Is it possible to predict the future of history. Phenomenon of foresight or coincidence? Foresight experiments with images

In short, the present will become the past and the future the present.

Not a single person can know what is there, "around the corner", what should happen tomorrow or in a month. Almost all experiments support this view, but sometimes, in exceptional cases, people seem to be able to look into the past and also lift the veil over the future.

These cases of astounding clairvoyance cast doubt on the scientific postulates of a consistent, linear flow of time. Either for this reason, or because the plausibility of these stories cannot be tested in the laboratory, many scientists turn a blind eye to them and do not seek to think about the nature of this phenomenon. Few have dared to take the wrong path, trying to create a new theory of time that allows for strange and unexpected deviations from the usual course of things.

John William Dunn was a pioneer in the construction of aircraft, he built the first British military aircraft. But it is precisely as a writer and creator of the theory of time that he is known today, all researchers of the anomalous phenomena of that time spoke about his developments. Dunn was mainly interested in prophetic dreams and kept his own diary of "nightly predictions of the future" from the beginning of the century. But it was not until 1927 that he formalized his ideas into a book entitled Thoughts on Time, which was the first serious attempt to understand the phenomenon of clairvoyance.

Dunn's concept, which he called "sequential time", was complex and controversial, but many found it to have a reasonable grain. The writer is based on the assertion that the human mind is able to comprehend only what is being done or comprehended at the present moment of time, the past and future are inaccessible to it.

At the same time, according to Dunn's theory, consciousness can comprehend what a person is doing at any given moment, but at the same time, consciousness must understand what the human mind is aware of, and so on, ad infinitum. Thus, according to Dunn, the human mind is a psychic mirror hole.

If this theory is accepted, then it is not difficult, the writer assures, to go one step further and also admit that the perception of time can be deceptive, and it is quite possible that the sense of time in a dream does not coincide with the sense of time in waking hours.

What appeared to him in prophetic dreams, although it came true, was for the most part insignificant until 1916. Dunn was then working for the British Army and one day, in a dream, he clearly saw an explosion at a munitions factory. Two months later, in January 1917, a terrible explosion really took place in London at a bomb factory, killing 70 workers and injuring more than 1,000. Shortly after that, the aircraft designer had another prophetic dream in which an unprinted newspaper appeared before his eyes , the headlines of which reported the death of 4,000 people in a terrible disaster in the Far East, where a volcanic eruption occurred. Not more than a week later, a newspaper with that headline appeared on his desk in the morning. Only one detail did not add up: the number of victims was about 40,000, 10 times more than he had foreseen.

D.V. Dunn was the first person to be able to predict the future from dreams, and his book "Experiments on Time", published in 1927, was the only discourse on this subject by a person with a reputation as a scientist. This marked the beginning of several serious studies that led parapsychologists to revolutionize the ideas about our world, in particular, the concept of linear time, which many of us still adhere to. These studies have revealed that people anticipate misfortune much more often than we think, and that the subconscious sense of impending disaster can be a reliable defense mechanism for the whole world.

In 1966, Dr. JK Barker, an English psychiatrist from Shrewsbury, wondered whether flashes of clairvoyance really preceded great catastrophes. Taking as an example the Aberfan coal tragedy, which claimed the lives of 144 people on October 21 of that year, Barker asked those who received the news of the coming disaster to respond through the London Evening Standard newspaper.

He received more than 100 letters, of which 35 really deserved attention, as their authors talked about their premonitions to relatives and friends even before the tragedy occurred. The dreams were very different: one woman saw a hundred black horses with hearses rushing through the hills, others began to choke in a dream, and a black fog appeared before their eyes, some heard the screams of children - but in all these dreams there is a tragic shade.

After analyzing the results of the study, Dr. Barker came to the conclusion that in the future clairvoyance can be put at the service of mankind. Knowing about impending disasters, you can take practical measures to prevent them.

Meanwhile, the American parapsychologist Professor William Cox proved with convincing examples that people subconsciously already use this mental phenomenon. After analyzing a number of statistics on railroad accidents, namely the number of victims, Cox found that on the day of the accident, there were fewer passengers on the fatal trains than usual at that time. Cox collected data on more than a hundred crashes that occurred in six years, and the discrepancies in the number of passengers were so significant that it could not be attributed to chance. Indeed, using a computer, Cox deduced that the ratio of ordinary passengers to the number of passengers involved in a disaster is more than 1,000,000 to 1.

Parapsychologists believe that somewhere in the depths of their souls, people foresaw the approach of trouble and tried by all means to avoid it.

To most scientists, our rantings will seem like nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. "If clairvoyance is a real phenomenon," said one Nobel Prize-winning academic, "it overturns all scientific ideas about the world." But as more and more evidence emerges that the human mind, under certain circumstances, can be a kind of antenna that captures the future, the solid wall of objection erected by skeptics is cracking. No doubt this will continue for some time, until perhaps in the middle of the next century, scientists will agree with Albert Einstein's statement: "The differences between past, present and future are nothing more than an illusion."

Is there such a thing as clairvoyance, or foreknowledge of the future? This ancient concept is present in every religion; one can recall the oracles of Greece and Rome and the Old Testament prophets. But pay attention: in such plots, the gift of foresight often becomes a curse. In Greek mythology, there is a myth about Cassandra, the daughter of the king of Troy, who attracted the attention of the solar god Apollo with her beauty. To win the girl he liked, Apollo gave her the ability to see the future. But Cassandra rejected the courtship of Apollo, and in a fit of rage, he distorted his gift: now Cassandra could see the future, but not a single person believed her. Cassandra warned the Trojans about their fate, but no one listened to her. She warned that the Trojan horse was a trap, she predicted the death of Agamemnon and even her own death, but the people of Troy, instead of listening to advice, declared her crazy and locked her in the tower. Nostradamus in the 16th century and later Edgar Cayce also claimed to be able to lift the veil of time. You can often hear that their predictions came true (we are talking, in particular, about the prediction of World War II, the assassination of President Kennedy and the fall of communism), but the confused allegorical form in which many clairvoyants dressed their predictions allows for a variety of, including contradictory each other, interpretations. The quatrains of Nostradamus, for example, are set out in such a general form that anyone can read anything in them [which happens all the time]. One of the quatrains says:

Fire roars from the center of the world, shaking the earth, The earth around the new city trembles. The two greats will fight long and fruitlessly. The nymph of the springs will make the new river blush.

