacitor.

Unless we find the dubious science correspondent referred to by the directors in the commentary (the one who pronounced it Jigowatt) we'll never know if they advised this number or it was plucked out for 'sounding nice'.

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It takes a large non-portable nuclear plant to generate 1.2 GW continuous, yes. But you CAN generate 1.2 GW pulses off of a lower average-power supply. It's clear from the fact that a bolt of lightning can trigger time travel that they need high power, but not for very long. If the 1.2 GW is only needed for 1 microsecond, for example, you could charge a capacitor bank from a 1.2 MW source and get a one-microsecond pulse once per millisecond. Of course, you'd need a ridiculously awesome capacitor to do that. But Doc had one. :) – Remiel Jun 22 '12 at 13:27
up vote 4 down vote

It is a large number, one which defies non-nuclear methods of portable generation (even to this day).

The number has some appeal visually, and could be spoken memorably by the actors involved.

It perfectly fit the story purposes, and is not outside of the bounds for a lightning strike, as Pureferret says.

A number low in the gigawatt range was exactly what was needed, and Doc Brown was equal parts crazy and brilliant - he would have calculated how much power is needed, and would also use the exact number (1.21) instead of rounding it as most people would. Thus, 'one point twenty-one' - it's a good number to speak, it doesn't have too many syllables. Most likely, one of the writers picked it at random (possibly along with several others) and the writers decided it fit best.

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up vote 3 down vote

There's nothing magical about this particular number, it's just a lot of watts.

Note that the actual unit is "gigawatts," but the producers didn't how to pronounce it, so it became “jigowatts” in the movie.

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3  
According to the dictionary "jiga" is a perfectly acceptable pronunciation. It is a 'g' followed by an 'i' after all. – Donald.McLean May 1 '12 at 22:01
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It's been a long time since I've seen it, I didn't realize that the pronunciation of "giga" in the movie was a bit of a big deal: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga-#Pronunciation – Ward May 1 '12 at 22:04
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Yes, but it is not an accepted spelling. – Gabe Willard May 1 '12 at 22:29
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No one knew how to pronounce it... nowadays, you could just Joogle it. – CamelBlues May 1 '12 at 22:48
@Ward Oh dear god, "jaigawatts"?? – Izkata May 1 '12 at 23:25
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up vote 1 down vote

To answer your direct questions its a MacGuffin just something to advance the plot.

How to answer the inferred question of why the need for so much power (in this case plutonium/Mr. Fusion/Steam which in fact is prove of the MacGuffin) and the speech of 88MPH is this:

The speed is required seemingly to provide a object with the forward motion need to start a time dilation (i.e why traveling in a airplane you seem to be barely moving while someone standing on the ground sees a very fast plane). The power is a requirement to generate a temporal flux to propel the object at the cusp of a time dilatation to another point in time.

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