What better way to start a year than with a fresh new report - or in this case, a veritable article - from a reader?
Well, here is one for you to enjoy: a very long one, very well written, complete with extensive thoughts on the possible reasons for perceived "timeslips".
Many thanks to Scotty Matthews, its author.
Timeslips, Altered Timelines,
and the Science of Multiple Realities
There are numerous accounts of people
experiencing places and events from other times... from years or
decades before, to hundreds of years in the future.
These accounts are often ridiculed with
the same skeptical fervor too often directed at those who report UFO
sightings, or encounters with Sasquatch. But there is a very real
potential that these experiences are real. First, I'll relate a
couple experiences from my life, and then I'll explain a few key
concepts from Einstein's Relativity, and from quantum physics, that
fully explain how this phenomenon could be all too real.
Near where my father used to live, not
far from Monticello, Illinois, there is a very unusual place called
Allerton Park. It was once the 17,000-acre country estate of a
wealthy industrialist named Robert Allerton. When he died, he gave
the whole place to the University of Illinois, which turned it into a
public park, self-supported by several working farms on the property.
Most of the park is forested land, along the Sangamon River,
surrounded by corn and soybean fields... it represents the forested
prairie before all the trees were cut down for farmland.
The place is well known for it's
English Formal Gardens. Far off on one side of the park, there is a
place which is known as “The Lost Garden.” It is no longer
cultivated as a garden, and consists of a small parking area off a
country road, that connects to a 40-foot wide path which traverses a
shallow valley for about an eighth of a mile, where it ends in
pristine oak woods.
I was 17 years old, and one Saturday, I
went to Allerton Park. I liked to go there to quietly commune with
nature, and I went to the Lost Garden. There were no other visitors
around that part of the park that day. I arrived there about 1:45 in
the afternoon, and hadn't visited this particular location in years.
I walked alone all the way to the end of the clearing/path, to where
it rose into the woods. At the end, there was a small, old concrete
slab, about six feet square, and next to it was an old tree stump,
about 24 inches tall, and easily 2 feet across... It appeared to
have been cut like that long ago. I sat on the stump to have a
cigarette and enjoy the breeze and the sunshine filtering down
through the Oak Leaf canopy of trees.
I remember it got very quiet and still.
And at that moment, a large barred owl came swooping from above the
trees, following the clearing toward me. It did not flap it's wings.
As the ground curved uphill, the owl swooped upward and landed
somewhere in the trees directly above me. It was an amazing moment.
I an still recall it vividly, because at the time, it barely seemed
real. It was just about then that the breeze picked up, and it
appeared that clouds had moved in, because the sun was no longer
shining down through the trees as it had been. It began to feel
chilly, so I began to walk back, which was about a six minute walk.
The entire time I spent there could not have been more than 45
minutes, and that's being generous. But as I came back into the
clearing, out from the area that is enclosed by trees, I noticed that
the sun was much further down on the horizon. I looked at my watch,
and it was 5:45 P.M. In what I had experienced as no more than 45
minutes, it seemed that four hours had passed. But my watch was
correct, nonetheless.
Now, there are stories of “missing
time” associated with UFO abduction reports, and in Whitley
Strieber's books on his abduction experiences, he describes some
events becoming covered with “screen memories,” sometimes
involving visions of owls. (Apparently, our subconscious can
substitute an owl's face for the face of an alien with big eyes. As
to the veracity of that information, I cannot comment, but I include
it as a footnote, because for many weeks thereafterward, I suspected
that something strange had happened to me in the woods that day, and
maybe it had something to do with UFO's.)
But about two months later, I decided
to go back to the same place. When I had again walked to the far end
of the clearing, where it ends in the wooded area, I discovered
something that was quite impossible. The old concrete slab was not
there, nor was the ancient stump. It's not that they had been
removed... there was no appearance that anything there had been
disturbed, nor indeed had the grass of the clearing been recently
mowed... They simply didn't exist. But they had existed in a
reality I experienced only weeks before.
Another experience I had took place in
the early 90's when I was living and working in Cookeville,
Tennessee. At the time, a new road, called Interstate Drive, had
just been built. It ran alongside I-40, and at the time, there were
only a couple of car dealerships on one end, and the rest had not
been developed. Near the middle of this road was a little gravel
drive that went about 40 yards off toward the treeline, where there
was a small park pavilion, next to a small old fenced-in historic
cemetery... having maybe 10 or twelve headstones that appeared to
date from the 1800's to the early 1900's.
One day, on my lunch hour, I went to
the brand new Subway Sandwich Shop, got a Tuna Sub, and went to this
isolated pavilion to enjoy my lunch in the open air, and in solitude.
