But What If We're Wrong? (13 page)

Well, fine. I give up. Pour me a drink. Simulate me, don't simulate me—it's all equally hopeless. We're just here, and there's nowhere else to be.

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Particle Fever
is a 2013 documentary about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It depicts the final seven years of the five-decade search for the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle at the core of everything we believe about deep physics and the origin of existence. The film is elucidated through the words of many perceptibly brilliant people, a few of whom spend much of the movie expressing dark apprehension over what will happen if the massive $9 billion LHC does not locate the Higgs particle. The person most openly nervous is the theorist identified as the academic star of his generation: Nima Arkani-Hamed. Born to a pair of Iranian doctors in 1972 and raised in Canada, the long-haired Arkani-Hamed directly states that if the Higgs particle can't be found, he will have wasted at least fifteen years of his life. Later, when discussing the bizarre numeric perfection of the “cosmological constant,”
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he says something that guys in his position don't usually say.

“This is the sort of thing that really keeps you up at night,” Arkani-Hamed says. “It really makes you wonder if we've got something about the whole picture—the big picture—totally, totally, totally wrong.”

Or maybe not. Spoiler alert: They find the particle. The experiment works. The previous fifteen years of Arkani-Hamed's life
were not in vain. But the discovery of the Higgs doesn't prove we are necessarily
right
about the origin of life; it just means that we're still not wrong. Moreover, the unexpected mass of the Higgs particle—125 GeV—doesn't corroborate the likelihood of a multiverse or the likelihood of its competing theory (a more elegant, less chaotic vision of the universe called “supersymmetry”). Still, this ninety-five-yard drive ends with a touchdown: The scientific community believed that something they could not see was there, and it ultimately was. It's an indicator that we are not wrong, and that the current path might be the final path.

And yet, even within this success, I can't help but wonder . . . if the finest physicist in North America was willing to publicly express anxiety over his entire life's work, how stable can any of this be? When Arkani-Hamed finds himself awake in his bed, wondering about his potential wrongness, is he being insecure or pragmatic? And what if the Higgs particle had
not
been found? Would any of the geniuses involved in its search quit their jobs? Would they have rebooted the entire concept? No way. They would have merely viewed the experiment itself as a failure, or the LHC as too small, or the particle as too crafty. They would have to double down on their commitment to certitude and we would have to agree with them. Philosophically, as a species, we are committed to this. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.

Do I believe we are right? I believe we are right. But even if I didn't, what would I
do?

The term “conspiracy theory” has an irrevocable public relations problem. Technically, it's just an expository description for a certain class of unproven scenario. But the problem is that it can't be self-applied without immediately obliterating whatever it's allegedly describing. You can say, “I suspect a conspiracy,” and you can say, “I have a theory.” But you can't say, “I have a conspiracy theory.” Because if you do, it will be assumed that even you don't entirely believe the conspiracy you're theorizing about. There's also a growing belief that conspiracy theories aren't merely goofy; some would argue they're politically detrimental. Early in his book
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
,
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British journalist David Aaronovitch asserts, “The belief
in conspiracy theories is, I hope to show, harmful in itself. It distorts our view of history and therefore of the present, and—if widespread enough—leads to disastrous decisions.” A smart person is supposed to recognize that the term “conspiracy theory” has only one conversational utility: It's a way to marginalize undesirable possibilities as inherently illogical, along with the people who propose them.

But I want to consider a conspiracy theory (so I will). And by virtue of my previous argument, this means I want to consider a theory that I don't actually believe (and I don't). It is, however, my favorite theory about anything. It's the largest possible conspiracy, and perhaps the least plausible. It's also the hardest to disprove, and—if it
were
true—the least socially damaging. It's referred to as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and the premise is as straightforward as it is insane: It suggests that the past (or at least the past as we know it) never happened at all.

There are two strains of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, both of which have been broadly discredited. The first version is the “minor theory,” proposed by the German historian Heribert Illig and extended by engineer Hans-Ulrich Niemitz. The German version of Phantom Time proposes that the years AD 614 to 911 were falsified, ostensibly by the Catholic Church, so that rulers from the period could begin their reign in the year 1000 (which would thereby allow their lineage to rule for the next millennium, based on the superstition that whoever was in power in the year 1000 would remain in that position for the next ten centuries).
The second version is the “major theory,” hailing from Russia, developed by Marxist revolutionary Nikolai Morozov and outlined in detail by mathematician Anatoly Fomenko. In this so-called New Chronology, everything that supposedly happened prior to the eleventh century is a historical forgery; the historical record we currently accept was constructed in the fifteenth century by French religious scholars. The argument is not that history
begins
in the eleventh century, but that we simply don't know what happened before that, so powerful French historians
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attempted to re-create and insert various events from the Middle Ages upon the expanse of our unknown pre-history. This would mean that many historical figures are simply different mythological versions of the same root story (for example, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane would all be roughly based on the same person). The life of Jesus Christ, surmises Fomenko, is a hagiographic interpretation of the reign of a likable twelfth-century Byzantine emperor who tried to destroy the aristocracy and empower the underclass. In short, everything we think we know about the ancient world is a fictional story, based on things that happened less than a thousand years ago.

