Time Loops Read online

  Advance Praise for Time Loops

  “I will not be shy. I consider Time Loops to be the most significant intellectual work on a paranormal topic in the last fifty years, since Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia (1969), to be precise. Not only does Eric Wargo show us how strong the evidence for precognition really is—already a major accomplishment. He gives us scientific, psychological, and interpretive tools for thinking about these phenomena in strikingly original ways. In the process—the real stunner for me—he points us toward (or looks back from) the future of knowledge, a future in which the humanities are as crucial as the sciences. Buckle up tight and get ready for the roller coaster ride of your life. And why not? As Wargo shows us with astonishing rigor and humor, these ‘time loops’ may well be our lives.”

  — JEFFREY J. KRIPAL , AUTHOR OF M UTANTS AND M YSTICS AND S ECRET B ODY AND CO-AUTHOR OF C HANGED IN A F LASH

  * * *

  “Precognition is the genie that can’t be put back in the bottle. Eric Wargo writes with epic breadth, keen observation, deep rigor, and—above all—great integrity on a topic of innate controversy. He succeeds gloriously in providing this century’s first historical and analytic overview of precognition and its causes. You will be hearing much more about this field—and this writer.”

  — MITCH HOROWITZ , PEN AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF O CCULT A MERICA AND T HE M IRACLE C LUB

  * * *

  “For those who wonder if experiences of precognition are real, or perhaps just coincidences or mistakes of memory, Time Loops provides a well written, balanced overview of the latest scientific interpretations of these mind-bending phenomena. Spoiler alert: Based on an increasing body of experimental evidence, yes, precognition is real.”

  — DEAN RADIN , AUTHOR OF E NTANGLED M INDS AND R EAL M AGIC

  * * *

  “Time Loops is the definitive inquiry into cases of people who remember their future. Eric Wargo is the Sherlock Holmes of retrocausation.”

  — NICK HERBERT , AUTHOR OF Q UANTUM R EALITY AND F ASTER T HAN L IGHT

  TIME LOOPS

  Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

  Eric Wargo

  An Original Publication of ANOMALIST BOOKS

  Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious

  Copyright 2018 by Eric Wargo

  ISBN: 978-1-938398-93-3

  Cover Art: lvcandy/iStock

  Book Design: Seale Studios

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever

  For information about the publisher, go to AnomalistBooks.com , or write to:

  Anomalist Books, 5150 Broadway #108, San Antonio, TX 78209

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another)

  PART ONE: WELCOME TO THE NOT YET

  1. The Size of the Impossible—Disasters, Prophecy, and Hindsight

  2. “If I Were You, I’d Stay on the Ground for a Couple of Days”—Victor Goddard, J. W. Dunne, and the Block Universe

  3. Postcards from Your Future Self—Scientific Evidence for Precognition

  4. The Psi Reflex—Presentiment and the Future-Influencing-Present Effect

  PART TWO: “HOW CAN THIS BE?”

  5. Catching Precognitive Butterflies—Chaos, Memory, and Premory in the Thermodynamic Universe

  6. Destination: Pong (or, How to Build a Quantum™ Future Detector)

  7. A New Era of Hyperthought—From Precognitive Bacteria to Our Tesseract Brain

  PART THREE: TIME’S TABOOS

  8. Sometimes a Causal Arrow Isn’t Just a Causal Arrow—Oedipus, Freud, and the Repression of Prophecy

  9. Wyrd and Wishes—Metabolizing the Future in Dreams

  10. Prophetic Jouissance —Trauma, Survival, and the Precognitive Sublime

  PART FOUR: LIVES OF THE PRECOGS

  11. A Precognitive Seduction—Maggy Quarles van Ufford, Carl Jung, and the Scarab

  12. Fate, Free Will, and Futility —Morgan Robertson’s Tiresias Complex

  13. “P.S. What Scares Me Most, Claudia, Is That I Can Often Recall the Future ”—The Memetic Prophecies of Philip K. Dick

  14. The Arrival of Meaning and the Creation of the Past

  Postscript: A Ruin from the Future

  Notes

  References

  Index

  For Laura and Emily

  Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself?

  — J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  M y thinking on time, causation, and precognition has been shaped and honed by many discussions over the past several years with friends and readers of my blog The Nightshirt , some of whom have shared stunning, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking personal experiences of their own. Most will remain anonymous, but I must single out for thanks a few friends and e-friends who have especially helped me by pointing me to ideas or writings I didn’t know about, by posing keen questions, and sometimes by needed opposition and push-back: Adam Elenbaas, Walter Johnson, Chris Savia, Alex van Oss, and “Vortex.” Nick Herbert also provided valuable feedback on a draft of this book and pointed me to some physics material I had missed, for which I am deeply grateful.

  I also thank Jeffrey Kripal for his encouragement of my work, for his comments on my manuscript, and for our ongoing dialogue about things paranormal. History will look very kindly on Jeff for bringing these subjects into the light of serious, sympathetic, scholarly inquiry. The more I research anomalous phenomena and “time loops,” the more I am actually pained by the arrogant, condescending, sometimes hostile dismissal of these subjects by cultural authorities—a predictable reaction that has contributed to a long climate of silence and embarrassment around a fascinating dimension of human experience. Jeff’s work is changing the conversation, creating what I hope (and believe) is a real shift toward greater openness and acceptance.

