Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  I must wait until the sugar melts . Another way of putting it is that the sugar is not just a lump of chemical. It is or has a story, and stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Your understanding of the sugar’s story can never be complete until you see how things turn out. When you do that, you apprehend the sugar’s story in a more complete way … and you may even detect that that dissolution of the sugar was already included in its prior dry, crystalline state. It might have even influenced that earlier state in some way. That is the possibility we are going to explore in this book—not for sugar, but for people. 11

  PART ONE

  Welcome to the Not Yet

  “I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.”

  “I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

  “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

  1

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

  [I]f we collect enough seemingly “anecdotal” or “anomalous” experiences from different times and places and place them together on a flat and fair comparative table, we can quickly see that these reports are neither anecdotal nor anomalous. We can see that they are actually common occurrences in the species.

  — Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural (2015)

  T housands of years ago, in what is now called Greenland, a gentle snow fell on a vast silent white desert, a bitter cold, and totally uninhabited plain. The ice crystals from that snowfall left a thin layer on the landscape and merged with it. Hour by hour, day by day, year by year, century by century, subsequent snowfalls fused with the ones underneath (as they had done for hundreds of thousands of years), building up the ice to a thickness of two miles in places. The enormous weight of the ice pressing downward forced it to extrude sideways, through the gaps in the mountain range that rings the land. One of these ice rivers is called Jakobshavn Ice-Fjord, on Greenland’s West coast, and it flows at a rate of about 65 feet a day, toward the cold gray arctic water of Baffin Bay.

  Where Jakobshavn presses out into the sea, at low tide, the unsupported weight of the six-mile-wide, half-mile-thick glacier causes it to give birth—the process is called calving. Enormous mountains of ice crash into the roiling water, ponderously roll over, and then spend weeks, months, sometimes even years in a sort of traffic jam of their iceberg siblings before gradually drifting off into deeper waters. 1 They slowly melt as they follow the currents carrying them counterclockwise around Baffin Bay, up past Ellesmere and Devon Islands, then south past Baffin Island. The larger ones make it farther, dying in the relatively warm waters of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream. 2

  The year 1910 was a particularly good one for calving in Greenland because of a stretch of warm wet weather two years earlier. High snowfall in 1908, coupled with increased melting, weakened the glaciers structurally, leading to many more icebergs being birthed at the beginning of the century’s second decade. 3 One of the many icebergs that crashed into the water during low tide one day in the spring of 1910—made of snow that may have fallen as long ago as when the boy king Tutankhamun was reigning in Egypt—was big enough to survive the journey around Baffin Bay and south past the coast of Labrador and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland over the next 18 months.

  Its journey was slow and lonely. Ships avoid those waters and the icy perils they contain, so only a few hardy humans, hunters from the arctic and Norway, had gazed on it; it was seen mainly by whales and seals and seabirds. But then in April, 1912 this still-massive predator—a couple million tons, but much smaller than it had been at birth two years earlier—drifted at its leisurely pace into the shipping lanes that linked Great Britain and the United States. At this point, its original underbelly, blackened from millennia of scraping across Greenland soil, was now uppermost, jutting about 90 feet into the air in a high central peak flanked by two smaller ones, almost like a great bat. At 11:40 PM on the night of April 14, this big black bat loomed out of the darkness a mile ahead of the biggest ocean liner in history, making its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York, via Cherbourg, France, with 2,224 souls aboard. The Titanic was then about 1,000 miles short of its destination, Manhattan.

  The huge ship was moving fast, at an overly confident 22.5 knots, and when the lookout spotted the black shape dead ahead, the quartermaster was unable to swerve the ship’s massive bulk to avoid a collision. The crew watched horrified as the iceberg scraped across the starboard side of the hull. The vessel was so massive that few passengers even felt the collision, and those on the bridge who knew what had happened were initially optimistic. Systems like automatic electrically powered seals that partitioned the damaged compartments from the rest would keep this “unsinkable” ship afloat. But six of the ship’s sixteen compartments were rapidly filling with water, and gradually a grim reality set in: The ship was sinking. And due to a combination of hubris and just plain corner-cutting, the White Star Line, the company that had built this ship, had only provided enough lifeboats to save a third of the passengers.

  The decorous pandemonium that ensued has been famously depicted in movies, from Roy Ward Baker’s 1958 A Night to Remember to James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic . The women and children who took to the available lifeboats, who watched the floating city up-end in the water and finally break in half, remembered vividly the screams of their husbands and fathers drowning in the water. What was more terrible was the sudden silence when the stern of the ship finally slid into the blackness, less than three hours after the collision, in the early morning hours of April 15.

  You could hardly ask for a more definitive demonstration of Newtonian physics than the Titanic ’s fatal encounter with that iceberg. Objects travel well-understood, predictable paths through space dictated by their own inertia; when they collide, both objects are changed by the energy they bring to the encounter. What happened to the Titanic after the collision has been described in countless books and stories and movies, and the wreckage can still be seen on the ocean floor. The iceberg did not come out unscathed either. It was seen and photographed in subsequent days by ships searching the area for survivors. How it was damaged below the waterline is unknown, but above, it sported a great red stripe along its side, which you could imagine was a scar from its battle with the steel leviathan, or blood of the Titanic ’s passengers. Actually it was fresh red paint, applied in the Harland & Wolff shipyard of Belfast, Ireland, where the ship had been completed nearly a year earlier, and now carried off with the ice.