Some have argued that this quatrain could serve as evidence that Nostradamus knew about the destruction of the twin towers of the shopping center in New York on September 11, 2001. But over the centuries, dozens of other interpretations have been made of these same words. After all, the images are so vague that they can be understood in any way.

Foresight is, among other things, a favorite tool for playwrights who describe doomed kings and the fall of empires. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, prophecy serves as the center of the plot and the focus of Macbeth's ambitious aspirations - after all, three witches predict his rise and the throne of the King of Scotland. The witches' divination further inflames his morbid vanity, and he launches a bloody and terrible campaign, destroying enemies, killing innocent children and the wife of his rival Macduff.

Having committed many terrible crimes and seized the throne, Macbeth learns from the same witches that no one can defeat him in battle, "until he moves across the Dunsinan hill Birnam forest"; in addition, he is informed that he is "protected by fate from all who are born of a woman." The prophecy reassures Macbeth, because the forest is not able to move, and all people are born from women. But in the end everything comes true - Birnam Forest leaves the place when Macduff's warriors take the branches of trees in their hands and secretly approach Macbeth's camp; in addition, it turns out that Macduff himself was not born, but cut out of his mother's womb.

So, past prophecies are too vague to be reliably verified; but there is one class of predictions that are not difficult to evaluate - these are the predictions of the Day of Judgment and the End of the World. In the Bible, in the book "Revelation", the last days of the Earth are described in colorful detail; the appearance of the Antichrist and the final Second Coming of Christ are accompanied by chaos and destruction. Christian thinkers have always, since the appearance of these texts, tried to predict the exact date of the events described.

One of the most famous doomsday predictions was made by astrologers on February 20, 1524, based on the position of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) in the celestial sphere; it was predicted that the world would perish in a great flood. Europe was overwhelmed by mass panic. In England, 20,000 people fled their homes in desperation. A fortress was erected around the church of St. Bartholomew, stuffed with supplies, food and water for two months. Throughout Germany and France, people began to feverishly build large arks that could survive the flood. Count von Igtleheim, for example, built a huge three-tiered ark on the eve of this fateful event. But on the appointed day, only a light rain fell from the sky. The mood of the crowd changed dramatically; Instead of fear, people were seized with anger. Those who managed to sell all their property and completely ruined their lives felt cheated. Angry crowds began to smash all around. The count was stoned to death, and several hundred people died in the stampede.

Of course, it is not only Christians who yearn for prophecy. In 1648, Sabbatai Zvi, the son of a wealthy Jew from Smyrna, Turkey, declared himself the messiah and predicted that the world would perish in 1666. Zvi was handsome, charismatic, and well versed in the mystical texts of the Kabbalah; he quickly managed to gather a group of fanatical followers who spread the news throughout Europe. In the spring of 1666, Jews from as far away as France, Holland, Germany, and Hungary began to pack up and gather for the call of their messiah. But a little later in the same year, Zvi was arrested and thrown into prison in chains on the orders of the Grand Vizier of Constantinople. Faced with mortal danger, he theatrically threw off his Jewish clothes, donned a Turkish turban, and converted to the Islamic faith. Tens of thousands of his devoted supporters left the sect, having experienced terrible disappointment.

The predictions of all kinds of prophets still influence people today, changing the lives of tens of millions of people around the world. For example, in the USA, a certain William Miller announced that the Day of Judgment would come on April 3, 1843. The news of this prophecy spread throughout the country; the accidental event that coincided with it - the impressive meteor shower of 1833, one of the most powerful in history - also greatly enhanced the impression of Miller's prophecy.

By 1843, tens of thousands of devoted Miller followers were expecting Armageddon; they even got the name Millerites. When the year of fulfillment of the prophecy began and then ended, and the end of the world did not happen, the Millerite movement split into several large groups. Miller had so many followers that each of these groups is still visible in religious life today and has considerable influence. One of the large groups of the Millerite movement in 1863 reorganized and changed its name; now it is called the Seventh-day Adventist Church and has about 14 million baptized in its ranks. Central to the teachings of Adventists is the imminent and imminent Second Coming of Christ.

Another fragment of the Millerite movement later began to focus on the writings of Charles Taze Russell, who pushed back the date of the Last Judgment to 1874. When this date passed, Russell revised his prophecy - it was based on the study of the Egyptian pyramids - and again moved the date, this time to 1914 This group was later called Jehovah's Witnesses; it currently has over 6 million members.

Other segments of the Millerite movement also continued to prophesy - and each time they split when the next prediction did not come true. One small group of former Millerites that broke away from the Seventh-day Adventists in the 1930s was called the Branch Davidian. The small congregation of this sect in Waco, Texas, fell under the influence of a charismatic young preacher named David Koresh, who spoke with great force and hypnotic power about the end of the world. This sect came to an end in 1993 in a tragic confrontation with the FBI; when the roaring fiery hell engulfed the village, 76 members of the sect were burned alive, including 27 children and Koresh himself.
Can we see the future?

Can rigorous scientific experiments prove that some people can see the future? We saw in Chapter 12 that time travel is not in principle against the laws of nature, but is available only to highly developed Type III civilizations. But maybe foresight is available to us today on Earth?