  I especially thank Patrick Huyghe, my editor at Anomalist Books, who has been a strong advocate for my ideas since the start and who has long encouraged me to write a book. Our many conversations over the past few years have hugely helped me clarify what I wanted to say. He also came up with the title.

  The biggest thank-you goes to my wife, Laura, and our daughter, Emily, for their long suffering and putting up with my need for quiet solitude in the evenings and on weekends, when we could have been “doing something fun.”

  INTRODUCTION

  Beyond Folk Causality (or, One Damn Thing Before Another)

  Our element is eternal immaturity. The things that we think, feel, and say today will necessarily seem foolish to our grandchildren; so it would surely be better to forestall this now, and treat them as if they were foolish already…

  — Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (1937)

  T hiotimoline is an aromatic compound extracted from the bark of the shrub Rosacea Karlsbadensis rufo . First isolated and described by Russian botanists in the 1930s, its properties baffled Soviet and American scientists for well over a decade. The extract, a whitish crystalline powder, dissolved so fast when water was added to it that they had to devise a new measuring instrument to measure its solubility accurately. What they found was stunning, and at first, totally unbelievable: Thiotimoline dissolves 1.12 seconds before water touches it.

  The question chemists always asked about thiotimoline effectively personified or anthropomorphized the substance: How did it “know” when, or if, water was going to be added?

  Thiotimoline’s ultrafast solubility, dubbed “endochronicity” by the Russians, met with so much initial skepticism in the chemical community that very little further investigation was done
on this compound until the early 1950s, when the reasons for its extraordinary behavior were finally discovered through a technique called crystallography.

  Thiotimoline is an organic molecule, which means that it contains a carbon atom bonded to other atoms. Carbon forms four such valence bonds , positioned at each point of a tetrahedron. What the Soviet chemists discovered was that the carbon atom in thiotimoline is somewhat different than other carbon atoms: Two of its carbon valence bonds extend across the temporal dimension , not a spatial dimension. It means that one of its bonds is slightly in the molecule’s past, and another is in the molecule’s future . This accounts for thiotimoline’s curious property of dissolving slightly before water touches it.

  Eventually the “endochronometer” devised to measure the rate of thiotimoline’s dissolution became more interesting than the plant extract by itself, due to the many possible real-world applications of performing measurements on a four-dimensional molecule. Think about it: If the adding versus not adding of water to a lump of chemical could somehow be tied to an outcome having real-world relevance—the weather, the winner of a horse race, the success of a satellite launch, or the attacks of an enemy in war—then a genuine predictor of future events was within grasp. Although 1.12 seconds is not much forewarning of an event, chaining together a lot of endochronometers (each with their little lumps of thiotimoline) would greatly enlarge that narrow window and create the world’s first precognitive circuit—what researchers called a “telechronic battery.”

  Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, it did not take long to figure out that such a device could be turned into a very destructive weapon. Interceding to prevent contact with water after the thiotimoline in a telechronic battery dissolved caused an Atlantic hurricane to suddenly change course and obliterate the lab and the battery, fulfilling its chemical prophecy and ensuring that no paradox (or what one researcher called “Heisenberg Failure”) occurred.

  Thiotimoline is fictional, of course—an ingenious hoax perpetrated by Isaac Asimov in a series of faux-journal articles, beginning with “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” in the March 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction . 1 The young writer was then a graduate student in chemistry and wanted to give himself practice writing for his dissertation by doing a story in the utterly humorless style of a journal article. He followed up his tour de force with his 1953 “The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline” and then “Thiotimoline and the Space Age” in 1960.

  It made for a fun thought experiment. But it was also remarkably prescient of real discoveries in physics that have been made over just the last decade. In 2009, for example, a research team at the University of Rochester used a high-precision sensor to measure how much a mirror was deflected by the photons in a laser beam, and then measured a portion of the photons a second time. The photons subjected to a second measurement were found to have deflected the mirror previously much more than the portion that didn’t get the second measurement. 2 It suggested that that second measurement amplified those photons in their past .

  There should really be a row of about twenty exclamation marks following that last sentence.

  For over three centuries, our expectations about cause and effect have been dominated by the way objects like elementary particles “hit” other particles and deflect them, in sequence—the mechanical billiard-ball “action and reaction” that Isaac Newton codified in 1687 as his Laws of Motion. Objects move through space, carrying a certain amount of energy with them, and imparting that energy to other objects they interact with. It’s an assumption that works well for predicting most of the things we encounter in our daily lives, like bodies and billiard balls, icebergs and ocean liners, and for creating machines. And it is why the natural-science worldview that arose in the Enlightenment was called mechanism , seeing the world as a big machine.

