Chapter 16 15. Precognition

Is there such a thing as foretelling or foreseeing the future?This ancient concept is found in every religion and can be traced back to the ancient Greek and Roman oracles, as well as the prophets in the Old Testament.But, in a story like this, the gift of prophecy can also be a curse.In ancient Greek mythology, there is a story about Cassandra, the daughter of King Troy.Her beauty attracted the attention of the sun god Apollo.To win her favor, Apollo promised her the ability to see the future.But Cassandra arrogantly rejected Apollo's courtship.In a rage, Apollo twists his gift so that Cassandra can see the future, but no one will believe her.When Cassandra warned the people of Troy of their impending doom, no one listened to her.She foretold the secrets of the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and even her own death.But instead of listening to her, the Trojans thought she was crazy and locked her up.

Nostradamus wrote about it in the 16th century, and more recently Edgar Cayce announced that they could unravel the veil of time.Although there have been many claims that their predictions came true (for example, correctly predicting World War II, the assassination of President Kennedy, and the collapse of the Soviet Union), the inexplicable, allegorical language in which these prophets wrote their lines can cause Many contradictory explanations.For example, Nostradamus's quatrains are so general that you can read almost anything you want (and people already do).One of the quatrains reads:

Some say the poem proves that Nostradamus foresaw the destruction of the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.However, the poem has been given many other interpretations over the centuries.The metaphor is too vague, and many interpretations are possible. Foreknowledge is also a favorite setting for playwrights who describe the impending doom of kings and the collapse of empires.In Shakespeare's Macbeth, foreknowledge plays a crucial role both in the play's theme and in Macbeth's ambitions.Macbeth meets three witches who foresee his rise as King of Scotland.His murderous ambitions, ignited by the prophecies of the witches, begin a series of bloody, gruesome campaigns to destroy his enemies, including the murder of the innocent wife and children of his rival Macduff.

After seizing the throne through a series of horrific crimes, Macbeth learns from the witch that he will never be defeated in battle or "conquered, unless one day the mighty Birnam Wood bursts to the heights (Dunsinane Hills)", and "no one born of a woman could hurt Macbeth".Macbeth is relieved by this prophecy because a forest is immovable and all men are born of women.But the great Birnam Forest did move, and Macduff's army, hiding itself under twigs plucked from the Birnam Forest, marched on Macbeth, and Macduff himself was born by Caesarean section. Can a rigorous scientific test prove that some individuals can see the future?In Chapter 12 we saw that time travel may be consistent with the laws of physics, but that is for an advanced Type III civilization.And is foresight possible on Earth today?

Detailed tests at the Rhein Research Center seem to imply that some people can see into the future, i.e. they can recognize cards before they are revealed, but repeated experiments have shown that this effect is very limited and usually occurs in other Disappears when the person tries to replicate the results of the experiment. In fact, precognition is difficult to reconcile with modern physics because it violates causality—the law of cause and effect.The effect follows the cause, not vice versa.All the laws of physics discovered so far contain inherently the law of causality.A violation of the laws of causality would mark a major breakdown in the foundations of physics.Newtonian mechanics is firmly based on the law of causality. Newton's laws include everything. If you know the orientation and position of all molecules in the universe, you can calculate the future motion of these atoms.In this way, the future is computable.Basically, what Newtonian mechanics says is that if you have a big enough computer, you can calculate all future events.According to Newton's theory, the universe is like a giant clock, wound up by God at the beginning of time, and forever beating according to his laws.There is no place for foreknowledge in Newton's theory.

However, things get a lot more complicated when we discuss Maxwell's theories.When we solve Maxwell's equations for light, we find not one solution, but two: a "delayed" wave, representing the standard motion of light from one point to another; but an "advanced" wave , the light beam travels back in time.This advanced wave comes from the future, but arrives in the past!In 100 years, when engineers encountered this "advanced", backward-looking solution, they simply dismissed it as a mathematical accident.Since delayed waves predict radio, microwave, television, radar, and X-ray activity with such precision, they easily throw the leading solution out the window.Delay's solution was brilliant and beautiful, and so successful that the engineers simply ignored her ugly twin.Why bother with success?

