Page 140 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

subject or they independently decided I should receive it; I can’t
imagine it would have served his purpose to make it easy for me to
find out the results of enabling a nutcase to live out his frustrated
fixation. Nevertheless, a copy of the Randolph Prize report on the
Gibbons examination did arrive in my next post office box. It was
fairly dry material, at least until the end, but I can paraphrase most of
it, adding what was widely reported in popular sources I would have
had to be a hermit to ignore.
Gibbons, following my suggestion, issued a challenge to the prize
committee in the accepted format, detailing precisely how he would
prove the existence of what was considered paranormal perception.
That description of quantum reticulation made for the record
included a series of illustrations and instructions to the Randolph
people well ahead of his moment of truth. The theoretical basis for
his claim, said he, had been developing in physics and cosmology for
more than a century. Einstein’s linkage of space-time with the speed
of light led to the idea of a world line, a path representing possible
pasts and futures for any given point in the cosmos. This was
represented graphically in a Minkowski diagram, a two-dimensional
chart resembling the letter X, with the space-time location of a given
point at the intersection of the mutually-perpendicular lines of the
letter, and the possible pasts and futures being contained within the
lower and upper spaces of the X, respectively. When it is understood
that the flat diagram in fact is a stand-in for four-dimensional space-
time, and that the crossing lines are a boundary of possible past and
future positions defined by light-speed, then it can be seen that the
left and right areas of the X are regions of space-time inaccessible to
that present point. That “forbidden zone” could be contacted only by
traveling faster than the speed of light, an impossibility. Thus any
world line is limited to points in space-time it could either have come
from or gone to by means of traveling slower than light-speed, an
absolute constant no physical body can exceed—much less approach.
Two separated points can have intersecting world lines only if they
could reach one other without traversing the “forbidden zone.”
When you consider the light reaching us from far distant galaxies this
limitation becomes obvious: even at light-speed that intersection took
billions of years—light-years. Given such velocity, the distance had to
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