by Eric Wargo
It is to the “how”—the possible nuts and bolts of precognition—that we now turn.
PART TWO
“How Can This Be?”
The future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to be a purely natural phenomenon. We are being talked to, by a very informed Entity: that of all creation as it lies ahead of us in time.
— Philip K. Dick, Exegesis (2011)
5
Catching Precognitive Butterflies — Chaos, Memory, and Premory in the Thermodynamic Universe
One night, Zhuangzi dreamed of being a butterfly—a happy butterfly, showing off and doing things as he pleased, unaware of being Zhuangzi. Suddenly he awoke, drowsily, Zhuangzi again. And he could not tell whether it was Zhuangzi who had dreamt the butterfly or the butterfly dreaming Zhuangzi. But there must be some difference between them! This is called “the transformation of things.”
— Zhuangzi (4th century, BC)
A lthough it is mostly forgotten today, J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time was quite popular in the middle decades of the last century, going through nine editions and reprintings between 1927 and 1950. Readers were fascinated by Dunne’s Serialism theory, and many took the engineer-dreamer up on his challenge to record their dreams in a daily journal and look for precognitive elements in them. His book exerted a particularly strong influence on writers. We have already met J. B. Priestley, who wrote several plays about the influence of the future on the present, such as Time and the Conways and An Inspector Calls . Dunne also influenced T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and H. G. Wells, among many others. 1 And over the course of three months in 1964, the insomniac Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov undertook a systematic, Dunne-inspired dream experiment of his own, recording 64 dreams on index cards and comparing them to subsequent events. There were several “hits” in the series that would have merited Dunne’s approval, as they fairly strikingly matched stories that would capture the writer’s interest on television within the next few days. 2
Nabokov’s interest in dreams and dream precognition long preceded his reading of Dunne and his dream experiment, however. As a teenager, he had had a doozy of a “Dunne dream,” which he would only recognize as such more than four decades later, when events in his life strikingly seemed to “confirm” what he had dreamed.
In 1916, the precocious, 17-year-old Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov lived comfortably on his family’s estate in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he led an idyllic life collecting butterflies and writing. He was even about to have his first collection of poems published. Then came one of those life events that mix luck and misfortune, of the sort that always somehow appear at the heart of psychic occurrences: His rich Uncle Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov died, leaving the young writer his fortune and his estate, Rozhdestveno. Although minus an uncle, the young Nabokov seemed set for a life of pursuing his hobbies with nary a care. But his new prosperity proved short-lived. The revolutionary fervor that engulfed Russia the following October overthrew the old class hierarchy. Nabokov lost his estate and his wealth, and his family had to flee the country.
It was during this time of tumult that Nabokov had his dream: His dead Uncle Vasily appeared to him and announced, enigmatically, “I shall come back to you as Harry and Kuvyrkin.” 3 In the dream, Nabokov thought that these names represented a pair of circus performers. It was absurd—senseless—at the time, like most dreams are.
Fast forward to 1959: The 60-year-old émigré novelist and butterfly expert was now living in Ithaca, New York, where his friend Morris Bishop had landed him a teaching position at Cornell. Life magazine wanted to do a story on Nabokov, because of the popularity of his 1955 novel Lolita , and he was lunching with his wife and the reporters at his home when he received a call from Bishop, who eagerly asked him if he’d read that day’s New York Times . He hadn’t, so his friend read the news story to him over the phone: Harris-Kubrick Pictures, he said—Stanley Kubrick’s production company—had just purchased the film rights to Lolita for a large sum: $150,000.
When the contract arrived in the mail, Nabokov was pleased to find himself, for the first time since his youth, a rich man. And he also remembered his uncle Vasily’s crazy dream promise that his wealthy benefactor would return to him as circus performers “Harry and Kuvyrkin.” The v in kuvyrok , which means “somersault” in Russian, would be a b in English, thus something like Kubrick. Harry and Kuvyrkin, from the “circus” world of Hollywood, had indeed come at last to restore Vladimir Nabokov’s lost fortune. 4
The Transformation of Things
Precognition, at least as it is usually understood, means a kind of time travel: Information from the future must travel backwards in time to affect a person in the present, for instance in a dream or an artwork or some “queer feeling.” So, for example, if the 17-year-old Nabokov really had precognized the rewarding news of Stanley Kubrick’s production company buying the film rights to a novel he would write decades later, it means that information about that occurrence, or the writer’s reaction to it, was somehow received by the writer’s unconscious 42 years beforehand, when he was 17, and was shaped into a dream. Another “precognitive butterfly,” in other words.