But for physicists, the ahead solution has been a problem that has plagued them throughout the past century.Since Maxwell's equations are one of the pillars of modern society, any solution to these equations must be treated with great rigor, even if it involves accepting waves from the future.It seems impossible to completely ignore leading waves from the future.What nature would give us this weird solution at its most fundamental level?Is this a cruel joke, or does it have a deeper meaning? Mystics became interested in these advanced waves, speculating that they seemed to be messages from the future.Perhaps, if we can somehow ride these waves, then we might be able to send messages back in time, thereby alerting the past to upcoming events.For example, we can send a message back to our grandparents in 1929 reminding them to sell all their stocks before the crash.Such advance waves do not allow us to visit the past in person like time travel does, but allow us to send letters and messages back in time, alerting people to important events that have not yet occurred.

These advanced waves were a mystery until they were studied by Richard Feynman, who became fascinated by the idea of ​​going back in time.After working on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb, Feynman left Los Alamos for Princeton University, where he worked under John Wheeler.In analyzing Dirac's original work on electronics, Feynman discovered something very strange.If he simply reversed the direction of time in Dirac's equation, and reversed the charge likewise, the equation would remain the same.In other words, an electron going backward in time is the same as an anti-electron going forward in time!Often, a mature physicist might dismiss this explanation as just a trick, a mathematical trick that doesn't make sense.Going backwards in time doesn't seem to make any sense, yet Dirac's equations are unmistakable on this point.In other words, Feynman found the reason why nature allows these time-regressive solutions: they represent the motion of antimatter!If Feynman had been a more senior physicist, he might have put this solution behind him.But as a modest graduate student, he decided to pursue what intrigued him further.

As Feynman continued to delve into this vexing problem, the younger Feynman noticed something even stranger.Normally, if an electron and an antielectron collide, they cancel and create a gamma ray.He drew this on a piece of paper: two objects collided, causing a burst of energy. But if you change the anti-electron's charge after that, it becomes an ordinary electron backwards in time.The arrow of time in the same diagram can then be changed to reverse.Now the electrons seem to travel forward in time, and then suddenly reverse direction.The electron has turned a head in time and is now backward in time, releasing a burst of energy in the process.In other words, it's the same electron.The electron-anti-electron cancellation process is just the consequence of the same electron going backwards in time!

So Feynman unlocked the secret of antimatter: It's just ordinary matter that travels backwards in time.This simple observation immediately explains the mystery that all particles have antiparticle mates: this is because all particles can travel backwards in time and thus be transformed into antimatter (this explanation is consistent with the previously mentioned " Dirac Sea" is the same, but simpler, and is the currently accepted explanation). Now, let's say a clump of antimatter collides with normal matter, creating a huge explosion.There are trillions of electrons and trillions of anti-electrons that cancel out.But if we reverse the direction of the antielectron's arrow, turning it into an electron that travels backwards in time, that means the same electron zigzags forward and backward trillions of times.