  But those predictable paths through spacetime leading to that event were also predictably un predictable. The causal arrows leading to any event are, for practical purposes, infinite. In the vast cosmic ocean of causes and effects—particles intersecting with other particles and changing each other’s course—what counts as an “event” at all is purely arbitrary. We could tell the story of any individual snowflake in that multimillion-ton iceberg, the vast majority of them oblivious to the metal object it struck, just as we could tell the story of any rivet in the ship, or any passenger, or the story of any molecule of paint that was transferred from the latter object to the former over the minute they were in contact. That inconceivable multitude of bits of matter, their countless vectors, makes it impossible for anyone besides God—and probably even God—to have predicted the event or precisely how it would unfold.

  Quantum physicists, who live in a world of delicate measuring instruments and fundamental particles of matter, call every physical interaction a “measurement.” You might say the Titanic performed a measurement of that iceberg. The New York Times ’
headline the next day, “TITANIC SINKS FOUR HOURS AFTER HITTING ICEBERG,” was the printed, published result.

  But almost as if to thumb its nose at physicists and their measurements, a dense fog of “impossible” coincidence hovers over that resolutely Newtonian disaster, making it a perennial object lesson in studies of paranormal or psychic phenomena. A psychiatrist and parapsychological researcher named Ian Stevenson compiled 20 accounts of such coincidences in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in the early 1960s. 4 I will cite a handful of examples.

  Ten days prior to the Titanic ’s departure from Southampton, an English businessman who had booked passage on it, Mr. J. Connon Middleton, slipped into a depression. Ordinarily he was not a person who remembered his dreams at all, but he awoke on the morning of March 30 and related to his wife a distressing dream that the ship he was going to be sailing on in ten days’ time was “floating on the sea, keel upwards and her passengers and crew swimming around her.” His mood darkened further when he had the exact same dream the following night. Not one to change his plans because of a dream or two, no matter how distressing, he simply allowed the matter to gnaw at him. So imagine his relief when he received a cable from his American associates suggesting he postpone his trip. It gave him the excuse he needed to cancel his booking … and saved his life. Friends testified later that he had told them of his dreams and his relief at not traveling on the Titanic , prior to the disaster. 5

  In the early evening of April 14, the night of the collision, a Methodist minister in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Reverend Charles Morgan, was making a list of hymns to be sung at his service that night. He nodded off momentarily, and in the hypnagogic half-awake, half-dreaming state that, history shows, produces a remarkable number of creative epiphanies as well as perhaps glimpses of the future, the minister saw the number of a hymn from the hymnal in front of his eyes. The number, and the hymn, were unfamiliar to him, but he took it as a sign and added it to his list. Later, reading from their hymnals, the congregants sang “Hear, Father, While We Pray to Thee, for Those in Peril on the Sea.” They had no way of knowing that, at roughly the same time, thousands of miles away in the North Atlantic, passengers in the Titanic ’s second-class dining room were also singing this same hymn begging God’s protection for the souls of seafarers, at the request of one of the passengers, Reverend Ernest Carter. It was a weirdly portentous choice for both ministers, as this was still two hours before the Titanic ’s collision with the iceberg. 6

  Later that same night, a Massachusetts woman named Clara Cook Potter awoke her husband, Baptist Minister Charles Francis Potter, to tell him of a vivid, terrifying dream. “I saw what seemed to be a high structure,” she said, “something like an elevated railroad. There were people hanging on the outside of it as if they were holding on by their hands to the top rail of a guard fence. Many of them were in their nightclothes, and they were gradually losing their hold and slipping down the inclined sides of this structure. I felt they were dropping to certain death.” The terror they felt, she said, was enough to jolt her awake. Days later, after news of the Titanic ’s sinking flooded the press and artists reconstructed the scene of the ship’s terrified passengers clinging to its tilting rails, Mrs. Potter reported that these depictions where exactly like what she had seen in her dream. 7

  An anonymous member of a traveling acting troupe performing a comedy in a small Northern Illinois town reported to the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) that the troupe’s manager, Mr. Black, could only be roused from sleep with great difficulty on the morning of April 15. After his worried companions applied towels soaked in cold water to his face, he finally woke “with a wild look in his eyes,” and announced: “Folks, something terrible has happened! I saw a large ship sinking and hundreds of people being drowned. You will find it is true because I saw the San Francisco earthquake and fire this same way at the time it happened.” When the group arrived at the train depot to depart to their next town, the station agent said, “Folks, I just received word over the telegraph that the big ship Titanic , on her maiden voyage, hit an iceberg and sank, drowning hundreds of people.” Mr. Black reportedly told his troupe “I told you so,” but the witness said none of them ever mentioned another word to each other of the strange affair. (If the account is accurate, the station agent was misreporting the news or had mis-heard it. On the morning of the 15th , it was being reported in the press only that the ship had hit an iceberg. Some reports even said it was being towed to Halifax, Nova Scotia.) 8