The complex and carefully orchestrated tests conducted at the Rhine Center seem to suggest that some people can actually see the future; namely, they can call cards before they are opened. But numerous repeated experiments have shown that this effect is very weak and often disappears altogether if other researchers try to repeat the result.

In fact, the prediction of the future is difficult to reconcile with modern science, because in this case the causal relationship, or the law of cause and effect, is violated. Cause must precede effect, not the other way around. Causality is built into all the laws of physics that have been discovered so far, and if it is violated, the whole building of modern physics will collapse. Newtonian mechanics is firmly based on the law of cause and effect, and Newton's laws are so comprehensive that, knowing the exact coordinates and velocities of all molecules in the universe, one could also calculate the future movement of these atoms. Thus, the future can be calculated. In principle, Newtonian mechanics states that, given a sufficiently powerful computer, it is possible to calculate all future events. According to Newton, the Universe is like a giant clock that God started at the beginning of time and which has been running according to His laws ever since. There is no place for foresight in Newton's theory.
Back in time

However, if we consider Maxwell's theory, the scenario is much more complicated. When solving Maxwell's equations for light, we get not one, but two solutions: not only a "retarded" wave, which is the usual movement of light from one point to another, but also a "leading" wave, which is a beam of light going back in time. This advanced solution comes from the future and comes to the past!

For hundreds of years, any engineer, meeting this "leading" solution, going back in time, simply discarded it as a purely mathematical curiosity. Since ordinary Maxwell waves predicted the behavior of radio waves of all ranges extremely accurately, practitioners discarded the advanced solution as unnecessary and forgot about it. The ordinary wave was so good, beautiful and successful that the engineers simply ignored its ugly twin sister: they don’t look for good from good.

But the leading wave did not allow physicists to sleep peacefully all these hundred years. Maxwell's equations are one of the pillars of modernity, so any solution to them should be taken very seriously, even if it requires accepting the existence of waves from the future. It was impossible to completely ignore them. Why did nature give us such a strange, bizarre solution - and even at the most basic level? Is this a cruel joke, or does it have some deeper meaning?

Mystics have also shown interest in leading waves; there were even arguments that these could be messages from the future. Maybe if we somehow curbed these waves, we could send messages to the past and inform previous generations about future events. For example, one could advise our great-grandparents in 1929 to sell all their shares without waiting for Black Thursday. Of course, advanced waves would not allow us to personally visit the past - this is still not a time machine - but they would help organize the sending of letters and messages into the past with warnings about key events that have not yet occurred.

Leading waves remained a mystery until they were taken up by Richard Feynman, who was always fascinated by the idea of going back in time. After participating in the Manhattan Project, where the first atomic bomb was created, Feynman left Los Alamos and went to Princeton University to work under John Wheeler. Analyzing Dirac's early work on the electron, Feynman discovered something very strange. If we change the direction of time in the Dirac equation to the opposite and at the same time change the sign of the electron charge, then the equation will remain the same. In other words, Feynman came up with the idea that an electron moving backward in time is the same as a positron moving forward in time! Under normal circumstances, a mature, established physicist might dismiss this interpretation as merely a trick, a mathematical trick with no meaning or physical meaning. In general, at first glance it seems that the movement back in time is devoid of any sense, but Dirac's equations in this respect are quite clear. In other words, Feynman was able to discover the reason why nature permits the existence of these time-reversed solutions: they represent the movement of antimatter. If Feynman had been a more experienced physicist, he might well have thrown this solution into the trash. But being just a graduate, he decided to follow his own curiosity and investigate the issue further.

As the young Feynman continued to dig into this puzzling solution, he noticed something even stranger. Usually, if an electron and a positron collide, they both annihilate and produce a gamma ray at the same time. He drew a diagram of what is happening on the sheet: two objects collide and disappear, and instead a burst of energy appears.

On the other hand, if you change the charge of the positron to the opposite, it will turn into an ordinary electron moving backward in time. Then the described diagram can be drawn again - only the time axis will be directed in the other direction. In general, everything looks as if the electron was moving forward in time, and then suddenly decided to change direction. It abruptly turned around in time and headed back, releasing a certain amount of energy at the moment of turning around. In other words, it turned out that this is one and the same electron, and the process of annihilation of an electron and a positron is just the moment of its turn in time!

Thus, Feynman was able to solve the mystery of antimatter: it is ordinary matter moving backward in time.

A simple observation immediately explained the mysterious fact that every particle must have an antiparticle partner: this is because all particles can move backward in time and still pretend to be antimatter. (This interpretation is equivalent to the “Dirac sea” already mentioned, but it is simpler, and it is this that is generally accepted today.)

Now let's imagine that we have a piece of antimatter, and we collide it with ordinary matter, generating a huge explosion. At this moment, trillions of electrons and trillions of positrons annihilate each other. But if we change the direction of the arrow for the positron and thus turn it into an electron moving backward in time, then it turns out that our entire explosion is the same electron that writes out zigzags and rushes back and forth in time trillions of times in a row.

From all this, one more curious conclusion could be drawn: in our piece of matter there should be only one electron. The same electron rushed back and forth, writing out endless zigzags in time. Each time it unfolded in time, it turned into a positron; but as soon as he turned back in time, he again turned into an ordinary electron.

(While talking to his supervisor John Wheeler, Feynman reasoned that there might be only one electron in the universe, bouncing back and forth in time. Imagine that a single electron was born out of the chaos of the Big Bang. Someday, through a few trillion years, this electron will live until the catastrophe and death of the universe, then it will turn around and head back to the Big Bang, where it will once again change direction in time.It can be assumed that this electron constantly travels back and forth, from the Big Bang to the Judgment day. And our universe of the twenty-first century is just a time slice of the travels of this electron; we see trillions of electrons and positrons at the same time, i.e. the visible universe. Of course, this theory may seem strange, but it would explain one curious fact of quantum theory: why all electrons are the same.In physics, it is impossible to distinguish between electrons.It is impossible to consider one of the electrons green, and the other, say, name Johnny. Electrons have no personality. It's impossible to "tag" an electron the way scientists sometimes tag wild animals to make them easier to track and study. Maybe it's because there's only one electron in the entire universe that just bounces back and forth in time.)