Now, if you want to view these competing theories as totally crazy, you will not have to work particularly hard (it says a lot that the notion's “minor” version would still mean I'm unknowingly writing this book in the year 1718). There is an avalanche of data that disputes these suppositions, some of which is astrological (e.g., the record of when certain comets and eclipses were seen that
concur with our standard timeline) and some of which is archaeological (the major hypothesis would mean that hundreds of historical artifacts supporting our conventional view of history are brilliant forgeries, secretly produced by fifteenth-century monks). There's also the question of motive: Fomenko's revisionist timeline places the center of all “real history” inside Russia, which is probably why the only people who take it seriously are Russian (most notably grandmaster chess champion Garry Kasparov, who wrote a long essay in support of the theory titled “Mathematics of the Past”). Yet the brilliance of these theories—and particularly the larger, Russo-centric hypothesis—is the unassailability of its scope. If you believe that all of history is a fabrication, every piece of evidence disputing that claim is
also
a fabrication. For example, Halley's Comet was spotted in AD 837 (in multiple countries), which is exactly when it should have been seen, which indicates that the year 837 must have happened the way we generally assume . . . unless, of course, you believe that the Dark Ages are classified as “dark” because they didn't happen at all, and all the ancillary details they encompass were manufactured by sinister people who made sure the math worked out. There is no way to irrefutably disprove either strain of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, as both are fundamentally grounded in the belief that all the information we possess about the distant past is unreal. Anything contradicting the possibility of established human history being false is proof that the plot succeeded. It's an inane argument that cannot be defeated.

So why consider it at all?

I consider it because of the central principle. Phantom Time inadvertently prompts a greater question that is not inane at all. Granted, it's the kind of question someone like David Aaronovitch
hates to hear, and it opens the door to a lot of troubling, misguided conjecture. But it still must be asked:
Discounting those events that occurred within your own lifetime, what do you know about human history that was not communicated to you by someone else
?

This is a question with only one possible answer.

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Arguing with a Phantom Time advocate is a little like arguing with someone who insists that your life is not really happening, and that you're actually asleep right now, and that everything you assume to be reality is just a dream that will disappear when you awake. How does one dispute such an accusation? It can't be done (unless you consider “scoffing” to be a valid forensic technique). You can disagree with the claim that any specific world condition is illusionary, but you can't refute that the world itself is an illusion; there's no other world to compare it against. The closest equivalent we have
is
the dream world—which, somewhat curiously, has never been viewed as less important than it is right now.

For most of human history, the act of dreaming was considered deeply important, almost like a spiritual interaction with a higher power. Three thousand years ago (assuming Fomenko was wrong), Tibetan monks would teach themselves to lucid dream in order to pursue enlightenment through a process called Dream Yoga. Around 1619, philosopher René Descartes forwarded his take on the so-called Dream Argument, the quintessential distillation
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of the “Maybe this isn't really happening” dorm room conversation. The zenith of dream seriousness occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, defined by the work of Sigmund Freud (who thought dreams were everything) and his adversarial protégé Carl Jung (who thought dreams were
more
than everything—they were glimpses into a collective unconscious, shared by everyone who's ever lived). But soon after World War I, this mode of thinking slowly started to crumble. The ability to map the brain's electrical activity started in 1924—and from that point forward, dreams increasingly mattered less. The last wide-scale attempt at cataloging a database of human dreams dissipated in the sixties. In 1976, two Harvard psychiatrists
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proposed the possibility that dreams were just the by-product of the brain stem firing chaotically during sleep. Since then, the conventional scientific sentiment has become that—while we don't
totally
understand why dreaming happens—the dreams themselves are meaningless.
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They're images and
sounds we unconsciously collect, almost at random.
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The psychedelic weirdness of dreaming can be explained by the brain's topography: The part of your mind that controls emotions (the limbic system) is highly active during dreams, while the part that controls logic (the prefrontal cortex) stays dormant. This is why a dream can feel intense and terrifying, even if what you're seeing within that dream wouldn't sound scary if described to someone else. This, it seems, has become the standard way to compartmentalize a collective, fantastical phenomenon: Dreaming is just something semi-interesting that happens when our mind is at rest—and when it happens in someone else's mind (and that person insists on describing it to us at breakfast), it isn't interesting at all.

Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgment.

Every night, we're all having multiple metaphysical experiences, wholly constructed by our subconscious. Almost one-third of our lives happens inside surreal mental projections we create without trying. A handful of highly specific dreams, such as slowly losing one's teeth, are experienced unilaterally by unrelated people in unconnected cultures. But these events are so personal and inscrutable that we've stopped trying to figure out what they mean.

“We have come to the conclusion that dreams are something that can be explained away scientifically,” Richard Linklater tells me over the phone. He's calling from his studio in Texas, and I
sense he's sweeping the floor of a very large room as we chat—his sentences are periodically punctuated by the dulcet
swoosh
of a broom. “Dreams used to have a much larger role in the popular culture—people would discuss dreams in normal conversation and it was common for people to keep dream diaries. So why did that drop off, but things like astrology somehow stayed popular? I mean, one is an actual thing that happens to everyone, and the other is a system put in place that obviously can't be real. This idea that we're connected to other realities is somehow no longer worth considering at all, even though the multiverse theory and string theory is increasingly prominent, and more and more scientists are reluctantly conceding that certain things about the universe lead to that very possibility. So two things are happening simultaneously: We're moving into this period where our view of the universe is kind of a ‘What the fuck? How could that be?' scenario, where there's this possibility of endless alternative realities across space, totally based on conjecture—yet our dreams are supposed to mean
nothing
? The fact that we're in a parallel world every night is just supposed to be
meaningless
? I mean, the same scientists that are trying to explain away our dreams are also telling us things about the universe that are so mind-boggling that we almost can't describe them.”

Linklater is an Austin-based director who's best known to casual audiences for
Boyhood
, a fictional narrative he shot over the course of twelve years that was nominated for an Academy Award. His most successful film was
School of Rock
, his most intimate films comprise a cultic romantic trilogy, and his most canonically significant film is
Dazed and Confused
. But I wanted to interview Linklater about two of his less commercial projects: his nonlinear 1991
debut
Slacker
and the 2001 animated film
Waking Life
. The former opens with a nameless character (played by Linklater) speculating on the nature of dreaming, specifically the thought that dreams are glimpses into alternative realities running parallel to our own. The latter film is perhaps the most immersive dream experience ever transferred to celluloid—the rotoscoped re-creation of a sprawling lucid dream Linklater had when he was eighteen. Now in his mid-fifties, Linklater concedes that his willingness to view dreams as literal pathways to alternative worlds has “fallen off.” But he still thinks we're underrating the psychological importance of nocturnal narratives. The lucid dream that inspired
Waking Life
was encapsulated in the span of twelve real-time minutes of sleep, but—inside Linklater's mind—the dream lasted for days, to the point where he truly believed he had died. Is it possible that this serves a function? Do we need to create unconscious interior experiences in order to manage our conscious, exterior existence?

“Here's something I still think about: the near-death experience,” Linklater continues. “There are several bestselling books about this topic, usually from a very Christian perspective. But I talk about this concept very specifically in
Waking Life
. You have this chemical in your brain, dimethyltryptamine,
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this never-ending chemical that is always there until you die. And there is this thinking that at the moment you die, maybe all the
dimethyltryptamine that remains in your brain tissue gets used at once. And what's interesting is that all the bestselling books about near-death experiences are always about people getting close to God and seeing relatives and having this calm, wonderful experience. What they never tell you about are the people who have near-death experiences that are not good, and in fact incredibly unsettling. Which really just tells me that we bring so much of ourselves to these so-called afterlife moments, and that maybe this is something we need to prepare ourselves for.”

What Linklater is describing is an unrealized relationship between sleeping and dying, specifically the sensation of having one's life “flash before your eyes” in a near-death episode. That event is the ultimate dream experience, possibly driven by a flood of dimethyltryptamine. Is it possible that our normal nightly dreams are vaguely connected to this dramatic eventuality? If so, a spiritual person might argue this means dreams are preparing us for something quite important; using the same information, a secular person might argue this means dreams are micro-versions of a massive chemical event that happens only at the very end of life. But either way, such a scenario should drastically alter the significance we place on the
content
of dreams. Right now, we don't think the content of dreams matters at all. If we end up being wrong about the psychological consequence of dreaming, it will be the result of our willingness to ghettoize an acute cognitive experience simply because it seems too difficult to realistically study. The problem with studying the subject matter of dreams is straightforward: We can map the brain's electrical activity, but we can't
see
other people's dreams. The only way we can analyze the content of a dream is to ask the dreamer what she remembers.
That makes the entire endeavor too interpretive to qualify as regular science. Every detail can prove or disprove the same thesis.