“I was sitting there wondering why the hell inertial mass and gravitational mass were exactly equivalent—in other words, why both these dice fell onto my desk at exactly the same rate, at exactly the same time—when I happened to notice that the little die kept coming up snake eyes. Two, I mean. Of course, it was a cheater’s die and was designed that way, but I had forgotten about that at that moment. Suddenly all these thoughts about quanta and gravity and craps suddenly came together in my head. I spent a few hours transcribing what I was thinking onto a pressure pad then I walked over to Wocek’s office and asked him whether I was crazy or not. He still hasn’t given me a satisfactory answer.”
Of the three fundamental forces known to science, two had, until Merced’s time, revealed themselves to have particles which, in a sense, carried the force. The photon was the force carrier for the electroweak interaction and the family of gluons served as the elastic between the quarks in an atomic nucleus. But where was the force carrier for gravity, the graviton? Its existence had been predicted, and plenty of indirect evidence for its presence had piled up, but so far no one had been able to actually find one. At first the reason was thought to be because it was so small—perhaps as small in comparison with atoms as atoms are in comparison with the solar system. But the particle accelerators of even the late twenty-first century were able to gauge such minute distances, and, alas, no graviton emerged. A plethora of explanations arose to explain this lack, the most interesting being a kind of modern reintroduction of the Newtonian idea of the “ether” as a kind of invisible substrate through which gravity propagated. Most scientists, including Merced, rejected such thinking. But where was the graviton?
“Where it was,” Merced wrote, “was in the immediate past and the immediate future. We were looking in the right place, but not at the right time.”
In order to understand this reasoning, we must consider one more odd component of quantum physics—the so-called quantum leap. In two classic experiments performed in the twentieth century, scientists confirmed that there was indeed what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” that occurred on the atomic level. The first experiment is known as the double-slit demonstration and it works like this: A beam of light is shot through an opening, one photon at a time. On the opposite side of the hole, at some distance away, is another barrier, this one with two holes—the double slit.
You would expect the photon, being a particle, to travel through one of the holes or the other—and that is exactly what it does. On the other side of the two slits is a detector—say a computer screen—that records, as a dot of light, where each proton strikes it. Now you would expect the photons, being particles, to pile up in a clump directly in front of the two slits. That is exactly what they do, forming two bright circles of light right in line with the slits that they passed through.
They do this, that is, with one other special condition to the experiment: You have to have a detector at either slit that either confirms or denies that a photon has passed through that slit. The detector in no way affects the flight of the photon; it just says whether or not a photon passed by it. So, with two slits, and a method of detecting which slit a particular photon passed through, you get two clumps of light.
What happens when you take away the detector?
Remember that you are still firing one photon at a time. You might put another detector near the light source to confirm this—as long as it is before the double slit. One photon at a time one after another. And what pattern builds up on the final screen?
If you said two clumps of light you would be absolutely wrong. Instead, what builds up is an interference pattern, just as a wave would make.
The greatest concentration of light is not in front of the two slits, but actually between them, where no particle could possibly hit. If the light were a particle. But waves travel around sharp corners all the time.
“So what?” you say. “Light is both a wave and a particle.”
But the fact is that you know with a certainty that the photon you are shooting is a single entity. The only thing you have changed is where you chose to look at it. And, by that change, you get a completely different buildup pattern on your final display screen. It is as if the photon “knows” whether or not you are watching it in flight. If it “sees” that you are trying to trick it into being a particle by having a look at it as it passes through one of the other slits, why then, it will behave as a particle to suit you, and pile up, one particle at a time, right in front of the slit after it has passed through. But if you’re not looking at it, the photon “decides” to be a wave, and does its part to create an interference pattern, as if it were two particles that had gone through each of the slits simultaneously.
There’s more. Say you put a detector after the slits, but before the final display screen. Rig your detector to turn on randomly—but only after the photons have passed through the slits, and they’ll pile up in clumps. Turn it off, and an interference pattern forms.
You are forced to the conclusion that each single particle of light “knows” about your whole experiment, past and future. Before it even leaves the light source, it “knows” whether or not you are going to try to detect it, and changes its flight path accordingly.
In the early twenty-second century, a version of this experiment was done with single photons from a quasar at the edge of the known universe. The results were the same. It seems that the photons “knew” ten billion years ago exactly whether or not the experimenter was going to switch on his detection apparatus ten billion years into the future. Clumps of light formed with it on, interference patterns with it off.