I remember it quite distinctly. Then, only a few months later, I
decided one day to return there, but the location was not the same.
There was no gravel side-road, no pavilion, no cemetery. Just
overgrown grass. So, where exactly had I enjoyed that Tuna Sandwich
on that warm Spring day?
The final experience I'll relate here
was in 1991, when I drove, with a friend, from Cookeville, Tennessee
to Washington, D.C. It's a long straight drive along I-40 going
east-northeast. And I calculated that it would take just over 9
hours. We set out around 10 AM on Friday morning, with sandwiches
and a cooler of drinks so we wouldn't have to stop on the way, except
for gas. We arrived in Washington D.C. A little after 3 in the
afternoon. This baffled me. We would have to have been traveling
the whole route at well over 100 miles per hour to make it in five
hours, and that certainly had not been the case. We had a big event
to attend in Washington on Saturday, so we met up with the friend we
were staying with, and didn't give it much more thought. We departed
after the event on Saturday, and the drive home took nine and a half
hours, which is exactly how long the trip there should have taken.
There is a famous story from around the
turn of the 20th century about two ladies, who were
friends and academic colleagues, who had traveled from Britain to
visit the Palace at Versailles.[This,
of course, is the story of Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain
which, in a way, prompted the creation of this very blog. See, e.g., Another garden, another time. Note by Myosotis.] But what they encountered when they
were there was visiting the palace as it had been hundreds of years
before, and interacting with people from that time.
There is also a
famous story of four British travelers going by car through the
French countryside in the late 1970's, when they stopped for the
night at a roadside inn. They had a wonderful meal together, and
were somewhat puzzled by other people at the inn, who all appeared to
be in historical period attire. They stayed the night, had breakfast
there the next morning, were charged only 19 Francs for their entire
stay and meals, took three photographs, and drove on to their
destination. On the way back, they decided to stay at the same
place, but when they got to the location, there was no inn, only the
crumbling foundations of an old building. When they got the photos
of their trip developed, all of the pictures came out perfectly,
except the three they had taken at the inn (with two different
cameras!) There was apparently nothing on the negatives at all.
Several Internet postings on similar
phenomenon include people recalling that the continent of Australia
used to be shaped a bit differently, and was also in a different
position, further from the islands of Southeast Asia. I just looked
at a map, and it certainly seems to me that when I was a kid in
school, studying geography, Australia was nowhere near as close to
those islands to the north.
So... what's happening here? Is it
just shared hallucinations, delusions, misremembered events, or is it
even remotely possible that we could experience events from another
time, or have the physical world itself appear to have a history
different from what we distinctly remember?
It turns out that not only are these
things distinctly possible... they're almost inevitable. And this is
because space, time, and matter are substantially much more bizarre
than we generally experience in everyday life.
It's time for a few observations from
proven experimental physics, along with some current theory, that
play a role in the explanation. Don't worry, there won't be any
equations involved.
According to Einstein, time and space
are part of the same thing. You can't travel in space without
changing the rate at which time moves for you, relative to a
stationary observer. I won't go into why this is... it's basic
Relativity Theory, and it was proven with paired atomic clocks in
1971, and many times since. But the important thing to understand is
this: Everyone experiences an individual timeline, unique to them
and their passage through space. Portions of that timeline will be
in sync with others who are moving at the same relative speed in the
same direction simultaneously, but as soon as those other move in
different directions and at different speeds, our experiences of the
passage of time also diverge slightly. In this way, time is elastic,
literally passing at different rates for different people, and for
all the matter in the universe.
We know from experiments in particle
physics that fundamental particles, like photons, can become
“entangled.” That is to say, if quantum entanglement is
established between two like photons, they will share a equal and
opposite “energy state,” no matter how far apart they are. They
could be on opposite sides off the Universe, but so long as they
remain entangled, they are, in a very real sense simultaneously
physically connected. Einstein had a couple of problems with this
idea from Quantum Physics, but it has been proven in many many
laboratory experiments.
One problem is... the particles, being
entangled, remain in the same inertial reference frame (a term from
Relativity which describes a common frame of reference in spacetime
in which a stationary observer would be able to witness events
occurring simultaneously, and the events themselves (such as the
behavior of an elementary particle at any given time) would agree
with it's entangled particle that the behaviors happened at the same
time. But! What if those entangled photons actually are a great
distance, say, many many lightyears apart? The forces of gravitation
and electromagnetism would be different in different regions of
space, and (Einstein again) different amounts of gravity will distort
spacetime in different ways... which means that the local “time”
for each of the particles would have to be different. The time in
that region of space could not possibly be ticking at exactly the
same rate... so how could the particles possibly experience
“simultaneous” events? Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Stay
with me. It's about to get very very weird.
