Captain Marvel is one of the few period pieces in the MCU catalog, set in the 1990s when Nirvana ruled the airwaves and Blockbuster cornered the home video market. Therefore, some fans were a bit perplexed by the character’s youthful appearance in Avengers: Endgame set nearly thirty years later. We all assumed it had something to do with the cosmic powers she gleaned from the Space Stone, but turns out Carol Danver’s youthful appearance is grounded in science.
Speaking with Space.com, cosmologist Paul Sutter revealed that Einstein’s theory of special relativity played a key role in maintaining Captain Marvel’s youth:
“Moving clocks run slow. The faster you move in space, the slower you move in time. It’s a consequence of the connection between space-time … if you go more in one direction, you go less in another direction. You feel totally normal. You eat breakfast, you go for a walk in your spaceship, you do your work, everything feels normal… you go out on your journey and you futz around the galaxy.
When you come back, you find out that you and the clock on your wrist has only gone by a few days or a few weeks. Meanwhile, the clock back on Earth has gone by years, decades, centuries, millennia, depending on how fast you were going and how fast you’ve gone.”
Did you follow all of that? It’s essentially the same concept applied to Matthew McConaughey’s time-warping journey in Interstellar, as time moves completely different on Earth than it does relative to space, and Captain Marvel’s whole deal is harnessing the power of lightspeed. So, even if it’s visually weird that Nick Fury has aged thirty years while Danvers still looks like a 28-year-old Brie Larson, it’s technically realistic.
Marvel’s carefully crafted cinematic universe has found great success in adapting the most unorthodox aspects of the comics on the big screen, so it’s impressive to see that they place just as much focus on grounding these films with scientific explanations too. Now, if only this theory could be applied to Peter Parker’s perpetually high school-aged classmates in the upcoming Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Captain Marvel is available now for digital download and hits Blu-ray shelves June 11th, perfectly-timed for you to give it a rewatch before catching Avengers: Endgame in theaters for the billionth time.