Imagine being strapped into a wheelchair and rolled backward down a steep hill. You have a clear view of where you've been, but no information about where you're heading except a vague, terrifying certainty that things are going to end very badly, very soon.
This sounds like something gangsters would do, but unfortunately it's also the way human beings experience the fourth dimension, that strange orthogonal axis we call "time." We could live moment to moment, the way animals seem to, or even in a completely unconscious state where all our responses were automatic and time had no meaning or relevance to us at all. Instead, we feel a distinct sense of motion we're helpless to control. We accelerate, tail first, into the jagged unknown.
But what if the wheelchair were equipped with rearview mirrors? The ride might be bumpy and the view incomplete, but with a little advance warning it should be possible to dodge around some of the obstacles.
The technical term for this—precognition—is generally associated with parapsychology, and with fantasy and science fiction. The Jedi can see a few seconds into the future—a necessary trick if you're going to dodge laser beams! Since lasers travel at the speed of light, it's literally impossible to get out of their way, or even see them coming. But with Jedi reflexes and martial-arts training, a human in good physical shape can generally arrange to be somewhere else when the first photons strike. The Jedi's evil cousins, the Sith, can prognosticate months or even years ahead, which is helpful in setting up wars, regime changes, mass murder and galactic domination. Of course, seeing the future is an empty tease if you're helpless to change it or if, like Paul Muad'Dib in
Dune Messiah, you find you can only change it once and are then forced to live through a future of your own mistaken creation.
Pseudoscience drivel—not!
In Lee Tamahori's action thriller
Next (very loosely based on Philip K. Dick's short story "The Golden Man"), we meet Cris Johnson, a seedy Vegas magician and low-stakes gambler with the power to see—and repeatedly change—the future within a narrow, two-minute window. In fact, the simple act of looking at the future causes it to change, so that Johnson perceives a constant haze of possible outcomes and is able to choose the one he likes best. The implication—that time is somehow quantum-mechanical in nature—tells us a lot about what sort of universe we're living in.
Indeed, according to the laws of physics, solid matter is actually made up from smears of uncertainty—particles that refuse to be nailed down to a particular location or speed. If this uncertainty extended to the fourth dimension—if mass and energy had hazy positions in time as well as space—then information really could leak backward into the past and be detected and thus alter the timeline ahead of it. So in raw physical terms, precognition is a perfectly rational concept that has yet to be proven one way or the other.
Historically, soothsayers have existed in every society, from the biblical prophets and the Greek oracles and sibyls, to Nostradamus and the medieval astrologers, to modern TV psychics and the
Weekly World News. Serious, peer-reviewed science has never confirmed precognitive powers in any person, but popular belief remains widespread. Why? Partly because fortune tellers often speak in riddles, and partly because their detailed predictions are usually only held up for examination when they turn out to be correct. In addition, there are whole classes of prediction that seem weirdly specific, yet apply to almost everyone. A dime-store psychic recently "sensed" a leg injury in my past—and in the past of every other person she talked to that night!
Anyway, while some reviewers have chosen to interpret
Next as pseudoscience drivel, I don't really see anything impossible about it. Just improbable. In fact, the worst criticism I have for the movie is really a critique of its protagonist. Cris Johnson wants to be likable and dull, but his desire for a "normal life" leaves him inexcusably timid, unimaginative and selfish with his gifts.
Enjoying the ride of life
In a zero-sum game like poker, value is neither created nor destroyed. Players simply move money around, hoping by skill or luck or cheating to end up richer than they started—always at someone else's expense. In a negative-sum game like
Battleship, pieces can be destroyed but not replaced. As a result, everyone winds up poorer in the end. But in the real world, air and dirt and sunshine can be combined to produce food. The elements in the Earth's crust can be reorganized into useful products, and new ideas give us ever-better access to the ultimate riches: energy and information. Over a span of decades, stock markets rise in an exponential fashion. This isn't an accident or some sort of weird accounting gimmick, but an actual measurement of the world's increasing wealth.
Why, then, does a man with superheroic powers choose to squander them on blackjack, sideshow gimmicks and carjacking—on zero-sum and negative-sum games—when he could be out saving the world from crime and disaster or even—perish the thought!—helping the global economy grow? Sadly, the movie's government heavies actually have the right idea. Sure, Cris can dodge bullets, but if he'd just talk to a physicist—or a science-fiction fan!—for a few minutes, he'd soon be writing notes to himself two minutes in the past, warning himself to write the note earlier and earlier and thus passing messages as far back in time as he wanted. What could the United Nations accomplish with a power like that?
But of course, if he did that we wouldn't have an end-of-April action movie to enjoy, so it's probably just as well. And since we, the audience, are powerless to affect the story's outcome, I'll offer the same advice when you plop yourself down in a theater seat that I would if you were strapped to a wheelchair and kicked down a hill: This is life. Enjoy the ride.
Sources:en.wikipedia.org: precognition, soothsayer
www.imdb.com: "Next"
www.rottentomatoes.com: "Next"
Wil McCarthy is a rocket guidance engineer, robot designer, nanotechnologist, science-fiction author and occasional aquanaut. He has contributed to three interplanetary spacecraft, five communication and weather satellites, a line of landmine-clearing robots and some other "really cool stuff" he can't tell us about. His short writings have graced the pages of Analog, Asimov's, Wired, Nature and other major publications, and his book-length works include the New York Times notable Bloom, Amazon "Best of Y2K" The Collapsium and most recently, To Crush the Moon. His acclaimed nonfiction book, Hacking Matter, is now available as a free download.