We now know that whole groups of
particles... photons, electrons, even whole clusters of atoms, can
become mutually entangled at a quantum level. By natural extension,
it is reasonable to assume, that for short periods of time, very very
large pieces of matter can become quantum-entangled with other very
very large pieces of matter. Large pieces of matter such as humans,
for instance. I know I'm stretching entanglement just a bit, but as
I said, stay with me, because this gets really good.
Back to Einstein... if two “observers”
are stationary in space relative to each other, then their common
“now” instant will be—for lack of a better analogy—a
straight-line slice across the “present” moment, that they would
agree is simultaneous. However, if one of them begins to travel in
space relative to the other, they would no longer agree on what time
it is, and would not agree on what is “simultaneous.” In fact,
the “slice” for the one who is moving would appear to be a
diagonal “slice” across spacetime, compared to the stationary
one's “straight across” slice. What is the present for one, is
the past for the other.
Ahem... however, if the topography of
the Universe is even half as strange as we think it is (it is almost
certainly several orders of magnitude stranger than that) then even
in our own personal timelines, there are multiple parallel
possibilities brought on by the potential of massive quantum
entanglements. Quantum entanglements are a “rip” through the
fabric of spacetime, forcing simultaneous frames of reference in
far-flung distant points in space and time. This entanglement will
remain stable until it is “observed”, at which point, the
entanglement collapses. I won't go into the Quantum Mechanics
definition of “observation,” but for our purposes, it means
basically what you think it means. The entangled particles have to
interact with another particle in order to “collapse” the
entanglement.
When they are observed, the
entanglement collapses, and their simultaneity is discontinued, at
which point, they would “pop” into the Relativistic frame of
reference common to the surrounding space they occupy, independent of
the frame of reference occupied by their formerly entangled twin.
And so, somehow, if you happen to be
the “observer” who breaks the quantum entanglement, you would
briefly see two contradictory frames of reference merge around the
formerly entangled matter, as the time frames drift back into sync.
Now, as unlikely as it is that an entire French inn from the 1900's
could exist in 1979 long enough for British tourists to spend the
night, and as unlikely as it is for a pair of travelers to experience
the entire Palace at Versailles to be hundreds of years out of place
for several hours, and as utterly unlikely as it is that I could
drive a 1989 Chevy Blazer from Cookeville, Tennessee to Washington DC
in just five hours... it is absolutely POSSIBLE for these things to
happen, given our understanding of how very strange spacetime and
matter really are in the way they relate to each other.
And, with another tip of the hat to
good old Al Einstein, he famously said “Anything in the universe
that is not strictly prohibited by the laws of physics, is absolutely
necessary... (however, practically everything is prohibited!)”
What he meant was, that in a functionally infinite universe,
everything that ever possibly could happen, no matter how improbable,
must happen somewhere, sometime. And given our understanding of
physics (which is still woefully incomplete, but getting very very
interesting lately) this means it is absolutely possible to
experience events which happened in the past, or in the future as if
they were in your present moment. It is absolutely possible that on
either side of that event, the past of some timelines, or the future
of some timelines could be altered. Like... a tree stump that had
been in a particular spot for a hundred years might turn out, when
you look for it again, never to have been there at all.
I could have gone into the science in
much greater technical detail, and not cut corners with some of the
explanations, but I didn't intend this to be a physics textbook. I
just wanted to point out that we already understand that time is NOT
simultaneous for any two particles in the universe, throughout their
entire timeline. No two particles in the Universe can have the same
quantum “state” at the “same time”. So, once in a while,
under very special circumstances, some separate frames of reference
which span huge swaths of space and time MUST become merged through
collapsing quantum entanglements, and temporarily break “the
present” in a localized area. Anything on the timeline of any bit
of matter that exists on one of the merging frames of reference would
experience a fractured simultaneity, experiencing an overlap between
two “different” times, or physical change in the universe that
had to happen in order for the merging frames to become mutually and
causally consistent.
Could this explain ghosts? Could this
explain UFO's? Could this explain how an entire gravel road and
historic cemetery could simply disappear?
Absolutely. No doubt about it. In
fact... these sorts of things are inevitable. If you've witnessed
anything like that, then consider yourself lucky, because even though
the Earth is a big place, events like this are still very
improbable... but they are not only possible: they are inevitable.
Is it the fault-lines fault?
Out of Mind?
The Ultimate Tourist
Yet I did not wonder...
(with links in each of them to many other relevant posts)
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