There is another, even more unusual consequence: there must be only one electron in a blob of matter.The same electron moves back and forth at high speed, zigzagging through time.Whenever it makes a U-turn, it becomes antimatter.But if it turns around again in time, it becomes another electron. (Feynman and his thesis advisor, John Weller, then theorized that the entire universe might consist of just such an electron zigzagging forward and backward in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only one The electron, trillions of years from now, will finally meet the catastrophe of the end of the world, when it will turn around and go backward in time, releasing a ray in the process. Then it will return to The original big bang, and then made another U-turn. The electron will then repeatedly zigzag forward and backward from the big bang to the end of the world. In the 21st century, our universe is just a part of the electron's entire journey. Small fragments of time in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, the visible universe. Although this theory may seem strange, it could explain a curious fact of quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. In physics, electrons cannot be categorized. There are no "green electrons" or "john electrons". Electrons have no personality. You can't give an electron the way scientists sometimes tag wild animals for study." label". Perhaps the reason is that the entire universe is made of the same electron jumping back and forth in time.) But if antimatter is ordinary matter going back in time, is it possible to send a message back in time?Is it possible to give your past self today's Wall Street Journal and make you a fortune in the stock market? the answer is negative. If we treat antimatter as just another novel form of matter, and then conduct an experiment with antimatter, the results do not violate the laws of causality.Cause and effect remain the same.If we now reverse the direction of time of the antielectron so that it goes backwards in time, then we have performed nothing but a mathematical operation and the physics remains the same.Physically nothing changes, and all experimental results remain the same.So there is good reason to think of electrons as going forward and backward in time.But whenever an electron goes backwards in time, it merely realizes the past.Thus, to have a coherent quantum theory, advanced solutions from the future seem essential, but they do not ultimately violate the laws of causality. (In fact, without these weird leading waves, causality would violate quantum theory. Feynman showed that if we add the effects of the leading and delayed waves, we find that the terms violating the causality happen to be all rounded out. Thus, Antimatter is necessary to maintain causality. Without antimatter, causality might collapse.) Feynman continued to probe the origins of this wild idea until it eventually grew into a complete quantum theory of the electron.His creation, quantum electrodynamics (QED), has been shown experimentally to be accurate to less than one part in 10 billion, making it one of the most accurate theories ever created.This won him and his colleagues Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga the Nobel Prize in 1965. (In Feynman's Nobel Prize Lecture, he said that, as a young man, he fell impulsively in love with these advance waves from the future, as he would have fallen in love with a beautiful maiden. Today, That beautiful maiden has grown into a mature woman and the mother of many children. One of these children is his theory of quantum electrodynamics.) In addition to advanced waves from the future (which have proven themselves time and time again in quantum theory), there is another wacky concept in quantum theory that seems equally crazy, but perhaps not quite as useful.This is the idea of ​​a "tachyon," which pops up a lot in Star Trek.Whenever the writers of "Star Trek" needed some new form of energy to perform some magical operation, they sacrificed tachyons. Tachyon lives in a wacky world where everything moves faster than light.As tachyons lose energy, they move faster, contrary to common sense.In fact, if all energy were lost, they would move at infinite speed.However, when tachyons gain energy, they slow down until they reach the speed of light. What makes tachyons so weird is that they have phantom masses ("phantom" in the sense that their mass is multiplied by the square root of -1, or "i").If we simply use Einstein's equations and replace "m" with "im", then incredible things can happen.Suddenly, the particles move faster than light. This result caused a strange situation.If a tachyon travels through matter, it loses energy by colliding with atoms.But when it loses energy, it picks up speed, which intensifies its collisions with atoms even further.These collisions cause it to lose even more energy, and thus gain speed, and as this becomes a violent cycle, the tachyon itself naturally gains infinite speed. (A tachyon is different from antimatter and negative matter. Antimatter has positive energy, travels at speeds below the speed of light, and can be created in our particle accelerators. According to theory, it falls under the force of gravity. Antimatter is equivalent to Ordinary matter that travels backwards in time. Negative matter has negative energy and also travels below the speed of light, but is pulled upwards by gravity. Negative matter has never been found in experiments. In theory, large