Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self by Eric Wargo

Author:Eric Wargo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dreams
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT BALL IN THE CORNER POCKET

Einstein’s theories about relativity—the ones that inspired his teacher Hermann Minkowski to conceive of a block universe and that gave Dunne permission to speculate about how consciousness might come unstuck in time at night—allow time travel. There are various methods including spinning the whole universe really fast, which is a bit extreme, but there are also simpler ways. If you radically bend the fabric of spacetime, you can create a shortcut called a wormhole—very much a “wrinkle in time,” if you remember Madeleine L’Engle’s novel from your childhood.6 Some astronomers have suggested the universe could be riddled with such portals or shortcuts, which are often visualized as something like coffee-mug handles extending between distant regions.

Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen published a paper on these objects in 1935—they are sometimes called Einstein-Rosen bridges—but they were given the more colorful name wormholes by the physicist John Wheeler in 1957. It was not until the 1980s, however, that wormholes really began to capture the public’s and physicists’ imaginations. This may be partly to do with the growing popularity of sci-fi TV and movies featuring faster-than-light travel, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, but it is also thanks partly to Carl Sagan. When the astronomer and science popularizer was writing his science-fiction novel Contact, he needed a scientifically legitimate way to get his heroine, Eleanor Arroway (played by Jodie Foster in the movie), to the Vega star system and back within her lifetime, so he called upon black-hole expert Kip Thorne at Caltech. Black holes and wormholes are similar—some think they may even be essentially the same (at the other end of black holes may be white holes, where all the in-falling matter is ejected, but so far those remain theoretical). Thorne obligingly roughed out the wormhole equations that would allow Arroway’s journey.

Despite the exciting promise of wormholes as an answer to how to traverse interstellar distances faster than light’s snail’s pace, there was the inevitable concern about what such shortcuts through spacetime might mean for causality, since wormholes through space meant, inevitably, wormholes through time. Wormholes could theoretically carry objects and people from the future to the past, which effectively means that the future could influence or cause the past. As I mentioned in that section you skipped in chapter 8, a growing number of physicists have no problem with that premise, at least on the microlevel of subatomic particles and the special situation of a quantum computer performing calculations that defy causal order. But when you start talking about physical objects and people traveling into their own past and mucking about, beads of sweat begin to appear on some physicists’ (and even some sci-fi writers’) brows. “Don’t hand the time traveler a weapon” is the unspoken rule when we think about this possibility.

I’m referring of course to the famous grandfather paradox, that strange fantasy of going back in time and killing one’s patriarchs, thus preventing oneself from ever having been born. Killing one’s grandfather or

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