They came for me in the dark, in the night, in the quiet. I could see them, hear them, smell them. Their grotesquely long, skinny limbs, and their huge, hideous, impossibly large heads, with slits for eyes. They never came in the light. And I was to find later that they would never come in total dark, although I do not know why.
My parents, not unkindly, tried their best to convince me that these were dreams, just nightmares, that the creatures were not real, existed only in my head. As I boy, I knew better. They were real, as real as my friend Doc. Mom and Dad didn't try to tell me Doc was all just in my head. But they didn't agree with Doc about the creatures. Doc knew they were real too, and he told me that he too had no idea what they were or where they came from or what they wanted, but, somehow, I could tell he did know.
These uninvited visitors made my childhood a terror. I cannot remember a night I slept well, a day I felt more than just a tiny bit calm. For I always knew they could come again, and no one would see them, no one but me. That left me helpless.
Health problems followed, a score of stress-induced maladies. Eventually Mom and Dad took me to see one psychiatrist after another. At first, Doc would come along. But as the shrinks slowly chipped away at me, and made me start to doubt the reality of these visitors, Doc came along less often, and then only occasionally, and eventually not at all. The shrinks made me think that Doc was just as unreal as the creatures, and by the time I was a young man, ready for postgraduate studies, I was rather well adjusted, in agreement that these were my imaginings, and I did not see so many things that others did not. Although now that I look back upon it all, I wonder how I convinced myself that what I saw that others did not was not real, was instead perhaps a lapse in memory.
My life went along like the lives of my friends and colleagues. It wasn't until I was a professor that I began again to question what was real and what was not. It was through hard research that I came to wonder again about the nature of reality.
A point came where I could choose to work on exotic topics, and I chose the study of what was, at that time, a respectable research topic: theoretical time travel. That was really the happiest I have ever been. The work was exquisite, delightfully difficult, and richly controversial. The years of refining my theory were wonderful years. I could enjoy my time thinking, and I made acquaintances and friends with some of my colleagues. Time travel was all a matter of opinion, and we debated our views; it was fun.
Kitt Peks and I, Ralph Artemit, were, unofficially, the leaders of the two opposing theoretical views of time travel. Kitt's group believed that backward time travel was impossible. My group said it could be done. Both groups had plenty of arguments. They would say, you can't change the past. We would reply, we're not changing the past; we're recognizing the role of the many worlds. They would counter: There's no evidence for the many worlds! No need to bring them into consideration —abide by Occam's razor! We would say: The many worlds are required to have a reasonable interpretation of time travel to the past; time travel will not go away just because you don't like it! As had generations of physicists before us, on and on we debated.
Until Al Turen discovered a way of actually doing the age old thought experiment of sending a message back to the past, which led to the historic experiments and, in turn, to the ultimate publication that gave the experimental results, and presented the theoretical view that ended the debate. The results showed that you cannot go back in time, that what's done's done, and cannot be undone.
Even though it could be. Even though the three of us had proven that you can travel back in time.
The problem with quantum mechanics is that it will only tell you the probabilities of various outcomes of an experiment, or an observation, and will not tell you what you will observe. Some very famous physicists didn't like this, and had proposed the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Suppose an experiment has two possible outcomes. Quantum physics will tell you the probability of each, and, upon making a measurement or observing the result, the many worlds interpretation says that the universe would spit into two, one where one of the two possible outcomes occurs, and one where the other occurs.
But others didn't like the many worlds view, saying it required too much extra baggage. One thing that really bothered them was that the two universes would be identical in all respects except for the outcome of just this one observation. Both universes would then split into more universes every time there was more than one possible outcome for an experiment or an observation, and all these new universes would go on to split into more and more universes, resulting in an incomprehensible number of universes—many universes, indeed.
