 DATE: The movie is set around 1905, as can be seen from the  "contract" that Gustav Adolf gave Maj early in the movie, but Edvard  tells Emilie that he heard that the universe is expanding. Slipher  discovered the red shifts in some nebulae/galaxies in 1912, an  observation that suggests that these objects are moving away from  us; Hubbles law of the expanding universe was published in 1929;  and the big bang theory become popular in the 1950s.