Paul Levinson: The Chronology Protection Case

Jennifer nodded again. “Same for me. Wheeler wrote about cosmic censorship. Maybe he was on to the same thing as Hawking.”

“All right, so what does that tell us?” I said. “Even thinking about publishing this is dangerous. But apparently it’s not a capital offense —knowing about this is in itself not fatal. We’re still alive. It’s as if the Universe allows private, crackpot knowledge in this area—’cause no one takes crackpots seriously, even scientific ones. It’s the danger of public dissemination that draws the response—the threat of an objectively accepted scientific theory. Our private knowledge isn’t the real problem here. Communication is. The definite intention to publish. That’s what kills you. Yeah, cosmic censorship is a good way of putting it.”

“OK,” Jennifer said.

“OK,” I said. “But it’s also clear that we can’t just ignore this—can’t expect to suppress it in our minds. Not having any particular plan to publish won’t be enough to save us—not in the long run. Sooner or later after a dark silent night we’d get the urge to shout it out. It’s human nature. It’s inside of us. Hays’s suicide proves it—his note spells it out. You can’t just not think of something. You can’t just will an idea into oblivion. It’s self-defeating. It makes you want to get up on the rooftop and scream it to the world even more—like a repressed love.”

“Agreed,” Jennifer said. “So what do we do, then?”

“Well, we can’t go public with this story, and we can’t will ourselves to forget it. But maybe there’s a third way. Here’s what I was thinking. I can tell you—in strict confidence—that we sometimes do this in forensics.” I lowered my voice. “Let’s say we have someone who was killed in a certain way, but we don’t want the murderer to know that we know how the murder took place. We just deliberately at first publicly interpret the evidence in a different way—after all, there’s usually more than one trauma that can result in a given fatal injury to a body —more than one plausible explanation of how someone was killed. Slipped and hit your head on a rock, or someone hit you on the head with a rock—sometimes there’s not much difference between the results of the two.”

“The Universe is murderous; all right, I can see that, but I don’t see how what you’re saying would work in our situation,” Jennifer said.

“Well, you tell me,” 1 said. “Your group thinks it built a wormhole that allows signaling through time. But couldn’t you find another phenomenon to attribute those effects to? After all, we only have time travel on the brain because of H. G. Wells and his literary offspring. Let’s say Wells had never written The Time Machine ? Let’s say science fiction had taken a different turn? Then your group would likely have come up with another explanation for your findings. And you can do this now anyway!” I took a sip of wine and realized I felt pretty good. “You can publish an article on your work, and attribute your findings to something other than time travel. Indicate they’re some sort of other physical effect. Come up with the equivalent of a false phlogiston theory, an attractive bogus conception for this tiny sliver of subatomic phenomena, to account for the time travel effects. The truth is, few if any serious scientists actually believe that time travel is possible anyway, right? Most think it’s just science fiction, nothing else. Who would have reason to suspect a time travel effect here unless you specifically called attention to it?”

Jennifer considered. “The graduate research assistants worked only on the data acquisition level. Only the project principals, the seven of us,” she caught her breath, winced— “only the seven of us knew this was about time travel. No one else. Ours were supposedly the best minds in this area. Lot of good it did us.”

“I know,” I tried to be as reassuring as I could. “But then without that time travel label, all you’ve got is another of a hundred little experiments in this area per year—jeez, I checked the literature, there are a lot more than that—and your study would likely get lost in the wash. That should shut the Universe up. That should keep it safe from time travel—send the scientific community off on the wrong track, in a different direction—maybe not send them off in any direction at all. Could you do that?”

Jennifer sipped her wine slowly. Her glass was shaking. Her lips clung to the rim. She was no doubt thinking that her life depended on what she decided to do now. She was probably right. Mine too.

“Exotic matter is what makes the effect possible,” she said at last. “Exotic matter keeps the wormhole open long enough. No one knows much about how it works—in fact, as far as I know, our group created this kind of exotic matter, in which weak forces are suspended, for the first time in our project. I guess I could make a case that a peculiar property of this exotic matter is that it creates effects that mimic time travel in artificial wormholes—I could make a persuasive argument that we didn’t really see time travel through that wormhole at all, what we have instead is a reversal of processes to earlier stages when they come in contact with our exotic matter, no signaling from the future. You know—we thought the glass was half full, but it was really half empty.”

“No,” I said. “That’s still not going far enough. You’ve got to be more daring in your deception—come up with something that doesn’t invoke time travel at all, even in the negative. Publishing a paper with results that are explicitly said not to demonstrate time travel is akin to someone the police never heard of coming into the station and saying he didn’t do it—that only arouses our suspicion. I’m sorry to be so blunt, Jennifer. But you’ve got to do more. Can’t you come up with some effects of exotic matter that have nothing to do with time travel at all?”

She drained her wine glass and put it down, neither half full nor half empty. Completely empty. “This goes against everything in my life and training as a scientist,” she said. “I’m supposed to pursue the truth, wherever it takes me.”

“Right,” I said. “And how much truth will you be able to pursue when you’re like Hays and Strauss and the others?”

“Einstein said the Universe wasn’t malicious,” she said. “This is unbelievable.”

“Maybe Einstein was saying the glass was half empty when he knew it was half full. Maybe he knew just what he was doing—knew which side his bread was buttered—maybe he wanted to live past middle age.”

“God Almighty!” She slammed her hand on the table. Glasses rattled. “Couldn’t I just swear before you and the Universe never to publish anything about this? Wouldn’t that be enough?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said. “From the Universe’s point of view, your publishing a paper that explicitly attributes the effects to something other than time travel seems much safer—to you as well as the Universe. Let’s say you change your mind, years from now, and try to publish a paper that says you succeeded with time travel after all. You’d already be on record in the literature as attributing those effects to something else—you’d be much less likely to be believed then. Safer for the Universe. Safer for you. A paper with a false lead is not only our best bet now, it’s an insurance policy for our future.”

Jennifer nodded, very slowly. “I guess I could come up with something—some phenomenon unrelated to time travel—unsuggestive of it. The connection of quantum effects to human thought has always had great appeal, and even though I personally never saw much more than wishful thinking in that direction.”

“That’s better,” I said quietly.