But that didn't bother me. I actually had the opposite view. It didn't make much sense to me that the splitting would be into only two universes. Like others who'd worked on this before me, it made more sense to me that the splitting should be into a multiple of universes. The way I thought of it was this. If an experiment has two possible outcomes, the probabilities of the two most likely won't be equal, and they can have any values as long as they add to 100%. So when you look to find out how things turned out, the universe should split into very, very many universes. How many? The only reasonable answer in my opinion is an infinite number. This idea was the foundation of my continuum many universe model. I devised a scheme where the probabilities of the possible outcomes led to the fraction of the continuum of new universes being expressed in terms of the quantum mechanical probabilities of the possible outcomes. Suppose, for example, you look to see if a radioactive atom has decayed. When you look at the atom, you either see it decayed or not. Suppose the probability of decay at the time you look
is just 1%. Then for every universe where the atom was found to decay there ought to be ninety-nine others where it did not. In my theory, there would be infinitely many new universes, 1% with a decayed atom and 99% with no decay.
That was the easy part. The theory got much more complicated when time travel was added in. There I had to bring in space-time, and in particular a space-time that allowed, at least theoretically, backward time travel ("closed time-like loops"). I developed the theory to the point where it could predict the probability for experimental detection of events where something had traveled back in time. Little did I know that I would actually see those predictions being scrutinized.
Kitt had done something quite different. She had considered events with travel into the past that were self-consistent within just one universe—our universe. Kitt developed a rigorous formulation that focused more on "classical" physics as opposed to the quantum formulation I had examined. Kitt focused on cause and effect events. She wanted to know what would happen if the space-time had something that allowed for backward time travel, a "time machine." Suppose a billiard ball is shot so it knocks another ball into this time machine, and in such a way that the ball knocked in would come out of another place in space but at a time before it was knocked in. Many people believed that the ball could come out before it was knocked in only if it came out in such a way that it ended up knocking itself into the time machine. That way everything was self-consistent, and backward time travel posed no paradoxes: time travel to the past would never change the past, it would only result in a sequence of self-consistent events. For the billiard balls, you could never arrange for the ball to travel into the past and come out in just such a manner that it would prevent itself from going backward in time. Kitt then extended her work as a conjectural inquiry for the quantum mechanical arena, and although it wasn't fully conclusive, it had never been proved wrong and remained as a highly regarded and plausible theory.
But Kitt didn't believe that even self-consistent time travel was possible. Her theoretical work strongly suggested that you needed an infinite amount of precision to have logically consistent backward time travel, that even the slightest uncertainty resulted in no time travel at all. Since you could never actually have infinite precision, her theory said that you could not go back in time.
Both Kitt and I agreed on an important, and strange, feature of quantum theory. We both agreed that an observation could be considered to have been made only if had been done by a conscious observer. We believed that you could not say a measurement had been made if, for example, you simply instructed a computer to make and record the measurement. We both thought that a conscious entity, a person, needed to decide what had been observed before the act of observing had any true physical meaning.
Kitt and I both took this consciousness interpretation seriously. As I think back on it all, I think that neither of us took it seriously enough. Perhaps we had become much too used to the idea to think further on its implications.
That neither of us had thought enough about this would change both of our lives, and with an impact that neither of us would ever have thought possible. The difference is that Kitt doesn't know this, and that I do.
So I believed in backward time travel, and I had a theory for it. Kitt did not believe in time travel, and she had her theory. And we argued and talked about it, and it was all a matter of debate, until Al Turen got involved. Al Turen didn't care whether or not time travel could occur. He only wanted to prove experimentally which was true: time travel or no time travel. And he had found a way to do the age old thought experiment that involved one of time travel's most famous,or infamous, paradoxes.
The thought experiment was to send a signal— a stream of photons was easiest—back in time to a detector that would find, or not find, the signal to have arrived before it would, or would not, be sent. The signal went through a region of space-time that I called "the time machine."
Suppose you set up the apparatus so it would send a signal only if it had received the same signal, and would not send a signal if it had not received one. Then no signal arriving would go with no signal sent, and a signal arriving would go with a signal being sent. Both results are self-consistent, with the latter supporting self-consistent backward time travel.
The paradox version of the experiment was to set up the apparatus a different way. If the signal was indeed detected, the apparatus would not send a signal through the time machine. But if a signal was not detected, then it would be sent. And there is the paradox: if a signal was received, no signal was sent backward in time —so where had the signal come from? And if no signal was received, a signal was sent—so where did it go?
The apparatus could be set up either way: the "self-consistent" way—no signal arrives, no signal sent; a signal arrives, a signal is sent, or the "paradox" set-up: no signal arrives, a signal is sent; a signal arrives, no signal sent.
