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Authors: Paul Pipkin
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author involving an “… ever spreading network of diverging,
converging, and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore
each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility.” 10 Set in life-and-death intrigues during the First World War, Borges’s images were so compelling that Bryce DeWitt used them
for the frontispiece in the 1973 exposition of the Everett theory.
Borges wrote those words in 1941, while brilliant young physicist Richard Feynman was putting the finishing touches on his
“many-histories,” proposing to explain the path of a particle in time and space, and was being romanced by a shadowy government
nuclear program. By September of that year, a new story appeared by Robert A. Heinlein, already gone into war work.
This was the story of which I had retained the most compelling recollection from my early reading. For months, a fragment
had plagued the corners of my mind about a professor’s escape from a disastrous future back to his college days. What was
that, I had wondered? Where had I read it? Did it not have to have been written before Everett? When I located the item, it
was in a 1953 collection. Heinlein’s Dr. Frost likened time to a rolling, hilly surface rather than a line:
Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hills. Every little way the road branches
and the branches follow side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. 11
Beyond the right or left turns to different futures, he visualized other possibilities, typically missed through tunnel vision.
By means of such shortcuts, one could presumably strike out across all possible time or even take paths that looped backward.
Heinlein went on to illustrate all the possible departures from “the road of maximum probability.”
Joe objected, “Couldn’t you say that this is what science fiction writers are
supposed
to do, predict future developments in theory? One role of the genre, I think, has been to bring the collective consciousness
to bear on legitimate thought experiments.” Very much a scientist and not at all airy, I wondered at how he put up with my
flights of fancy.
“Language in these pieces is uncomfortably precise for a thought experiment that hadn’t even been framed yet,” I argued. “Substitute
a particle for a person as the subject, and these quotations give you a damned good layman’s description of the manyworlds.
Precision like that decades in advance of the theory would not be prediction but prescience.”
I had paused for thought. “Even if Feynman may have worked out his math during 1941, his famous lectures from which writers
have extrapolated were still in the future.” I would soon be reading hauntingly similar passages that lay not ahead of Heinlein’s
work, but a decade behind him.
We’d continued while the wind whipped the trees against the house. In the morning, I would discover that one of my ancient
mesquites had been uprooted. Perhaps that was one small portent of the wrenching discoveries I was to make about my own life
and motivations. Neither did we ignore the evidence of argument
against
branching worlds. As with
The Door into Summer,
Ward Moore’s classic
Bring the Jubilee
argued contrary to a theory that had yet to be articulated.
It had become evident that the most persuasive pieces of the old literature had a couple of other things in common besides
their representation of the branching paths. One was the consistent use of a “psychic” means of contact, instead of a technological
motif. It was the choice even of writers who were otherwise heavily into gadgetry.
The means employed would involve focusing the attention on a set of symbols, be they magical, geometric, or symbolic logic.
Sometimes the mind would simply be attuned to accept the possibility of such a transit, through exercises
converging, and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore
each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility.” 10 Set in life-and-death intrigues during the First World War, Borges’s images were so compelling that Bryce DeWitt used them
for the frontispiece in the 1973 exposition of the Everett theory.
Borges wrote those words in 1941, while brilliant young physicist Richard Feynman was putting the finishing touches on his
“many-histories,” proposing to explain the path of a particle in time and space, and was being romanced by a shadowy government
nuclear program. By September of that year, a new story appeared by Robert A. Heinlein, already gone into war work.
This was the story of which I had retained the most compelling recollection from my early reading. For months, a fragment
had plagued the corners of my mind about a professor’s escape from a disastrous future back to his college days. What was
that, I had wondered? Where had I read it? Did it not have to have been written before Everett? When I located the item, it
was in a 1953 collection. Heinlein’s Dr. Frost likened time to a rolling, hilly surface rather than a line:
Think of this track we follow over the surface of time as a winding road cut through hills. Every little way the road branches
and the branches follow side canyons. At these branches the crucial decisions of your life take place. 11
Beyond the right or left turns to different futures, he visualized other possibilities, typically missed through tunnel vision.
By means of such shortcuts, one could presumably strike out across all possible time or even take paths that looped backward.
Heinlein went on to illustrate all the possible departures from “the road of maximum probability.”
Joe objected, “Couldn’t you say that this is what science fiction writers are
supposed
to do, predict future developments in theory? One role of the genre, I think, has been to bring the collective consciousness
to bear on legitimate thought experiments.” Very much a scientist and not at all airy, I wondered at how he put up with my
flights of fancy.
“Language in these pieces is uncomfortably precise for a thought experiment that hadn’t even been framed yet,” I argued. “Substitute
a particle for a person as the subject, and these quotations give you a damned good layman’s description of the manyworlds.
Precision like that decades in advance of the theory would not be prediction but prescience.”
I had paused for thought. “Even if Feynman may have worked out his math during 1941, his famous lectures from which writers
have extrapolated were still in the future.” I would soon be reading hauntingly similar passages that lay not ahead of Heinlein’s
work, but a decade behind him.
We’d continued while the wind whipped the trees against the house. In the morning, I would discover that one of my ancient
mesquites had been uprooted. Perhaps that was one small portent of the wrenching discoveries I was to make about my own life
and motivations. Neither did we ignore the evidence of argument
against
branching worlds. As with
The Door into Summer,
Ward Moore’s classic
Bring the Jubilee
argued contrary to a theory that had yet to be articulated.
It had become evident that the most persuasive pieces of the old literature had a couple of other things in common besides
their representation of the branching paths. One was the consistent use of a “psychic” means of contact, instead of a technological
motif. It was the choice even of writers who were otherwise heavily into gadgetry.
The means employed would involve focusing the attention on a set of symbols, be they magical, geometric, or symbolic logic.
Sometimes the mind would simply be attuned to accept the possibility of such a transit, through exercises
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