Things get weirder yet. The other crucial experiment of the twentieth century was first performed by the scientist Alain Aspect and his colleagues, all Earthlings, of course. In the Aspect experiment, two photons are created in the same quantum process. Several of the properties that each photon possesses must be a mirror image of the other. One of these properties is the polarization of the light. You can think of it as being something like a compass direction. If one photon has 90 degrees of polarization, the other must have 270. The photons are said to be “entangled” on a quantum level. So both of these “entangled” photons go shooting off in different directions, and they both have an equal chance of having any particular polarization. In fact, if you measured either photon separately, you would find that its polarization was entirely random. But if you measure one photon first and determine its polarization, then the polarization of the other photon is instantly determined. How do we know? Because photon B, the one you didn’t measure, will pass through a filter and pile up in a different pattern than it would have had you not measured its counterpart. Furthermore, it wouldn’t matter if the photons were separated by many millions of miles when you took the measurement. Changing photon A instantly changes photon B. Not at the speed of light. Not faster than the speed of light.
Instantly. The photons “know” before they leave their light source whether or not you are going to measure one of them and when and where, and they set out on a different path accordingly.
Again, these facts were well-known to scientists of the late twentieth century. Einstein thought of them as “spooky action at a distance” that was seemingly faster than light, but they were not mysterious at all to the quantum theorists. They were predicted by the equations of quantum physics. In fact, the experiments were done to confirm what theory had already called for.
But it took Raphael Merced to reconcile the absolute violation of common sense (and General Relativity), which Einstein had sensed, with the obvious facts of the matter.
“It turns out,” says Merced, “that atoms—all of elementary particles, that is—are little time machines. After you accept that madness, it’s fairly simple to explain the rest, including the relationship of the strong force and electromagnetism to gravity.”
Gravity, said Merced, is the same thing as the other
two forces when considered as a wave function not in time, but of time. The graviton is time’s “messenger particle,” and, as such, it doesn’t ever exist in the present. The only trace it leaves in the now is a record in space-time of its passing. Its “purpose”—if it can be said to have such a thing—is to mediate between basic particles separated in space. Or, conversely, to mediate space to conform to the properties of each and every particle in it. The residual effects of this mediation are what holds the galaxies together and sets the planets in their orbits. The present is a “symptom” of the past and the future.
With his theory, Merced also solved the renormalization problem of quantum theory. The infinities of particle self-interaction turned out to be precise and finite solutions of Merced time functions.
Merced went on to suggest a kind of macro graviton detector using a modified Josephson junction that functioned as a time machine—albeit for nanoseconds—on the everyday level of things. Within a year of the publication of his doctoral thesis, gravitons had been detected both in the past (zero spin) and in the future (with a spin of 2). Today, every schoolchild has learned the statement of his fundamental equation:
FT = (pq – qp) + mc2
Where “FT” is the future multiplied by time as a continuous function, where “pq” and “qp” are quantum matrices, and “mc2” is matter times the speed of light squared.
“What it all comes down to,” Merced wrote, “is that you either accept space as being nonlocal or you accept time as being a series of unrelated points, essentially disjoint. For me, it is a lot easier to view time as self-forming, with the future being intimately acquainted with the past. But it doesn’t matter how you look at it. The math is the same.”
Merced’s time equations had the added bonus of giving a precise explanation for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Time, it turns out, has chirality, or handedness.
“The space-time continuum,” says Merced, “has a left-handed spin to it of exactly one second per second.”
And this is the reason that we live our lives from the past into the future, and the reason that hot things get cooler instead of warming up, and why a scattering of stones doesn’t spontaneously form itself into a house.
Twelve
“Shall we check the markets?” said Danis. “Maybe things have settled down.”
“I seriously doubt it,” Kelly replied, but Danis engaged the merci, and they had a look together at the current conditions.
Things were worse than even he had imagined they could become in so short a time. It was a crash that was rapidly headed toward a full-scale depression.
Danis checked the automatic sell-points on all of the shorted stocks that Kelly had arranged. Everything had been converted into cash and pure energy certificates of deposit hours ago. She gave Kelly a summary of their current holdings, and he laughed aloud.
They were now multimillionaires. Teleman Milt was also weathering the storm and acting as a kind of ad hoc inner-system bank, making limited, heavily secured loans to keep the other trading houses afloat. The old man at TM would soon be the most powerful financier in the solar system, if he wasn’t already. And that, Kelly estimated, should last a few e-days at most—and then would come a government takeover of the financial community. Such was in the cards, and Kelly was amazed that he was one of the few who saw the obviousness of it. Kelly would not be surprised if the Old Man were personally incorporated into Director Amés’s array of personas. Amés had made no secret that he was “recruiting” some of the bigger LAPs to do productive government work. The Old Man might go from being king of the world to a slave in a matter of moments.
There was no way Amés was going to pass up this opportunity to consolidate his rule. The banks would soon be an extension of the Department of Immunity.