You need to know Al Turen to understand why he would say he had not done the experiments and wanted to wait until Kitt and I would be able to attend. It is true that he only needed an unequivocal result to carve his name in history: either finding time travel to be possible or not would suit him equally well. He knew that he would be famous for his experimental proof, and probably would have deserved the Nobel prize, if it was still awarded. But there is more to it than that.
Simply put: Al Turen had a mean streak in him. He enjoyed seeing his colleagues fail. So much that it was not enough to have outdone fellow experimentalists. No, Al Turen was going to enjoy seeing either Kitt or me found to be wrong, exposed as a failure. He knew, or thought he knew, how painfully important these experiments would be to Kitt and to me. He did not just want to have all of us there, as he claimed, involved in the experiments, with all of us being witnesses. "After all", he had said to us, "we know this was going to make history. We are were going to find out, really find out, whether or not you can go back in time, or at least send a message back in time."
The truth is that he would enjoy seeing one of us fail. It was that simple.
Kitt and I agreed that the three of us would meet and watch the experiments done. We would do the self-consistent mode and the paradox mode. We would do the experiments first manually, so we could see the results as they were found. Al Turen had set things up so that we would see a big red flash if the photon stream, the signal, was detected. After we'd gotten enough results, automation would be set up to collect a large number of results and compare them against the two theoretical models, against Kitt's life's work, against my life's work.
Of course, I much preferred the paradox set-up, because just one experiment with the arrival of a signal and no signal sent could not be explained by Kitt's theory, but could be understood by my many worlds interpretation: the signal received came from another universe; the signal we sent out went to another universe. Just one such result would support my theory, and eliminate Kitt's claim that you would never receive a signal because backward time travel was impossible.
Kitt, of course, felt more comfortable with the self-consistent set-up. What she wanted to see in this set-up was all experiments resulting in no signal in and no signal out. She had devoted most of her career to working out all the details of her infinite precision model.
While Kitt and I were rivals about our theories, we had a very respectful professional relationship. Kitt was always a fair person, showing humility that I often wished many others had as well. Although we disagreed about our theories, and we defended them as best we could, Kitt was never unkind. When we would debate the time travel issue, because she was firm yet so gentle, I found myself to be the same. Whereas I would get into some pretty hostile arguments with some other people, I was always able to be gentle with Kitt, and the credit goes to her: I was gentle because she was gentle. With others, the scars of my childhood made me need to win the arguments, but not with Kitt.
There was also a time, all too brief, that Kitt and I had been very good friends. We'd opened up to one another, shared some of our secrets. That relationship was the closest I had ever had. And I had come to know her well. I knew Kitt well enough to know that she didn't just want, but actually needed, to have her theory shown to be true. I also knew that even if there were experiments with a signal in and a signal out, she would feel all right. She had been very careful to point out, in all of her theoretical papers, that self-consistent time travel just might be obtained. Her theory allowed for only self-consistent time travel, but with only the slimmest chance. The paradox set-up, on the other hand, could wipe out her life's work with just one experiment, and hurt her very, very deeply. I was thankful that Al Turen did not know this about Kitt.
On the day of the experiments, Kitt told me that she couldn't eat and couldn't sleep, that just one experiment could destroy her. She did not believe that would happen, but there was a nagging uncertainty within her. I understood, and I was also uneasy. What would I do if my lifetime achievement was suddenly obliterated by experimental results? It had been wonderful to work out all the theory, but now we faced experiments, and the results would leave no room for doubt.
I wanted to start with the paradox experiments, and Kitt wanted to start with the self-consistent experiments, and Al Turen really didn't care: we would do both anyway, and he just needed to get experimental results that would establish time travel as being possible or not possible. As a bonus, he would get to see one of us fail.
The three of us came together in Al Turen's lab to perform the experiments that would settle the issue. He tossed a coin to choose the starting set-up, and announced that we would begin with the paradox set-up.
There were a few other people in attendance, doing various jobs. We would start with the paradox experiments. We would do a number of experiments ourselves, before handing the job over to computers to obtain a statistically compelling conclusion. We also agreed, for this first run of experiments, not to tamper with the apparatus between the earlier time of detecting the photon stream and the later time of sending it out. The apparatus was set up in the paradox mode, and we readied ourselves to watch what would happen.