But if antimatter is ordinary matter moving backwards in time, could it be used to send a message to the past? Maybe you can send today's issue of the Wall Street Journal to the past to yourself and how to cash in on stock speculation?

The answer is very simple: no, you can't.

If we treat antimatter as just another exotic form of matter and then experiment with it, then there is no violation of causality. Cause and effect remain in place. But if we change the direction of the time axis for the positron and send it into the past, then this does not mean anything; we're just doing some math. The physics remains the same, and in reality nothing changes. All experimental results remain in place. That is why we have every right to believe that the electron runs back and forth in time. But every time it moves in the opposite direction, it just fills in the past. So it seems that advanced solutions from the future are indeed necessary for the existence of a consistent quantum theory, but by and large they do not violate the principle of causality. (In fact, the opposite is true: if there were no these strange leading waves, the principle of causality in quantum theory would be violated. Feynman showed that if we introduce the concepts of leading and retarded waves into the theory, then those quantities that could cause a violation of causality, will cancel out very neatly. Thus, antimatter is necessary for the preservation of causality. Without antimatter, causality can collapse.)

Feynman kept digging into this crazy idea and finally got it to blossom into a complete quantum theory of the electron. His brainchild, quantum electrodynamics, has been experimentally verified to the tenth decimal place, making it one of the most accurate theories of all time. In 1965, she brought Feynman and his colleagues Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga the Nobel Prize.

(In his Nobel lecture, Feynman said that in his youth he fell head over heels in love with these most advanced waves from the future - just as he could fall in love with a pretty girl. Today, this pretty girl has grown up, has become an adult woman and has got many children. Among these children - and his theory of quantum electrodynamics.)
Tachyons from the future

In addition to "advanced" waves from the future (which have proved their usefulness time and time again in quantum theory), there is another unusual concept in quantum theory that seems just as crazy, but perhaps not so useful. This is a hypothesis about tachyons, which regularly appear in the Star Trek series. Every time the Star Trek writers need some new kind of energy for some kind of magical operation, they bring in tachyons.

Tachyons live in a strange world where everything moves faster than light. Losing energy, tachyons begin to move faster - which, of course, is contrary to common sense. Moreover, a tachyon, completely deprived of energy, moves at an infinite speed. Conversely, acquiring energy, tachyons slow down until they reach the speed of light.

What makes tachyons especially strange is the fact that they have an imaginary mass. (By "imaginary," we mean that their mass is multiplied by the square root of minus one, or i.) If you take Einstein's famous equations and replace m with im, a miracle happens. The particle speed will suddenly become faster than the speed of light.

Because of this, strange situations arise. When a tachyon flies through matter, it loses energy as it collides with atoms. But, losing energy, it accelerates, which is why collisions only intensify and occur more often. In theory, these collisions should cause further loss of energy and, consequently, further acceleration. There is a vicious circle, and the tachyon itself, naturally, gains infinite speed!

(Tachyons are different from both antimatter and negative matter. Antimatter has positive energy, moves slower than light, and can be produced in our particle accelerators. According to the theory, antimatter obeys the law of gravity and, as expected, falls down. Antimatter corresponds to ordinary matter moving back in time. Negative matter has negative energy and also moves slower than light, but under the influence of gravity falls upward, i.e. away from the attracting body of ordinary matter. No one has yet seen negative matter in the laboratory. In theory, in large quantities it can serve as fuel for a time machine. Tachyons travel faster than light and have an imaginary mass; how they behave under the influence of gravity is unclear. They have not yet been obtained in the laboratory.)

Tachyons, of course, are very strange particles, but physicists study them seriously; one might name, for example, the late Gerald Feinberg of Columbia University and George Sudarshan of the University of Texas at Austin. The problem is, no one has ever seen a tachyon in the lab. Reliable experimental evidence for the existence of tachyons would be a violation of causality. Feinberg even suggested that physicists investigate the laser beam before turning on the laser. If tachyons exist, then it is possible that the light of the laser beam can be detected even before the apparatus is turned on.

In science fiction, tachyons are regularly used as a means of sending a message to the past, to the ancestors. But from the physics of the phenomenon it is completely incomprehensible whether this is even theoretically possible. Feinberg, for example, believed that the emission of tachyons moving forward in time exactly corresponded to the absorption of negative energy tachyons moving backward in time (similar to the situation with antimatter), so no violation of causality occurs.

Science fiction aside, physicists currently believe that tachyons may have existed at the time of the Big Bang, violating causality, but now they no longer exist. Moreover, it is very possible that tachyons played a significant role in the fact that the Universe exploded in general. In this sense, they play an important role in some big bang theories.

Tachyons have another funny property. When introduced into any theory, they destabilize the "vacuum", i.e. the lowest energy state of the system. If there are tachyons in the system, it means that it is in a state of "false vacuum", and therefore, it is unstable and will collapse to a state of true vacuum.

Imagine a dam that holds water in a lake. This is the "false vacuum". Although the dam appears to be quite reliable, there is an even lower energy state. And if a crack appears in the dam, water begins to rapidly flow out of the lake and flow down to sea level - then the system reaches a state of true vacuum.

Similarly, it is believed that the Universe before the Big Bang existed in a state of false vacuum, where there were tachyons. But their presence meant that this was not the lowest energy state of the system, and therefore the system was unstable. Then a tiny "tear" appeared in the fabric of space-time, representing the true vacuum. The gap began to grow, a bubble appeared. Tachyons still existed outside the bubble, but they were not inside. With the growth of the bubble, the Universe that we know appeared - the Universe without tachyons. This was the Big Bang.

