Paradoxes and pointlessness

In his 1967 short story "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," writer R. A. Lafferty took one of the first looks at something that since has become a standard trope in science fiction; going back into the past and doing something that changes history.

In his hilarious take on things, some time-machine-wielding scientists pick an event in history that seems to have been a critical juncture (they chose the near-miss assassination attempt on Charlemagne in 778 C.E. that immediately preceded the Battle of Roncevaux), then send an "avatar" back in time to change what happened.  The avatar kills the guy who saved Charlemagne's life, Charlemagne himself is killed, and his consolidation of power into what would become the Holy Roman Empire never happens.

Big deal, right?  Major repercussions down throughout European history?  Well, what happens is that when the change occurs, it also changes the memories of the scientists -- how they were educated, what they knew of history.  The avatar comes back, and everything is different, but the scientists are completely unaware of what's happened -- because their history now includes the change the avatar made.

So they decide that Charlemagne's assassination must have had no effect on anything, and they pick a different historical event to change.  The avatar goes back to try again -- with the same results.

Each time the avatar returns, things have become more and more different from where they started -- and still, none of the characters inside the story can tell.  They can never, in C. S. Lewis's words, "know what might have happened;" no matter what they do, those alternate timelines remain forever outside their ability to see.

In the end, the scientists give up.  Nothing, they conclude, has any effect on the course of events, so trying to change history is a complete waste of time.

One has to wonder if Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has read Lafferty's story, because Loeb just authored an article in The Debrief entitled, "The Wormhole Dilemma: Could Advanced Civilizations Use Time Travel to Rewrite History?"  Which, incidentally, is a fine example of Betteridge's Law -- "any headline phrased as a question can be answered with the word 'no.'"

Before we get into what the article says, I have to say that I'm getting a little fed up with Loeb himself.  He's something of a frequent flier on Skeptophilia and other science-based skepticism websites (such as the one run by the excellent Jason Colavito), most recently for his strident claim that meteoric debris found in the Pacific Ocean was from the wreckage of an alien spacecraft.  (tl;dr: It wasn't.)  

I know we skeptical types can be a little hard to budge sometimes, and a criticism levied against us with at least some measure of fairness is that we're so steeped in doubting that we wouldn't believe evidence if we had it.  But even so, Loeb swings so far in the opposite direction that it's become difficult to take anything he says seriously.  In the article in The Debrief, he talks about how wormholes have been shown to be mathematically consistent with what we know about physics (correct), and that Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking demonstrated that they could theoretically be kept open long enough to allow passage of something from one point in spacetime to another (also correct).  

This would require, however, the use of something with negative mass-energy to stabilize the wormhole so it doesn't snap shut immediately.  Which is a bit of a sticking point, because there's never been any proof that such a something actually exists.

Oh, but that's no problem, Loeb says; dark energy has negative (repulsive) energy, so an advanced civilization could "excavate dark energy from the cosmic reservoir and mold it into a wormhole."  He admits that we don't know if this is possible because we still have no idea what dark energy actually is, but then goes into a long bit about how we (or well-intentioned aliens) could use such a wormhole to "fix history," starting with getting rid of Adolf Hitler and preventing the Holocaust.

A laudable goal, no doubt, but let's just hang on a moment.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of artist Martin Johnson]

The idea of the altering of history potentially creating intractable paradoxes is a staple of science fiction, ever since Lafferty (and Ray Bradbury in his brilliant and devastating short story "The Sound of Thunder") brought it into the public awareness.  Besides my own novel Lock & Key, in which such a paradox wipes out all of humanity except for one dubiously lucky man who somehow escapes being erased and ends up having to fix the problem, this sort of thing seemed to happen every other week on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where one comes away with the sense that the space-time continuum is as flimsy as a wet Kleenex.  It may be that there is some sort of built-in protection in the universe for preventing paradoxes -- such as the famous example of going back in time and killing your own grandfather -- but even that point is pure speculation, because the physicists haven't shown that time travel into the past is possible, much less practical.

So Loeb's article is, honestly, a little pointless.  He looks at an idea that countless fiction writers -- including myself -- have been exploring ad nauseam since at least 1967, and adds nothing to the conversation from a scientific perspective other than saying, "Hey, maybe superpowerful aliens could do it!"  As such, what he's done is really nothing more than mental masturbation.

I know I'm coming away sounding like a killjoy, here.  It's not that this stuff isn't fun to think about; I get that part of it.  But yet another article from Loeb talking about how (1) highly-advanced alien civilizations we know nothing about about might (2) use technology that requires an unknown form of exotic matter we also know nothing about to (3) accomplish something physicists aren't even sure is possible, isn't doing anything but giving new meaning to the phrase "Okay, that's a bit far-fetched."