On the first attempt, there was a bright flash of red that indicated the arrival of the signal: the stream of photons had arrived at the detector before the signal was to have been sent through the time machine into the past! Despite my awareness of how very much this would bother Kitt, I was … relieved.
Kitt was obviously struggling, and seemed to me to be almost in shock. She said, "This can't be happening. It's not possible. It doesn't … it doesn't make sense …."
"I think it does," I said. "I think we will now see that no signal will be sent. And that means the signal was sent, but from another world, another universe. In that other world, the three of us, so to speak, will not receive any signal, and so they will send a signal, and that signal is the one that we all just observed."
Kitt seemed numb, stunned with the evidence but filled with disbelief. Then Al Turen quite calmly announced: "Ten seconds until we see whether or not the signal will be sent."
"It won't be sent," I said.
Kitt was silent.
We all waited.
The instant arrived.
No signal was sent.
It bothers me to admit it, but I think I might have smiled. "We received the signal," I said, "and after having received the signal, we all saw that no signal was subsequently sent. So it must have come from the group of us doing the same work in their own world."
Al Turen started to smile. His grin grew, and grew. He looked over at Kitt and said, "That pretty much settles things, don't you agree, Kitt?"
This infuriated me. Enough was enough. I had heard all about his taking pleasure in others' failures. I had known some of them, and known their pain, and felt badly for them. I'd convinced myself that, since there was nothing I could do, it was all right just to let it go and to leave these people to deal with it by themselves. But with Turen taking this cheap shot at Kitt, I found myself repulsed. He had hurt too many people this way, and aiming at Kitt was not something I could rationalize away. Raw anger filled me for the first time in my life. I'd become accustomed to feeling fear, and pain, and insecurity, but this anger was new and I wanted to do something. But what?
Suddenly, and inexplicably, I wanted it to be possible for both Kitt and me to be right. Before I could realize the hopelessness of this desire, everything changed. Al Turen had lost his grin. The mood had changed, had lightened in some way. I felt that somehow everything had been suspended, that nothing had been decided.
Then I saw a striking change in Kitt. She wasn't upset, and she seemed to be puzzled more than anything else. She simply ignored Al Turen, and looked at me instead, and in her very gentle way said, "I don't understand, Ralph. Why do you say we received a signal? We did not receive a signal. We all saw that … there was no red flash. No signal arrived, no signal was recorded. That is why one was just sent out."
Now it was I who was in shock. What was going on? Why had Kitt just said that no signal had come in, and that one had just gone out? Exactly the opposite was what had really happened! I tried to compose myself, and I spoke very slowly. "Kitt didn't you see the flash? We all saw the red flash. We did see the signal arrive. And we recorded the arrival of the signal. Just a moment ago. And that is why we saw, we did see, just a moment ago, that no signal was sent." I could not find words to express myself any further. I turned to the others in a silent appeal to explain what was going on, to explain to Kitt what we had just seen.
Al Turen hesitated. He looked confused. He was clearly very annoyed, and he said to me, "What are you talking about Ralph? You saw a red flash? I didn't see a flash! No signal was received! There was no red flash! That is why the apparatus sent out a signal, sent it to what you call your time machine." He took a deep breath and said, one word at a time, "No signal arrived. So a signal was sent." He paused, looked at the two of us, and said, "We can do it all over again, but I think we'll see the same result."
Now I was annoyed. What was happening here? We'd seen the evidence, and it confirmed my theory. Why were they denying it? I said, "We did detect the signal. Just look at the recording! Let's see the recording! Show us the recording!"
Al Turen showed the recording.
The record showed that … no signal had been received!
The world seemed twisted. I had just seen that a signal had been received, and now Kitt and Al Turen, and the computer, were all telling me that what I had seen was not what they had seen.
Then it hit me, and hard. My demons were back. The hideous, grotesque creatures were back in my mind. I had seen them, and no one, no one else had. And in that moment I knew, I knew that those horrible creatures were real, as real as the arrival of the photon signal. There was no doubt for me. This was an experiment! It was recorded! And they were telling me what I knew as a boy, all those years ago, that only I could see what was really happening. And I knew now what I knew as a boy, that the world was as I saw it, that for some reason the others were seeing something different. Then a chill swallowed me as I thought: why am I the only one who remembers what really happened? Why me?