One theory that cosmologists take very seriously is that the initial process of inflation was started by a single tachyon known as the "inflaton". As we have already mentioned, the theory of the inflationary universe claims that it originated as a tiny bubble of space-time that experienced an ultra-rapid period of expansion (inflation). Physicists believe that the universe originally existed in a state of false vacuum, where the tachyon was the inflationary field. But the presence of the tachyon destabilized the vacuum, and tiny bubbles formed. Inside one of these bubbles, the inflationary field found itself in a state of true vacuum. This bubble began to rapidly inflate until it turned into our Universe. Inflation has disappeared inside our bubble-universe, which is why it cannot be registered in our Universe. It turns out that tachyons are a bizarre quantum state in which objects move faster than light and, perhaps, even causality is violated. But tachyons have long since disappeared, possibly giving life to the Universe itself.

Probably, all this looks like idle reasoning that cannot be verified. But the first experiment to test the false vacuum theory begins in 2008 with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, in the vicinity of Geneva. One of the main tasks of the LHC is the discovery of the Higgs bosons, the last particle of the Standard Model that has not yet been found, the last piece of the scientific puzzle. (The Higgs particle is so important and so elusive that Nobel laureate Leon Lederman called it the “god particle.”)

Physicists believe that the Higgs boson began life as a tachyon. In a false vacuum, none of the subatomic particles had mass. But the presence of the tachyon destabilized the vacuum, and the universe moved into a new state, a new vacuum, in which the Higgs boson turned into an ordinary particle. After this transition - from the state of a tachyon to the state of an ordinary particle - subatomic particles acquire the mass that we measure today in the laboratory. Thus, the discovery of the Higgs boson will not only put in place the last missing piece of the Standard Model, but also confirm that the tachyon state once existed, but later transformed into an ordinary particle.

Summarize. Newtonian physics completely rejects the possibility of predicting the future. The iron rule of cause and effect is never broken. Quantum theory allows for other states of matter, such as antimatter, which corresponds to ordinary matter moving backward in time, but the principle of causality is not violated. Moreover, antimatter in quantum theory is necessary to restore causality. Tachyons at first glance violate the principle of causality, but physicists believe that they have fulfilled their purpose - they launched the Big Bang mechanism and disappeared from our Universe.

So foreseeing the future seems to be excluded, at least for the foreseeable future, which means that it should be classified as a class III impossibility. If one day it is possible to prove with the help of reproducible experiments that it is still possible to predict the future, modern physics will have to be revised to its very foundations.

Colin Wilson, in his book on the occult, tells the story of a man living in India who used to walk along the muddy path to the river every day to swim. One day, returning home, he noticed that in one place his footprints rushed to the side: for some reason, at a certain moment, he began to walk along the other side of the road. He couldn't understand why. Why did he switch to the other side at this particular moment? He stopped and looked at the footprints. Suddenly he noticed huge footprints of a tiger in the bushes. They were just where he would have passed if he hadn't crossed over to the other side. Most likely, subconsciously, he sensed the danger and bypassed the tiger, saving his life. Coincidence or predictive ability? You, too, can develop your psychic abilities and apply them in life.

Steps

Development of psychic abilities

Understand the difference between premonition, foresight and prophecy. When it comes to predicting the future, a large number of different terms immediately pop up, in which it is easy to get confused. Find out what this or that word means, and this will make your task easier and make the whole process of prediction more interesting.

foresight means knowledge of future events through certain means of perceiving the world (for example, dreams). Most precognition comes in dreams, and events happen within 24-48 hours of waking up.
Premonition It is a feeling that something is about to happen, but there is no clear understanding of what exactly. A person feels that it will be right to do one way or another. Premonitions can be just as important as foresights, and they are much more reliable.
Term prophecy was used by the ancient Greeks to describe the sense of time, while it was believed that the future is predetermined and cannot be changed. Prophecy is the knowledge of future events that will definitely happen, and there can be no doubt about it. Prophecy means that there are no other options for the development of the future.