While skeptics will scoff at such possibilities, many physicists have no trouble with the idea of time travel or backwards causation in principle. It is often pointed out that the equations governing fundamental interactions in the material world are time-symmetric . 5 If you could watch a video of interacting fundamental particles, and then played that video in reverse, there would be no easy way to tell which was the correct, forward-in-time version. There is no fundamental reason why effects cannot precede causes, and as we will see later, information is really just causation by another name. If causation can run backwards, so can information. The trouble is, a video of a person walking down the sidewalk, or an apple dropping off a tree, cannot be played in reverse without looking comical. On our scale, serious things seem to happen in a single direction only.
One big difference between the quantum realm of tiny particles and the classical, macro-scale world we are used to interacting with is that the latter is ruled by entropy , the constant tendency toward increasing disorder. Like a steep hill you can roll down with ease but cannot climb up, you cannot unscramble an egg, or unstir the cream from your coffee. That thermodynamic tendency for things to mix and mingle and equalize is, for most physicists, equivalent to the arrow of time. Entropy is a one-way-street. This is why most scientifically educated people, still living as they do in a classical, Newtonian world, will simply dismiss claims of precognition out of hand. The idea of information “flowing” in reverse is as absurd as the idea that things could get more orderly, rather than less.
Some of the absurdities are described in a 2016 history of time travel by James Gleick. 6 The idea that time is a dimension like space is a surprisingly young one, it turns out. The fourth dimension (not necessarily time) gripped the Victorian imagination right at the same time telepathy did, with fables like Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland . A sphere from “Spaceland” traversing Abbott’s two-dimensional world appears to a bewildered local, the narrator, as a point enlarging to a circle, out of nowhere. The Stranger then “abducts” the narrator, bringing him on a higher-dimensional journey to show him the limitations of his perceptions. (The narrator is ultimately jailed for the dimensional heresies he tries to preach to his fellow, skeptical Flatlanders after his return.) Abbott’s thought experiment was an invitation to imagine that our own 3-D reality may be similarly dimensionally challenged. 7 But it really took H. G. Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine to get people to realize that time itself was that fourth dimension, and that objects or information might traverse it in either direction, not just forward. Wells was prescient. Ten years later, Einstein’s special theory of relativity made “past” and “future” fluid categories. Because t
he photons that carry information and causation have a fixed speed limit, an event in one observer’s past may still be in another observer’s future.
Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski extrapolated on this: The bodies we experience are really three-dimensional cross-sections of four-dimensional wormlike beings snaking some distance, several decades ideally, through a big four-dimensional block, space-time . This makes the idea of literally moving through time problematic, since everything is four-dimensional already. If you set the dial of your time machine for “T minus 10 minutes,” would it collide with itself in its backward journey? Would it just “de-age” a bit, lose some iota of dust or tarnish? Don’t cheat by having it fly through the air like Marty McFly’s DeLorean in Back to the Future , which is just evading the issue.
What would those around you see? To your lab assistant watching your machine depart to some destination in the past, say a year ago, would you and your machine appear to vanish, like Doctor Who’s Tardis? Theoretically, no—not unless you moved the time machine in the past … but in that case, it would no longer be where it was … er, is … for you to get in it and travel backward. And what is “where it was” anyway? Is “here” relative to a point on the surface of the Earth, or to some arbitrary point in space that that point happened to pass through when you activated your machine?
If you set the dial for farther into the past—to some year before the machine was built, for instance—what about the individual histories of all its individual parts and particles? All the intertwining spaghettis of starstuff making up your time machine were somewhere else, living separate lives, before being woven together in their current form. How does time travel affect that?
And what about you, the passenger? If you “traveled” back to the date of your birth, would you yourself “age backward” like the wizard Merlin, getting younger and younger, smaller and smaller? Would you go back up inside your mother? Where did she come from? And … how awkward! (We will see in the second half of this book, when we get to Freud, that the taboo of time travel is more entangled than you might think with the taboo of incest. Oedipus, who famously married his own mother, was essentially a premodern time traveler.)
“Moving” into the future, as Wells’ time traveler initially does, is just as incoherent, albeit in a much more boring way. To move into the future, the time machine just needs to sit there … and sit … and sit …
Einstein’s theory does in fact permit physical time travel, but it requires traveling rapidly through space first. Traveling faster than light is tantamount to traveling back in time—and since you are flying through space in that case, it might get you around the awkward situation of finding yourself in an immobile time machine sitting there in your garage laboratory awaiting your arrival to get in and pull the lever. (So, okay, you can have your DeLorean.) But traveling faster than light would require infinite energy; it is possible on paper, not in practice. More recently, physicists have theorized other ways that physical travel into the past could be achieved, but they are still exotic and expensive. A technological civilization thousands or more years in advance of our own, one able to harness the energy of its whole galaxy, could create a wormhole linking different points in the fabric of spacetime and send a spaceship through it. 8 It is an idea explored widely in science fiction and depicted vividly in Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar .
But all this is academic for our purposes. For Gleick, what we are really talking about with time travel is a thought experiment about the experiencer—the passenger—in a novel, disjointed relationship to the external world. We can readily perform feats of “mental time travel,” or at least simulate such feats, as well as experience a dissociation between our internal subjective sense of time and the flux of things around us and even our own bodies. 9 According to Gleick, part of what suddenly facilitated four-dimensional thinking in both popular writing and the sciences was the changing experience of time in an accelerating society. The Victorian age, with its steam engines and bewildering pace of urban living, increased these experiences of dissociation, and they have only intensified since then. Time travel, Gleick argues, is basically just a metaphor for modernity, and a nifty premise upon which to base literary and cinematic fantasies that repair modernity’s traumas. It also shines a light on how confused we all are about time.
The most commonly voiced objection to time travel—and with it, precognition—is that any interaction between the future and past would change the past, and thus create a different future. The familiar term is the grandfather paradox: You can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t have been born to go back in time and kill your grandfather (leaving aside for the moment the assumed inevitability of wanting to kill your grandfather, which is an odd assumption). The technical term for meddling in the past this way is “bilking,” on the analogy of failing to pay a promised debt. 10 Whatever you call it, it is the kind of thing that, in Star Trek , would make the Enterprise’s computer start to stutter and smoke and go haywire—the same reaction, in fact, that greets scientific claims of precognition. (As Dean Radin puts it, laboratory precognition results like those cited in the past two chapters “cause faces to turn red and sputtering noises to be issued from upset lips.” 11 ) Information somehow sent backward in time from an event cannot lead to a future that no longer includes that event—and we naturally intuit that it would be very hard not to have such an effect if we meddled in the timeline. Our very presence in the past would change things.
A 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury called “A Sound of Thunder” is a famous illustration of the problem. In Bradbury’s future world, time-traveling safari hunters are allowed to hunt old, sick dinosaurs (ones soon to die anyway) in the Cretaceous period so long as hunters stay on an assigned walkway and do not disturb things too much. One hunter strays from the path during his hunt and returns to his own time (2055) to find that a Fascist who had lost the election prior to his departure is now President, along with other strange, minor differences from the world he left behind, such as differently pronounced words. He then notices a crushed butterfly on his boot and realizes that his killing of that butterfly had had somewhat significant effects on history. He pleads to be allowed to return to the past to make things right, but this is forbidden. 12 The “sound of thunder” of the title is the sound of his outraged hunting guide shooting him in the head for his carelessness.
Bradbury, like so many science-fiction writers, was weirdly prescient here. A little less than a decade after he wrote his story, an MIT meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Lorenz made a now-famous, serendipitous discovery: When he rounded off a parameter in a weather model running on his office computer—cutting off the last three of six digits to the right of the decimal point—his model unfolded differently than it had in other runs. 13 A one-part-in-1,000 difference in initial conditions quickly blew into a huge difference. This discovery, which came to be called the “butterfly effect,” was the birth of chaos theory . As Gleick memorably put it in his 1987 bestseller Chaos , “a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.” 14
Lorenz did not call his discovery the butterfly effect initially. When he wrote and presented about his discovery, he used the wingbeats of a seagull as his go-to example. But another scientist convening a session at a 1972 AAAS meeting where Lorenz was scheduled to speak wanted a snappy title for Lorenz’s presentation and thought that a butterfly would make a more poetic and thus more memorable animal. 15
Whoever really deserves credit for this metaphorical butterfly, it is thanks to Lorenz’s discovery—and especially to Gleick’s popularization of it—that we can no longer take seriously a simple time-travel scenario like “A Sound of Thunder,” or for that matter the plots of any number of similar Star Trek episodes—such as “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which a time-traveling Kirk and Spock have to repair the damage done to the historical timeline by Doctor McCoy’s acc
idental presence in depression-era Manhattan. What may have seemed to Bradbury and his mid-century readers like a major deviation of history since the Mesozoic—differently pronounced words and an altered election outcome—today looks like ridiculously small potatoes. The un-unscramble-ability of the egg goes way deeper than it is possible to imagine. Stepping on that butterfly all those millions of years ago would lead to a totally different 21st century—one without time machines, or at least with different time machines and different creatures to step in them.
One of the things that inspired people about chaos theory was that it suggested a kind of openness and possibility even in the mechanistic determinism that rules the physical world. The butterfly effect, along with the sublime recursive forms of fractal geometry, injected a slight bit of romanticism into that dull cold Enlightenment picture. No computer, no matter how many decimal places it can calculate out to, can predict the fate of the universe or even a human life. Implicit in the unpredictability entailed by chaos theory is the ability of the small to affect the large. The butterfly in Peking is a kind of David to weather’s Goliath, and who doesn’t thrill to stories about underdogs defeating much larger opponents? But even if it restores a little bit of the magic to the Newtonian billiard-ball world, the butterfly effect also, in the same wingbeat, trounces further our hopes for something truly enchanting like precognition … or at least, it seems to.