The whole thing put me in mind of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's recent, rather dismal, video "Science is in Trouble, and It Worries Me."  Her contention is that science's contribution to progress in our understanding of the universe, and to improving the wellbeing of humanity, has slowed way down -- that (in her words) "most of what gets published is bullshit."  Not that what gets published is false; that's not what she means.  Just that it's pointless.  The emphasis on science being on the cutting edge, on pushing the limits of what we know, on being "disruptive" (in a good sense), has all but vanished.  Instead, the money-making model -- writing papers so you get citations so you get grants so you can write more papers, and so on and so on -- has blunted the edge of what academia accomplishes, or even can accomplish.

And I can't help but throw this fluff piece by Loeb into that same mix.  As a struggling writer who has yet to exceed a three-figure income from my writing in a given year, I have to wonder how much The Debrief paid Loeb for his article.  I shouldn't be envious of another writer, I guess; and honestly, I wouldn't be if what Loeb had written had scientific merit, or even substance.

But as is, the whole thing pisses me off.  It adds to the public perception of scientists as speculative hand-wavers, gives the credulous the impression that something is possible when it probably isn't, teaches the reader nothing most of us haven't already known for years, and puts another entirely undeserved feather in Avi Loeb's cap.

My general sense is that he was doing less harm when he was looking for an alien hiding behind every tree.

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Following Bigfoot down the wormhole

Today, we turn to the ever-entertaining Nick Redfern over at Mysterious Universe, and an article that appeared yesterday called "Bigfoot: An Inter-Dimensional Entity."

What, you might ask, does "inter-dimensional" mean?  I'm not sure.  Over at Dictionary.com we read the following definitions for the word "dimension:"

1. extension in time.
2. measurement in length, width, and thickness.
3. scope; importance.
4. magnitude; size.
5. a magnitude that, independently or in conjunction with other such magnitudes, serves to define the location of an element within a given set, as of a point on a line, an object in a space, or an event in space-time.
6. any of a set of basic kinds of quantity, as mass, length, and time, in terms of which all other kinds of quantity can be expressed.
7. a property of space; extension in a given direction:

• the generalization of this property to spaces with curvilinear extension, as the surface of a sphere.

• the generalization of this property to vector spaces and to Hilbert space.

• the generalization of this property to fractals, which can have dimensions that are non-integer real numbers.

I guess "inter-dimensional" is "between two or more definitions on the above list."  So I still have no idea, really, what the hell it means, and I suspect Mr. Redfern doesn't either.  Because in the article itself, we discover that he is of the opinion that Bigfoot's elusiveness has come about because of the Hairy Dude's ability to jump through wormholes.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Redfern seems to have picked up the idea from one Ronan Coghlan, a paranormal investigator from Ireland.  Here's Coghlan's take on the whole thing:

Now, how do you get into, or out of, alternative universes?  Well, the answer is quite simple: You have heard of worm-holes, I’m sure?...   Physicists admit there is a possibility that this exists, and it would be like a short-cut, from one universe to another.  Thus, for example, it’s rather like a portal: Something from the other universe would come through it.  Or, something from another planet could come through it... If there are any of these worm-holes on Earth, it would be quite easy for anything to come through, like a Bigfoot, and it’s quite possible any number of anomalous creatures could find their way through from time to time.

I have to admit, of all of the possible manifestations of wormholes I've ever heard of, their being used as means for avoiding capture by elusive North American proto-hominids is probably the last thing I'd have come up with.  But Coghlan and Redfern think that this may also explain Mothman and UFOs, so apparently wormholes aren't the highly theoretical and unproven phenomena that posers like Stephen Hawking think, they're scattered around in the woods of North America as thickly as beer bottles after a college campout.  You have to wonder, if they're that common, how random hikers aren't getting sucked into wormholes every other day, disappearing from the Appalachian Trail and reappearing milliseconds later in, say, downtown Peoria.

But Coghlan admits that wormholes aren't the only possibility for Bigfoot's elusiveness:

I think, looking at a great many legends, folk-tales, and things of that nature, it is possible to vibrate at different rates.  And if you vibrate at a different rate, you are not seen.  You are not tangible.  And, then, when your vibration changes, you are seen, and you are tangible.  Maybe that this has something to do with Bigfoot appearing and disappearing in a strange fashion.

Righty-o.  As far as this goes, which Coghlan describes as "cutting-edge physics, as it were," I can say with some authority that you can make fiddle strings vibrate at a variety of different rates, and one thing that it almost never does is make the fiddle become invisible.  So Coghlan's grasp of actual physics seems to be tenuous at best, and his ideas about why we don't seem to be able to get a hold of an actual Bigfoot are cutting-edge bullshit.

As it were.

Which may seem a little harsh, but it's a point I've made before: if you're going to use scientific terms to support your argument, you should take the time to learn what the fuck said scientific terms mean.  I mean, it's nice to keep an open mind to strange ideas, and all, but this just strikes me as lazy.

"Inter-dimensional entity," my ass.