  But it has long been known that the machine view doesn’t hold in all situations, or at the smallest scales. On the scale of atoms and photons, a frustrating unpredictability was found to reign. For instance, while you can predict when half the atoms in a lump of radioactive material like uranium-235 will decay (i.e., its half-life), you cannot predict when a single uranium-235 atom will decay; it is completely random. About a century ago it became the central dogma of the new field of quantum physics that this randomness imposed strict limits to how much an experimenter can know about a physical system. Any given fact about a particle, such as its position or its velocity, had to be regarded as uncertain , taking the form of a vague smear of probabilities, until someone actually performed an experiment and got a result. The dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics for most of the past century has been glossed by the term “Copenhagen Interpretation,” a rough consensus some of the field’s big names reached in the mid-1920s that a particle has no fixed, determinate reality unless and until it is observed.

  But recently, an alternative, even more mind-bending but also more elegant interpretation is winning a growing number of converts. That’s the idea that what looks to our human eyes random or uncertain (because we cannot predict it other than statistically) may actually reflect the effects of unseen influences of the future, acting “backward” on the present. For instance, the precise amount each photon deflected the mirror in the Rochester experiment seemed to be influenced by the next thing the photon interacted with after it bounced off the mirror. Experiments like this—we will learn about some others later in this book—are actually shaking the foundations of physics and vindicating Albert Einstein, who famously could not accept that God would be so unclassy as to turn His universe into a giant craps table. What seemed for all the world like randomness—blind chance—may really be the previously unseen influence of particles’ future histories on their present behavior. Retrocausation , in other words.

  We may be on the verge of a massive shift in how we view time, causality, and information. Classical causality, the one-thing-after-another billiard-ball world of Isaac Newton and his Enlightenment friends, is being revealed as folk causality , a cultural construct and a belief system, not the way things really are.

  Could physics’ new two-way perspective on the behavior of matter at a fundamental level have anything to teach us about human behavior?

  Consider a highly publicized 2011 article by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem, called “Feeling the Future.” 3 Unlike “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline,” this was not a hoax or a fiction, but in many respects it was similar to Asimov’s story, in that it described an apparently time-defying behavior, this time not of water-soluble organic molecules but of Cornell University undergraduates.

  Turns out that if you put 100 Ivy League kids in front of a computer and ask them to guess which of two “curtains” on the screen hides a picture, they tend to be correct more often than chance would predict when the not-yet-shown picture is explicitly erotic—of “couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts” (according to the description they read prior to signing the consent form). The students’ accuracy did not deviate from chance when the pictures were of boring romantic but nonsexual scenes, like couples kissing or a wedding. Unknown to the participants, the correct answer and the type of picture—erotic or neutral—were randomly selected by the computer after the students made their choice.

  Bem’s picture-guessing experiment was one of nine he had conducted during the first decade of this millennium, all of which reversed the causal direction in four basic paradigms in psychology, including reinforcement (what the above example was testing), priming (subliminal influences on behavior), habituation (the tendency of familiarity to breed disinterest), and facilitation of recall (or the reinforcing effects of repeated exposure on learning). Eight of his nine experiments produced statistically significant but “impossible” results from the standpoint of unilinear causality. 4 For example, students preferentially remembered words in a word-learning task that they were exposed to again after the t
est. (Again, picture a row of about 20 exclamation points.) But while it made headlines and even got Bem onto the Colbert Report , the paper sparked a flurry of hostility, embarrassment, and ridicule from across psychology and other scientific fields, and the ridicule continues to this day. Just Google “Daryl Bem” and you’ll get a taste of it.

  Bem’s article was controversial not just because of what he purported to find—as we will see, he was only the latest in a long line of serious researchers to report time-defying psychological effects in carefully controlled laboratory studies—but because he had the poor taste of publishing his causally perverse results in one of the highest-ranking journals in psychology, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology . Although his paper passed peer review, the ritual that traditionally sorts the scientific wheat from the chaff, and although Bem was a very well-respected experimental psychologist with a long track record of solid science in other areas like self-perception and attitude formation, the journal’s editors felt compelled to publish an editorial comment addressing readers’ inevitable concerns:

  We openly admit that the reported findings conflict with our own beliefs about causality and that we find them extremely puzzling. Yet, as editors we were guided by the conviction that this paper—as strange as the findings may be—should be evaluated just as any other manuscript on the basis of rigorous peer review. Our obligation as journal editors is not to endorse particular hypotheses but to advance and stimulate science through a rigorous review process. 5

  The editors’ reference to “beliefs about causality” highlights an important point. Causality is part of our belief system, and beliefs have a cultural basis, not just an empirical one. Ours is the first and only society in history to not—at least not officially—make a place in its story of causality for sensing or knowing events in the future, and more generally for the teleological relevance of “final causes” in explaining human affairs. Yet ordinary people in all walks of life, in every culture on Earth (including our own) and throughout recorded history, have reported getting forewarnings of traumatic or threatening events, commonly called premonitions ; and many religious traditions make a place for the ability of certain individuals to speak or even write about future events, commonly called prophecy . On top of that, many researchers besides Bem have accumulated masses of robust and compelling evidence for the human capacity to unconsciously sense or feel the future, or presentiment . The term precognition , which means knowing or perceiving future events in some fashion other than through normal inference, is an umbrella term that is often used to encompass the rest.