This week's Dreamland (09/05/09) features an interview with
a pioneering timeworker, Starfire Tor. The reason is that,
as our relationship to time changes, certain people are
tuning to it in a different way, Starfire among them.
The reason I know this is simple: while with her and after
being with her, Anne and I have actually experienced the
kind of time slips that she talks about. In the interview,
we both describe some of these timeslips, among them an
incident where I read a listing to her in the newspaper six
weeks before it actually appeared.
When I read it, it looked completely normal. It was part of
the newspaper. But a moment later when I returned to it to
get the times the movie it described would be playing, it
was not there. I was so confused by this that I went to the
internet and discovered that the movie had not yet been
finished!
In another incident, I witnessed Starfire and Anne enter a
ladies room after a dinner we'd had together. A few moments
later Anne came out, and third woman did so at the same
time. The problem is that the ladies' room was tiny. There
was no third person in it when they entered.
I did not realize this at the time, of course, but Anne did,
and she was extremely startled when the person appeared.
It developed that she was an employee and we were able to
talk to her about the experience. She had used the ladies'
room, but didn't remember seeing anybody in it at all!
So what happened? Starfire can not only explain it, but
simply being around her seems to bring such experiences on,
as if her knowledge, itself, generates them or causes us to
notice them.
There is, in physics, nothing fundamental that says that
time should only move forward. And yet, we never see
anything except forward-moving time--unless we are
sensitized by a timeworker like Starfire, who has trained
herself to notice such things, or we notice by chance.
A recently published study suggests a reason for this: the
illusion that time is moving only in one direction is caused
by amnesia induced by a quantum-mechanical process that
erases all traces of temporal anomalies, such as time moving
backwards, or shifts across timelines.
Lorenzo Maccone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
suggests that the entropic nature of movement through time
may be an illusion. He told the New Scientist, "if you
analyze (the laws of quantum dynamics) carefully, you'll see
that all the processes where things run backward can happen,
but they don't leave any trace of having happened."
Or do they? Scientists would never believe that the mind can
detect these anomalies, but I think that it not only can,
but that it is in the process of rapid change--in fact,
that, over the next few decades, one of the responses to the
increasingly desperate situation the human species is going
to find itself in, is going to be a fundamental change of
mind that will, among other things, alter our relationship
to time.
In Macchone's view, while a fallen tree may rise again when
time moves backward, we never see this because the
information is not retained anywhere in nature. Of course,
such an idea assumes that quantum mechanics must operate in
large-scale events, while most scientists believe that the
indeterminacy implied by these laws unfolds only on the
scale of the very, very small.
I suspect that Newtonian mechanics are, essentially, an
illusion imposed by the mind, and that the more supple
mechanics we observe in the world of the very small also
pertain in the large scale.
This is why people like Starfire, who have noticed these
anomalies, are infective. What she is doing is shaking an
illusion, and the mind reacts by--to some extent only and
not in everybody--giving it up.
Where are we in time and space? After meeting her and as a
result observing timeslips and time anomalies in my own life
that I cannot explain, I am not so sure.
I do think, though, that there is a scientific explanation
for what I have observed. But before it becomes clear,
scientists must come to terms with the fact that the
enigmatic laws of quantum mechanics do not only apply to the
world of the very small.
They are the laws of the universe, the only laws. All the
rest is illusion, and, as our world collapses around our
ears, so will the illusion that time runs only forward, and
the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually defines reality.
Dr. Maccone's paper can be found in Physical Review Letters,
Vol 103. I apologize to him in advance for even mentioning
his name. It is never comfortable to be cited by a heretic,
which I am very proud to be.
Starfire Tor can be heard on this week's Dreamland
(September 5, 2009.) Her website is
StarfireTor.com.