Start doing deep meditation. Research has shown that humans use only a tiny fraction of the brain's capabilities. But are sleeping abilities really impossible to use? It is not always so. You can train your subconscious mind by doing a deep meditation that allows the subconscious mind to take over the conscious mind. This is how you can begin to predict the future.
- Sit back in a room with soft natural light. Sit straight, but in a comfortable position (preferably on the floor), relax and focus on your breathing. Feel the air move into your lungs. Exhale. Imagine how oxygen saturates your body, and then the air comes back out again. Think only of the breath, nothing else.
- Gradually begin to relax your body while continuing to breathe. With each breath, concentrate on relaxing, say, one arm. Feel your breath pass through your arm and relax it. Then move on to the second arm, to the chest, and to the rest of the body. Calm your mind. Focus on relaxation.
Gradually enter into a trance and sink into it as deeply as possible. There are no special secrets in meditation. Zazen (the meditation practiced by Zen monks) translates roughly to "just sit." The purpose of meditation is inaction, which allows the subconscious mind to come out and gives a person psychic abilities. By learning to do this, you will be able to see many more signs and omens, which will make it much easier to predict the future.
- As the trance deepens, you will begin to lose track of time. Your consciousness will calm down, and your subconscious will become more receptive. Some people at this moment imagine themselves climbing or descending stairs or entering a cave, which symbolizes the descent into the unconscious and entering a trance.
Start using the ability to meditate in everyday life. Once you have learned how to go into a trance and engage in deep meditation, stop trying to make things happen - instead, let them happen. Pay attention to the images that come to you during meditation, and then look for them in real life. Remember the faces and people you see in trance and watch them after you wake up. It is possible that you were visited by foresight.
- Use all the senses. This may seem silly, but still try to imagine that your body is one big eye that is collecting information all the time. Air temperature, smells and even feelings can be signs pointing to the future. If you feel uneasy at the sight of an owl, and this has never happened before, consider this sign important. If you feel cold every time you hear the same song, take it as an omen.
Pay attention to symbols and signs. We are surrounded by many signs, but it depends on the person whether to notice them or not. If you are lucky enough to be psychic and observant, it will still take a lot of effort to learn to predict the future, but you will be better at it if you train yourself. To unleash all your possibilities, you should stop thinking that everything that happens is accidental, and start viewing all events as parts of one big plan.
- Always pay attention to the moments when goosebumps run through the skin. If something happened that caused such feelings, put everything aside and think. What do you see? What scared you? What seems important?
- Don't shy away from deja vu. Have you ever had the feeling that something has already happened in the past, that everything seems strange and already known? Start to look closely at what confuses you in this situation. What do you feel? Where are you? What sensations have awakened?
- Pay special attention to coincidences. For example, you wake up in the morning and see a swarm of midges near your window, and then you go to a cafe and the barista has a T-shirt with a picture of similar midges. Pure coincidence? Many people believe that there is no such thing as a coincidence, and that what matters is that something happened. Consider coincidences as symbols, signs, signs, and not just accidents.
Analyze symbols. Suppose that during meditation you saw a bunch of crabs drinking gasoline on the beach at night, and now you cannot get rid of this image. Strange. What does this mean? For different people, such an image can have different meanings, so you need to learn how to read the symbols and transfer them to your own life so that they gain some meaning.
- Treat it like the analysis of a dream or a poem. The images may have evoked certain impressions, so start simple. Was the image positive or negative? Weak or strong? Did the action take place during the day or at night?
- Analyze individual symbols that you regularly encounter in real life and during meditation. For example, crabs are an important image in predicting the future. They are in some decks of Tarot cards, as well as in the zodiac. This is a very important symbol.
- If you speak English, read the Dream Bible. In it you will find a description of many of the images that are found in dreams. With this information, you can start the study of dreams.
Check out the mythology. If you understand nothing at all in metaphysics, it will be difficult for you to predict the future. For those who seek to develop psychic abilities and learn to predict future events, it is best to read and find out what the collective unconscious is, as well as get acquainted with important myths and symbols of their culture.
- Our understanding of consciousness and the connection between the conscious and the subconscious has been greatly influenced by the work of Carl Jung. In Joseph Campbell's book The Hero and a Thousand Faces, similarities can be traced in the myths of different cultures, which suggests that symbols, signs and substitutions are somehow "built into" people.
Dream analysis
1. Start keeping a dream diary. If you don't remember the dream, you won't be able to analyze it thoroughly. To make things easier for yourself, always keep a notepad and pen on your bedside table. As soon as you wake up, write down everything you saw in your dream. Try to capture as many details as possible. Do this every morning after waking up, even if you are tired.
  - What did you saw? Who was there? What smells, tastes, textures surrounded you? What did you feel emotionally? Was it a nightmare? Erotic dream? Just a pleasant dream?
  - Record the dialogue first. Most often, this is what is forgotten in the first place, so it will be very disappointing to forget something that may be important.
2. Wake yourself up from time to time at night. If you don't remember dreams, wake yourself up while you are still dreaming. Sleep interruption is a great way to recognize characters and remember all events.
  - Set an alarm on your phone to go off every three hours. This will allow you to get two full REM cycles of 90 minutes each. It will take you a minute or two to write down everything you see in a dream, which means that you will sleep as usual, but at the same time you will be able to record dreams.
3. Find symbols in dreams and determine their meaning. Treat your dreams exactly as you would with the images you see during meditation: isolate the symbols, bring them into your life, and figure out what meaning they want to convey to you.
  - Write down as many details about each dream as you can. Return to the image of crabs drinking gasoline on the beach. Crabs and gasoline seem like important symbols, but it's also worth considering what sand, drinking, and other tactile and emotional elements of the imagery might mean. What did you feel when you saw this picture?
  - People are also symbols. If you dream that you are kissing your best friend, this does not mean that you are in love with your friend, and you should start kissing. We dream of certain people because our subconscious gives these people a symbolic meaning. Dreaming about a kiss with a friend may mean that you like a certain trait in the character of this person that you would like to see in yourself.
4. Match the symbols seen in a dream with real life and the future. There are frequent dream themes: for example, your teeth fall out, you fly, or you find yourself naked in the midst of a crowd of people. Such dreams have generally accepted interpretations: you are emotionally exhausted, you strive for control or learn to cope with it, you are defenseless. However, you can trace more complex connections to coincidences or events in your life. Use the information gained from dreams and psychic abilities to predict the possible development of the future.
  - If you're waiting for news after you've passed your interview and you dream that you're flying high and out of control, you can decode such a sign as anxiety about success or as the freedom that a new job will give you. And this may mean that you will get this position.
  - Approach the analysis of dreams soberly. If you dreamed that your friend died and they put him in a coffin, this does not mean at all that your friend will really die. Most likely, some chapter of this person’s life is coming to an end or your relationship will change in some way in the future. Relate the dream to what is happening in your life.
5. Practice lucid dreaming and ask about the future. Some people who are good at this use lucid dreams to directly ask questions about what's to come. If you can develop the ability to remain conscious and dream, try imagining a notebook or oracle and ask them something about the future, such as "Who will win the World Cup?" or "What are my chances of getting this job?" See what comes of it.
Communication with the oracle
1. Don't ask one word questions. If you want the oracle to help you learn something about the future, ask questions that require detailed answers. This will help you interpret the characters received in response. It is important to ask a question that does not require a one-word answer and is not too simple.
  - You can start with the following questions: "What should I pay attention to?" "How should I treat ...?" or "What should I be thinking about...?". Don't narrow down the question, let the oracle give you the exact answer you need to interpret correctly.
  - The question "Will I get this job?" it will be incorrect if you decide to roll the dice or read the book of changes, since there can be no yes or no answer. Instead, ask what you need to do to get the job.
2. Refer to tarot cards. The tarot deck consists of 78 cards, which has major and minor arcana, and resembles a regular deck of playing cards. There are four suits: wands, swords, cups and denarii. In addition, each card has an image that can be read in different ways. This is one of the most famous and multifunctional ways to predict the future by symbols.
  - Most tarot card spreads tell entire stories that are built around a given question. If you want to learn more about these cards, read about them online, buy a textbook, and get started with the deck.
3. Ask questions to the book of changes. To work with the book, you can use coins, pieces of marble, stems, sticks, or any other computational methods that will lead to the outline of a six-sided figure consisting of two characters. The figure will correspond to a specific entry in the book. Simply put, you need to roll the dice, ask a question and read a mysterious passage of text. If you like poetry, stories and meditation, you will love this way of predicting the future.
  As in the case of divination by shadows, observing the figures in a mirrored surface allows you to see the symbols and interpret them.
4. There are several good astrology websites that detail each sign, but almost all of them bypass the Chinese zodiac.
5. It is possible to draw conclusions about a person's behavior in the future from his past actions. If your friend rarely stayed in a relationship for more than a month or two, you can assume that the new guy is unlikely to be with her for long.
6. Almost all people give away their thoughts in one way or another. If you pay attention to small clues, you will be able to understand what will happen next. If your neighbor in a cafe is always looking at his watch, you can assume that he is waiting for someone.
- Predicting the future requires experience and is associated with a lot of mistakes and attempts to start over. You will not always be able to make accurate predictions.

