Page 142 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

The Quantum Reticulator

metamaterials he needed. But how to design such an experiment?
Gibbons knew that it had to be verified by external observers—but
they couldn’t all be given a view of alternate subsets of reality, and
who would believe them if they were? And what if some risk were
involved? No, he alone would be the space-time traveler, and he
would have to bring back proof that he had been in—or at least had
witnessed--the “forbidden zone.”
His next diagram showed a cluster of X’s, all overlapping and
strung along a single horizontal line passing through their centers;
each, with respect to the others, was therefore partially inaccessible.
Then, from below, in the past, came a series of world lines, each
originating in the same point in the past and connecting with a
different X intersection. Those lines, therefore, represented possible
futures for that earlier point—but they could not lead to
simultaneous present points: relative to the others, each was in an
isolated region of space-time. Imagine, he proposed, that from the
common point in the past, an unknown number of different
quantum states could be arrived at in the present, and that some of
those mutually-exclusive alternates could be drawn back together in
the future. The following chart showed the same set of possible
presents for one point in the past, but it now had a mirror-image of
those diverging lines coming back to a common point in the future.
Each of those different present-to-future lines was a valid world line,
of course, but at that future point each of them could only have
come from the original point in the past by passing through one
point alone in the present—the horizontal line along which all those
different possible presents occurred. And that was how we perceived
our single view of what we like to call “the” universe.
Returning to the idea of a world line representing a signal, or
electromagnetic transfer of quantum information through space-time,
Gibbons stated that metamaterials would enable a future point to
receive many, if not all, of the signals transmitted along the possible
paths from the past. Those materials had a very limited ability to
bend light through space in such a way as to create an apparent
violation of the boundaries of the “forbidden zone.” His challenge,
therefore, was to create a device which would permit an observer to
make an extremely brief perceptual excursion through those
140