Page 141 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

be enormous; for any “thing” (including a signal of any type) to arrive
sooner than that is impossible. But it was not Gibbons’ intention to
deliver a lecture on relativity physics. He moved on to cosmology.
In recent decades the concept of multiverse or an infinite number
of possible parallel existences branching off from every quantum
point of physical existence had gained popularity—but only as a
theory. No proof could be advanced for that as a better description
of reality than the composite world line everyone in our tight clump
of interwoven world lines agrees upon. And while the supposed
multiplicity of subsequent possibilities for any quantum, or minimal,
event cannot be predicted, neither can they be observed
simultaneously: it would require violating that maximum velocity
keeping world lines in each other’s “forbidden zones” apart; if
multiple resultant quantum states did in fact follow any given state,
the experiment did not yet exist to prove it, and thus the multiverse
remained hypothetical.
Gibbons had wrestled with this problem, getting nowhere until a
new class of compounds was developed: metamaterials capable of
accelerating and decelerating light at different wavelengths,
preserving in this prismatic fashion the total constant speed.
Scientists saw practical applications for this phenomenon; journalists
seized on the oddity that time could be distorted by this method,
permitting part of a signal technically to arrive before it had departed.
Simeon Gibbons saw another use: faster than light-speed
transmission of information could establish the existence of the
multiverse. This was the theory that went beyond another set of
limits, those set by physicists in his field. He would not give up his
ideas, and was forced to yield his position and lose credibility. Now,
after years of hardship and exile, he would show the Randolph
committee that clairvoyance was identical to perception of events in
the “forbidden zone,” and his colleagues that such a perception
established the fact of the multiverse.
I realized upon reading this that what had stopped Gibbons from
setting up an experiment to prove his theory was money, plain and
simple. If his peers would not take him seriously, neither would any
funding agency dependent on orthodox approval for its own
credibility. Al Magnus had given him enough to buy the
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