History knows many examples of prophecies that came true exactly. For example, Nostradamus for several centuries predicted the revolution of 1917, and the great predictor, who saw through time, Wolf Messing warned Germany about the Second World War, in turn Vanga described in detail the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in the United States.

People with the gift of prophecy are one of the most interesting and inexplicable mysteries of mankind. Who are they?

Since ancient times, the future has worried and worried people. In search of answers to many questions, people hopefully turned to shamans and astrologers, who predicted the future with varying success, and sometimes simply deceived. Prophets were revered and feared at all times, they were close to the rulers who made history and ruled the world.

Has the gift of prophecy always brought happiness to its owners? After all, this gift is quite difficult already because the seers accumulate quite a huge amount of information in their minds. They feel the emotions of people, their pain and all sorts of experiences. Passing all this through themselves, the seers cause irreparable harm to their health.

In the 7th century BC in Greece, a thousand people, in a long line, skirting the gorges, climbed to the temple on the rocky slope of Parnassus. They overcame such a difficult path in order to find out their future from the gods. Here, at an altitude of 700 meters, stood a temple of unprecedented beauty, in the center of which was an altar - the Oracle. Historians believe that in this place underground gases evaporated from under the ground, inhaling which the priestesses of the temple made their predictions. In this way they put themselves into a trance. No one will know for sure whether they were drugged or really communicated with higher powers.

In ancient Rome, an even more exotic way of foresight flourished. There was a college of augurs. These are priests who predict the future by the flight path, the cry and the behavior of birds. Roman troops on military campaigns always took a wagon of chickens with them, which they used for predictions.

Kings, kings of all times and peoples all their lives had court sorcerers and astrologers, whose words were listened to.

Weather is the first thing magicians learned to predict, but it was not enough. They wanted to know more, about life, destiny. The future was at the same time alarming and beckoning. He wanted to be tamed like a wild animal, so as not to be afraid.

In 1933, the mathematician Andrey Kalmogorov presented his theory of probability to the world. He proved that even seemingly random processes have their own patterns that can be calculated and predicted the future.

This begs the question: Is prediction really the ability to see the future clearly? Or maybe you can not have the ability, but just be a psychologist and analyst, and using the theory of probability to predict the future?

In 2012, scientists from the University of California proved that the gift of foresight really exists. They showed a group of people some unpleasant pictures with images of pieces of meat, terrible grimaces and other images of negative content. The devices recorded that a few seconds before the photo appeared, the heartbeat of the subjects quickened. Scientists have called this phenomenon the premonition effect.

One of the methods of prediction is palmistry. Palmistry is one of the oldest ways to predict the future. This is hand prediction. This method is considered one of the most accurate. On the left hand, you can predict the fate of a person, his past, and on the lines of the right hand, the future. Each person has lines on their palms, and each of them has a characteristic meaning.

But what to do if you want to know the future, but there is no money or time to go to a psychic? You can try the most common folk divination with matches. The main thing before the beginning of the ceremony is to formulate the question in such a way that the answer is monosyllabic. Either yes or no. You need to light a match and throw it into the water. If the match floats on the surface, the answer is yes. If she drowned, then the answer is no. If coals float from a match, this means that there will be a lot of obstacles on the way to the goal. If the match sank head down, but did not sink to the bottom, this means that the person is not ready to find out the answer to his question.

You can also predict the future on water and wax. In this way, you can predict the fate of love relationships. To do this, you need 2 candles and with the help of a needle or a knife you need to write the first letter of your name on one candle, and the name of the chosen one on the other. Then you need to light candles, and drip wax into the water. After that, you need to take the matches again, think about the chosen one and throw it into the water, then the second match and repeat the same. Next, you need to look at the pattern obtained from the wax. Matches in this case can lie in different ways. For example, if they are intertwined, then this means a strong union, if the matches are drowned, then the union is doomed. However, the interpretation of wax figures is different for everyone and everyone understands them in their own way.