amounts of negative matter could be Used as fuel for a time machine. Tachyons travel faster than light and have phantom masses, and it's not clear whether they're gravitationally pulled up or down. They've also not been detected experimentally.) Despite their oddities, tachyons are seriously studied by physicists, including Gerald Feinberg at Columbia University and George Sudarshan at the University of Texas at Austin. The reason is that no one has ever seen a tachyon in an experiment.The main experimental clue of tachyon should be that it violates the law of causality.Feinberg even suggests that physicists check a laser before switching it on.If tachyons are present, perhaps the light energy from the laser beam can be measured before the instrument is turned on. In science fiction stories, tachyons are often used to send messages back to prophets of the past.But if one scrutinizes the laws of physics, one finds that it is not clear whether this is possible.For example, Feinberg believes that emitting a tachyon that travels forward in time is exactly the same as absorbing a negative-energy tachyon that travels backward in time (similar to the case with antimatter), and thus does not violate the laws of causality. Science fiction aside, the modern interpretation of tachyons today is that they may have existed at the instant of the Big Bang, violating the laws of causality, but they no longer exist.In fact, they may have played an integral role in making the universe "explode."In this sense, tachyons are essential to some big bang theories. Tachyons have a weird property.When introduced into any theory, they destabilize the "vacuum", the lowest energy state of a system.If there are tachyons in a system, it is in a false vacuum, so the system is unstable and decays into a true vacuum. Imagine a dam that holds water in a lake.It symbolizes "false vacuum".Although the dam appears to be very solid, there is an energy state below the dam.If there is a crack in the dam, the whole system gets a true vacuum as the water flows towards sea level. In the same way, it is believed that the pre-big bang universe originally began in a false vacuum, where tachyons existed.The existence of tachyons means that this is not the lowest energy state, so the whole system is not stable.A rift appears in the fabric of space-time, representing the true vacuum.As the crack grows larger, a bubble appears.Outside the bubble, tachyons still exist, but inside the bubble, all tachyons disappear. With the expansion of the bubble, we find the universe as we know it, without the existence of tachyons.This is the Big Bang. Cosmologists are taking a theory very seriously: that a tachyon known as "inflation" kicked off the initial process of inflation.As we mentioned earlier, inflationary cosmology states that the universe started out as a tiny space-time bubble that underwent a period of supercharged inflation.Physicists believe that the universe started out in a false vacuum and that the inflaton field was a tachyon.However, the existence of tachyons makes the vacuum unstable and tiny bubbles are produced.Inside one of the bubbles, the inflaton field begins a true vacuum, and the bubble begins to expand rapidly until it becomes our universe.In our bubble-universe, inflation has disappeared, so it can no longer be found in our universe.Tachyons thus signal an oddball quantum state in which objects move faster than light and may even violate the laws of causality.But the tachyons disappeared long ago, possibly before the birth of the universe itself. It all sounds like an unverifiable inference made when you are full and have nothing to do.But the false-true vacuum theory will receive its first experimental test, and when the Large Hadron Collider opens outside Geneva, Switzerland in 2008, one of the key aims of the LHC will be to find the "Higgs boson" - the Standard Model The last undiscovered particle in .This is the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle (the Higgs particle is so important, but so elusive that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman dubbed it the "God Particle"). Physicists believe that the Higgs boson originally evolved from a tachyon.In a false vacuum, subatomic particles are all massless.But its presence destabilizes the vacuum, and the universe then transforms into a new vacuum.In this new vacuum, the Higgs boson became an ordinary particle, and subatomic particles began to have the masses we measure in the laboratory today.In this way, the discovery of the Higgs boson will not only complete the final missing chapter of the Standard Model, but also prove that the tachyon state once existed, just as an ordinary particle. In sum, foreknowledge is ruled out by Newtonian physics.The iron law of cause and effect cannot be violated.In most sub-theories, new states of matter are possible, such as antimatter, which is equivalent to matter that travels backwards in time, but where the laws of causality are not violated.In fact, in quantum theory, antimatter is necessary for the restoration of causality.Tachyons might seem at first glance to defy causality, but physicists believe their true purpose was to start the Big Bang, and they can no longer be observed as a result. Precognition therefore seems to be ruled out, at least for the foreseeable future, making it a third-rate uncanny.If precognition could indeed be demonstrated in reproducible experiments, it would seriously shake the foundations of modern physics.