And what would happen then? Amés would either have to start minting money or he would step up production. Not even Amés was arrogant enough to think that he could escape runaway inflation if he fired up the greenleaf mints. That meant stepping up production of goods. And how did you do that with an economy that was already operating at full capacity?
You started a war.
Thirteen
from
Old Left-handed Time
Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect a short history
by Andre Sud, D. Div.
Triton
After Raphael Merced published his dissertation, Chen Wocek secured a junior professorship for him at Bradbury. Merced turned down several far more lucrative offers in order to take it and remain near his mentor. At Bradbury, Merced began further investigations into his idea that theory was a kind of by-product of phenomena and that the laws of nature were only a limited way to understand experience. When he was twenty-seven, Merced devoted himself entirely to experimental physics, and it was at this time that he and Beat Myers began their famous “Fifty Worlds to Sunday” correspondence that is a seminal text in the modern study of aesthetics and its relationship to the scientific method.
Merced built larger and larger Josephson-Feynman time machines and extended the duration in which he could study the graviton up to several seconds. It was in the course of these experiments that he began to notice a peculiar aspect of the particle. Gravitons seemed to possess a property that was singular and asymmetric. It was a property that only expressed itself under conditions of extremely complex paradox resolution.
“It was as if the little buggers were making informed decisions after thinking about something for a while,” wrote Merced. “That’s why I called this behavior judgment. It was as if, within the locality of my apparatus, nature became teleological—that is, it acted as if it had will and purpose. There were singular instances of paradox resolution that didn’t obey any statistical laws I had ever heard of, and they certainly weren’t predictable by any standard mathematical means. They were, by definition, little miracles. And that’s why, in the equations I developed to express this behavior, there is always a point where I wrote ‘and a miracle happens here.’ ”
Merced called this method evolutionary calculus. Four years after publishing the Grand Unified Field Theory that linked all the known forces of nature, Merced’s contemporaries openly pilloried him and he was kicked out of the two major associations of scientists of the day. Wocek fought a rearguard action at Bradbury and managed to save Merced’s position there. Merced was too engrossed in his research to take much notice of the brouhaha.
“I cannot tell you if the universe as a whole has any meaning,” said Merced. “This may be fundamentally unknowable. But what I was seeing in my experiments was that the universe was acting as if it had meaning locally. After a while, I was forced to the conclusion that this wasn’t just appearance. Individual gravitons were exercising judgment just as a person does. The universe is teleological locally. By locally I mean any distance that is contained between quantum-entangled particles that are pressed into complex time-related paradoxes. I would force these paradoxes on the gravitons, and it was as if they had a little town meeting and came to a decision about how to handle each paradox. These decisions were never precisely the same, but all had the general tendency of preserving reality as we know it. From there it was only a short step to reasoning that one aspect of the ‘judgment’ property was that it brought about instant information transfer at a distance. After continued work, I discovered that I could influence what this information would be, and I could cause the gravitons to carry messages that I wanted. I discovered a number that acted as a sort of code key of time. This is what I called the Teleological Constant. If you know the Teleological Constant, you could send and receive information instantaneously over great distances—as far, in fact, as you chose to separate two entities that you originally observed to be entangled on a quantum level.”
This instantaneous transfer of information is what we call the Merced Effect.
Merced
was thirty-five years old by this time. His experiences with the scientific establishment had left him extremely leery. He chose to publish the results of his experiments in his friend Beat Myers’s poetry journal, Flare. The November 2646 issue of Flare was almost wholly devoted to Merced’s paper, which was interspersed with poetry by Myers and others in the Flare generation. During his life, Merced always insisted that reprints of his paper, “The Teleological Constant and its Relation to Instantaneous Information Transfer at a Distance,” be printed with the poems included.
The November Flare did not make much of an impact at first. Merced continued his work, and by that time had several graduate assistants under him. One of them was a brilliant young nanotechnological engineer who had been raised in an orphanage in the asteroid belt. His name was Feur Otto Bring. Bring was an incurable victim of Tourette’s syndrome, and conversations between Merced and Bring would often consist of Merced patiently explaining a problem to Bring, followed by Bring swearing uncontrollably at Merced. Then, usually within days, Bring would have the engineering solution or the apparatus that Merced had envisioned.
One day in 2648, Merced casually suggested to Bring that it ought to be possible to invent a nanotech time machine that incorporated his Josephson-Feynman setup and that, if such nano were properly disseminated, there could be instant information shared over whatever distance the nano covered. Bring is reported to have stormed from the room shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you, cocksucker!”
Within a week, he and Merced had designed and created such a thing. With little modification, that design is still with us, permeating all our lives. It was the design of what we now know as grist.
Tony Daniel Page 12