I couldn't allow them to know what I'd seen. I had to play along. It wasn't just Kitt and Al Turen: all the others agreed, I could see that. They had their heads together, whispering, looking at me.
Kitt said, "No signal was received." She looked at Al Turen, and he nodded and said, "No signal was detected. That is why the apparatus then sent out a signal through what you call your time machine."
As bad as things were, they got worse. Kitt was shaking her head. She frowned, swallowed, looked at Al Turen. She calmed herself and said, "What are you saying Al? We did not send a signal. We recorded no signal and we sent out no signal. It all makes sense. Think about it. No signal in, no signal out. The apparatus was designed that way: "no signal arrives, no signal sent."
At this point I was numb, stunned. Now Kitt was saying no signal had been sent. A moment ago she had said that a signal had been sent! And now Kitt and Al Turen were disagreeing! It wasn't just me! They had separate realities. They remembered differently.
Al Turen then said, "We didn't set up in the self-consistent mode Kitt, we're in the paradox mode: the apparatus is set up to send a signal if it does not receive a signal."
Kitt interjected, "Let's look at the recording! Show it to us, Al!"
He did.
The recording showed that a signal had been sent.
"So why are you saying no signal was sent?" he asked Kitt.
She replied, "I never said that. Of course a signal was sent. No signal arrived, so a signal was sent."
A moment passed in silence. Kitt seemed satisfied. Al Turen just waited.
I had no idea what to do or what to say. Truthfully, I was badly frightened. Reality wasn't something independent of us, although I don't think I realized that just then. Kitt and Al Turen and I, and probably all the others too, were, somehow, creating reality. But not just creating it, altering it, changing it. The final record said that no signal had come in and that one had subsequently been sent out. That was also what Kitt and Al Turen and all the others ended up remembering.
Except me. I knew what had really happened. And I knew what had really happened when I was a boy. That I would have horrible things ahead of me, that my life had just changed, changed so much that I'd just lost all the good things I had waited for so long, and had worked so hard to have.
I had huge hurdles ahead of me, but the time travel issue was soon to be settled.
We continued on, doing more experiments.
I knew that the second time was going to be the same, and it was. We all saw the red flash. I then said that no signal would be sent. Kitt was lost in disbelief. The time for emitting the photon steam came, and no signal was sent. Then Kitt said that no signal had arrived. Al Turen agreed. I asked to check the recording. No signal had been detected. Kitt explained that this was because they were using the self-consistent mode. No signal arrived, no signal was sent, she said. But Al Turen remembered a signal had been sent. The recording was checked and a signal had indeed gone out. Then they all remembered that no signal had been detected, and that later one was sent out. They all agreed.
Except for me.
I withdrew as more experiments were done, and they argued some more, until they all agreed, until they all remembered the same thing, and until the recording was what they ended up remembering. And with each experiment, the arguing dwindled, until it all became routine.
After doing many experiments, it was turned over to the automation.
Over and over again, backward time travel was found to occur. But they all remembered that it had never been seen, not even once, and the computer records confirmed that.
Then they wrote up the results and reported that backward time travel was never experimentally observed.
Of course, the experiments were repeated by others.
And backward time travel was unequivocally demonstrated many times.
And, of course, everyone agreed that it had never happened.
That's what everybody remembered. And that's what ended up being recorded.
What's done's done, and can't be undone. You can't change the past. You can't go back.
Even though you can.
Later, much later, after all the experiments had been done, and repeated over and over and over, I realized that they had to go the way they did. A template had been formed. Initially, what that template would be was not clear, but somehow, in the dynamics of our interactions, the template was formed. Once formed, there was no going back. The same results were seen over and over, because the template made it so.
I eventually realized that the template had started to form when I had wished for the impossible: that both Kitt and I would be right. The experiments had confirmed Kitt's theory, negated mine. However, although I was the only one who remembered, my theory had also been proven: signals had been sent to the past.
This was just the time travel template.
I wonder now about all the other templates. I wonder which have been formed, and which are still in the process of forming.
Worst of all, I wonder about the visitors, and what will be coming for me now.
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