  Some people reported peculiar visions related to relatives who had been working or traveling on the Titanic . A Vancouver woman, Mrs. Henderson, reported a strange waking dream two days after the Titanic ’s loss: a vision of her sister-in-law and niece, the wife and daughter of her brother Willie Simpson, who (she then thought) was working on another White Star liner. In a letter to her sister on April 19, she wrote: “I saw Bessie and Nina crying and clinging to one another. I seemed to be in a kind of dream and yet I was wide awake and had not even been thinking of them.” Henderson had no way of knowing when she wrote her letter that her brother Willie had been offered and accepted a job on the Titanic just before its departure and had perished. She only learned her brother’s fate (and the impact of the news on his family) after she sent her letter. 9

  Several seeming prophecies centered on and/or issued from the pen of a distinguished English journalist and avid spiritualist, W. T. Stead, who unlike Mr. Middleton did not cancel his booking on the Titanic ’s maiden voyage despite several forewarnings. In the 1880s, as editor of The Pall Mall Gazette , Stead printed a fictional article about the death of many passengers of a doomed ocean liner, along with his editorial warning: “This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.” It certainly could be chalked up to ordinary safety concerns; although in 1892, he wrote another story describing the fatal collision of an ocean liner with an iceberg, after which a sole passenger (the narrator) is rescued by another ship, the real White Star liner Majestic , captained by its real captain, Edward J. Smith. 10 Stead turned this story into a novel, From the Old World to the New , which was published the following year, in 1893. 11 The real Captain Smith, nearly two decades later, became captain of the Titanic , and, of course, went down with his ship. In 1900, Stead also described a premonitory vision of his own death that may have corresponded to the reality in the early morning hours of April 15, 12 years later: “I had a vision of a mob, and this had made me feel that I shall not die in a way common to the most of us, but by violence, and one of many in a throng.” 12 Two psychics Stead had been fond of consulting also reported to him premonitions of death or disaster at sea, although he ignored them. 13 (After Stead’s death, fellow spiritualists reported communicating with the dead journalist; his spirit allegedly informed one of them that he had asked the ship’s orchestra to play “Nearer My God to Thee,” but it is known that that tune was not played. It makes a nice story, though.)

  Stead was not alone in writing about an ocean liner tragedy involving an iceberg. The most famous Titanic “prophecy” by far was a short novel published 14 years earlier, in 1898, by a then-popular sea adventure and science-fiction writer named Morgan Robertson. His novel Futility depicts the collision of a remarkably similar luxury liner called Titan with an iceberg. Robertson’s Titan was also making a run between England and New York (returning to England from New York, in the Titan ’s case), also striking an iceberg on its starboard side, around midnight on an April night in the North Atlantic, and with great loss of life due to an insufficiency of lifeboats. Like the Titanic , Robertson’s Titan had three propellers and two masts and was the largest ocean liner ever built. Whereas 1,520 people perished on the Titanic , all but 13 of the Titan ’s 3,000 passengers perished in Robertson’s story. Apart from their names and passenger capacities (the Titanic too could hold about 3,000 people), numerous details between the real and fictitious ships align closely:

&
nbsp; RMS Titanic “Titan ” 14

  Length 882.5 feet 800 feet

  Water-tight compartments 16 19

  Displacement 66,000 tons 45,000 tons

  Gross tonnage 45,000 46,328

  Horsepower 46,000 40,000

  Lifeboats 20 24

  Speed at impact 22.5 knots 25 knots

  Because of its closeness in so many particulars, Robertson’s Futility is the best known of all disaster prophecies, and thus naturally the most debated. One writer, Jack W. Hannah, an Evangelical Christian attempting to prove that Robertson’s novel was “a piece of literature that contains a word of God,” calculated that the odds were one in four billion that the coincidences between Robertson’s story and the Titanic disaster could be due to chance. Revisiting the case in the early 1980s, psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud basically agreed that some sort of “paranormal foreknowledge” was likely involved but found enough flaws with Hannah’s statistics and reasoning that he lowered the odds to a more modest one in 1,024. 15 Skeptic Martin Gardner on the other hand, in a book compiling many uncanny predictions of the Titanic disaster in order to debunk ESP claims, argued that “There is no way to estimate, even crudely, the relevant probabilities.” 16

  Gardner is right. There is no way of objectively calculating the likelihood or unlikelihood of a correspondence between a novel—or a dream, or a vision, or some other premonitory inkling—and a later historical event. Rare events are commonplace, and human beings are terrible at grasping this, runs the refrain of professional statisticians and psychologists in the face of paranormal claims. 17 Because of the “law of large numbers,” an impossible, once-in-a-lifetime event is probably happening to someone somewhere at any given time, and will likely happen to you too. And anything can be sliced and diced to yield startling coincidences. Gardner points out the following, by way of comparison to the Futility -Titanic case: