Time Loops

In her stunning 2007 meshing of critical theory, physics, and gender studies, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad revisited Bohr and his then-untestable Gedanken-experiments from the standpoint of recent developments in what she calls “experimental metaphysics”—the

Meaning is the value of information, in other words, and it is what we as humans constantly create and recreate as part of our social and cultural experience.50 Rather than hovering over and above us, animating us, or exerting its own transpersonal causal (or, in Jung’s paradoxical formulation, “acausal”) force, meaning is constantly fashioned and

This after-the-fact selection of some of the light to measure again is known in these experiments as post-selection—a key concept that we will be returning to throughout the remainder of this book.

Could it be that quantum computers really compute across time

is not unthinkable that the brain may turn out to be something like a squishy, pinkish-gray tesseract—a roughly six-inch-in-diameter information tunnel through time,

unlike memory for past experiences, we have no context for recognizing information from our future, let alone interpreting or evaluating it, and thus will seldom even notice its existence. We would also have little ability to directly search our memory for things future, the way we can rummage in our mental attic for information we know we acquired

Precognition operates in the shadow realm of uncertainty. Some things that look very much like precognition may indeed be just coincidence, and there is no way to know for sure.

What we are talking about here instead is an inflection of ordinary particles’ observable behavior by something ordinarily unobservable: measurements—that is, interactions—that lie ahead in those particles’ future histories.

Knowledge evolves by the spreading of metaphors and the (mis)application of new concepts to different, seemingly unrelated questions—a healthy epistemic ecosystem depends on cross-fertilization, play, and error. The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called it bricolage