PRECOGNITION 277
retarded waves were so spectacularly beautiful and successful that engineers simply ignored the ugly twin. Why tamper with success?
But for physicists, the advanced wave has been a nagging problem
for the past century. Since Maxwell's equations are among the pillars
of the modern age, any solution of these equations has to be taken very
seriously, even if it entails accepting waves from the future. It seemed
that it was impossible to totally ignore the advanced waves from the future. Why would nature, at this most fundamental level, give us such a
bizarre solution? Was this a cruel joke, or was there a more profound
meaning?
Mystics began to take an interest in these advanced waves, speculating that they would appear as messages from the future. Perhaps if
we could somehow harness these waves, we might be able to send
messages back to the past, and hence alert previous generations of
events to come. We could, for example, send a message back to our
grandparents in the year 1929, warning them to sell all their stocks before the Great Crash. Such advanced waves would not allow us personally to visit the past, as in time travel, but they would enable us to send
letters and messages into the past to alert people of key events that
would not yet have occurred.
These advanced waves were a mystery until they were studied by
Richard Feynman, who was intrigued by the idea of going backward in
time. After working on the Manhattan Project, which built the first
atomic bomb, Feynman left Los Alamos and went to Princeton University to work under John Wheeler. Analyzing Dirac's original work on
the electron, Feynman found something very strange. If he simply reversed the direction of time in Dirac's equation, the equation remained
the same if he also reversed the electron charge. In other words, an
electron going backward in time was the same as an antielectron going forward in time! Normally, a mature physicist might dismiss this
interpretation, calling it just a trick, a mathematical sleight-of-hand
with no meaning. Going backward in time did not seem to make any
sense, yet Dirac's equations were clear on this point. In other words,
Feynman had found the reason that nature allowed these backward-
retarded waves were so spectacularly beautiful and successful that engineers simply ignored the ugly twin. Why tamper with success?
But for physicists, the advanced wave has been a nagging problem
for the past century. Since Maxwell's equations are among the pillars
of the modern age, any solution of these equations has to be taken very
seriously, even if it entails accepting waves from the future. It seemed
that it was impossible to totally ignore the advanced waves from the future. Why would nature, at this most fundamental level, give us such a
bizarre solution? Was this a cruel joke, or was there a more profound
meaning?
Mystics began to take an interest in these advanced waves, speculating that they would appear as messages from the future. Perhaps if
we could somehow harness these waves, we might be able to send
messages back to the past, and hence alert previous generations of
events to come. We could, for example, send a message back to our
grandparents in the year 1929, warning them to sell all their stocks before the Great Crash. Such advanced waves would not allow us personally to visit the past, as in time travel, but they would enable us to send
letters and messages into the past to alert people of key events that
would not yet have occurred.
These advanced waves were a mystery until they were studied by
Richard Feynman, who was intrigued by the idea of going backward in
time. After working on the Manhattan Project, which built the first
atomic bomb, Feynman left Los Alamos and went to Princeton University to work under John Wheeler. Analyzing Dirac's original work on
the electron, Feynman found something very strange. If he simply reversed the direction of time in Dirac's equation, the equation remained
the same if he also reversed the electron charge. In other words, an
electron going backward in time was the same as an antielectron going forward in time! Normally, a mature physicist might dismiss this
interpretation, calling it just a trick, a mathematical sleight-of-hand
with no meaning. Going backward in time did not seem to make any
sense, yet Dirac's equations were clear on this point. In other words,
Feynman had found the reason that nature allowed these backward-