Lifeboat Foundation

If you watched Back to the Future over the holiday weekend and wished the flux capacitor was a real thing so you could travel through time, we have sorta good news. Scientists from Australia and Switzerland have proposed a real-life flux capacitor — but you won’t be able to travel back to a high school dance in the ’50s with it.

The device is a new type of electronic circulator, which can control the directional movement of microwave signals. The scientists, who published their research in Physical Review Letters, have proposed two different potential circuits — one of them borrows the design of the three-pointed flux capacitor Doc Brown and Marty McFly used to travel to 1955 and 2015 in their DeLorean.