Wormholes, Freud, and Jacob the Dreamer
In the 1980s, when the possibility of wormholes began to capture physicists’ imaginations, there was the inevitable concern about what such objects might mean for causality in an Einsteinian, time-elastic universe. Wormholes through space meant, inevitably, wormholes through time. And so, naturally, people thought of the grandfather paradox, that strange fantasy of killing one’s patriarchs that is the big stumblingstone for rational people when trying to countenance the idea of time travel. Killing one’s grandfather or (Oedipally) one’s father, though, boils down to a fantasy of self-negation; so, when physicists model this problem, it is more convenient to cut out the patriarchal middlemen and ask about the neurotic possibility of self-inhibition or (more extremely) suicide in time-traveling objects.
In the early 1980s, a Russian physicist named Igor Novikov worked out that physical law would actually prevent any such self-inhibition, that in fact a principle of self-consistency would govern a wormhole-riddled universe. Even if an object could enter a wormhole at some time point B and emerge earlier, at some time point A, it could never actually interfere with its own entry into the wormhole at that later time point B. Two Caltech students of black hole and wormhole expert Kip Thorne checked and found that Novikov was right: First, a time-traveling billiard ball cannot take the place of its younger self—a kind of “exclusion principle” would prevent that (more on which in a future post). Instead, what happens is the time-traveling object encounters its earlier self and interferes in such a way that its later entry into the wormhole is actually facilitated.
All possible paths of a billiard ball entering a wormhole later (bottom, in graphic at right) would in fact, upon exiting the wormhole earlier (top), nudge itself into the mouth of the wormhole later, thus completing the causal tautology, or what physicists call the closed-timelike curve. These days, quantum physicists use the idiom of “post-selection”—a kind of informational-causal Darwinism which ensures that the only information that survives its journey into the past is information that does not foreclose its origins in the future.
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My book Time Loops touches lightly on the physics of time-traveling billiard balls and quantum informational reflux into the past, but it delves mainly into the psychodynamic principles governing time-traveling information in our tesseract brains. It is no coincidence, I think, that the associative laws of the unconscious work so nicely to prevent paradox in beings who are subject much more than we know to premonitions and who are constantly guided by a kind of presentimental orientation toward future rewards. The unconscious, I suggest, is just ordinary conscious thought displaced in time. Paradox is prevented by the very nature of the rules that allow information to reflux into the past, specifically the limitations on making that refluxing information meaningful as opposed to noise.
Dreams offer the best example for what I’m talking about. A typical precognitive dream is an oblique and indirect associative halo around some future experience or train of thought; its exact relationship to that experience or train of thought only becomes clear in hindsight. There are apparent exceptions: more obvious premonitions that may even be almost “video-quality” in their transmission backward of some future scene (I believe this is exactly what sleep-paralysis episodes and “out of body experiences” may in fact be*); but even in those cases, the “metadata” of the transmission is always lacking: the when, where, and how, as well as the meaning, or how the event fits into the ordinary course of life. One way or another, the information that arrives from the future in dreams and altered states is garbled or incomplete and thus cannot be used to foreclose the inciting experience.
Could the laws preventing billiard balls from interfering with themselves in wormholes offer us a new way of thinking about the processes of distortion in dreams?
The Nightshirt
more to come...