Along with the above, an interesting fact should be noted: scientists have developed a sensational theory that the phenomenon of predicting the future is inherent in every person. Therefore, it is better not to guess on matches, wax or anything else. It would be more correct to study your own thinking, because the brain is a matrix that is filled with various information flows. People live in a three-dimensional time space and constantly perceive and study information. The information that a person receives goes into the past, and the information that he perceives is the future. Thus, a person can build his life in a simple way - by analyzing the past.

Researchers argue that foresight is an innate gift of human consciousness that people have lost. But it can be developed. It is only important to learn to listen to intuition, analyze current events and attach importance to dreams. And yet, psychologists advise not to get involved in fortune-telling, but to live for today. After all, today is what shapes tomorrow.

Is it possible to foresee the future? What does it give to the individual and society? Being an integral element of the connection of times, the category of the future is included in the structure of historical consciousness; without the future, without confidence in it, there can be no sound historical consciousness.

The point, however, is not only in the state of historical consciousness: an attempt to lift the veil over the future is of vital importance both for the individual and for society. In both cases, there is no gap between the present and the future. When building his plans for the future, the individual starts from the present, regardless of whether and to what extent he wants to transfer something from the present to his subsequent life. Thinking about reforms and transformations, society, one way or another, must take into account their possible consequences. In this sense, taking into account the perspective is of social and practical importance. Attempts to foresee can differ both in the length of the prospect - distant or immediate, and in scale (where history is going, where the country is going or what awaits it in the near future as a result of certain changes, reforms in the present). In all cases, it is important to understand how this should be done, what is the mechanism of thinking aimed at unraveling a possible perspective.

In this regard, it is necessary, first of all, to distinguish between two ways of predicting the future. They differ both terminologically and in meaning. Is it a prediction or prophecy, And foresight. Prediction lies outside the field of science, rational Thinking, foresight is scientific in its essence. The most famous prophet was a French doctor, the most educated person of his time, M. Nostradamus(1503-1566). His fulfilled prophecies include the French Revolution of 1789-1794, two world wars, the war in Afghanistan, and so on. Nevertheless, the attitude to the predictions of M. Nostradamus was and remains ambiguous, up to doubts about their reliability and even denial of it. The soothsayer gives you a reason for this: his quatrains (quatrains) are often not amenable to unambiguous interpretation. The most important thing is that the mechanism, the logic of the predictions of M. Nostradamus still cannot be deciphered, their secret remains undisclosed.

A well-known magical soothsayer was also Vanga who lived in Bulgaria in the 20th century. Vanga predicted the defeat of A. Hitler; in World War II, the collapse of the kingdom of the Bulgarian Tsar Boris, the entry of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia in 1968, etc. Regarding her prophecies, the question remains open: “What should be treated as a real, proven historical fact?” This question refers not only to the prophecy itself, but also to the method of divination; however, in the latter case, the requirement of a rationalistic decoding is hardly justified, because we are talking about magic.

Unlike divination, the mechanism of scientific foresight should not be a metaphysical mystery: looking to the future, the historian cannot remain ignorant of the logic, the structure of thinking, otherwise he will have nothing to say about the probable future. What is this logic? Its understanding is facilitated by the study of the real facts of foreseeing the future. The German historian of the 19th century, an expert on the history of Ancient Rome T. Mommsen(1817 -1903) left a will that was to be opened fifty years after his death. T. Mommsen died in 1903, in 1953 the will was opened and made a lot of noise in Germany. From behind the coffin, the scientist told his descendants that he did not believe in the strength of the German Reich created in 1871 and predicted its collapse in the near future. During the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, this prediction became a fact.

What did T. Mommsen rely on in his forecast? From his will, we learn practically nothing about this, except for his sharp negative attitude towards the Hohenzollern dynasty. However, even during his lifetime, being an ardent and sincere supporter of the unification of Germany, T. Mommsen, in his own way, using the means of a historian available to him, sought to help the unification of the country, referring to the past. The scientist wrote about the law of the movement of any nation towards the creation of a single state, considered the conquest of Italy by Ancient Rome as a kind of such unification, and even found in this distant past a model for Germany - the democratic, as it seemed to him, Caesar's monarchy. With the formation of the Bismarckian Reich, T. Mommsen had to endure a rather sensitive disappointment about this: the German empire did not at all resemble a democratic one, and the historian moved into the category of opponents and even opponents of O. Bismarck. T. Mommsen's forecast is connected with this disappointment. In his forecast, the historian relied on the past and the contemporary environment. Even if we admit that reliance on the past is not convincing (Caesar's dictatorship, in its social essence, could not become a prototype for Germany), one cannot but agree with the reality of another: the conservative nature of the Hohenzollern empire became one of the reasons for its collapse.

F. Engels (1820-1895) and O. Bismarck predicted the First World War, the latter linking its beginning with the crisis situation in the Balkans. An analysis of the emerging contradictions, the formation of opposing sides to the conflict, of which O. Bismarck was a contemporary, helped him make this forecast. The rest in the mechanism of thinking of politics cannot be deciphered due to the individuality of the situation and the thinking of O. Bismarck, who did not give explanations on this matter that are so necessary for penetrating the secret of this mechanism.

And here is what F. Engels saw in the future: “... for Prussia - Germany, no other war is now possible, except for a world war. And it would be a world war of unprecedented size, unprecedented strength. Eight to ten million soldiers will choke each other, and in doing so will devour the whole of Europe to such an extent cleanly that clouds of locusts have never yet devoured. The devastation caused by the Thirty Years' War - compressed over the course of three or four years and spread over the whole continent, famines, epidemics, general savagery, both of the troops and the masses, caused by acute need, the hopeless confusion of our artificial mechanism in trade, industry and credit ; all this ends in general bankruptcy; the collapse of the old states and their routine state wisdom, such a collapse that dozens of crowns fall on the pavements and there is no one to pick up these crowns; the absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will emerge victorious from the struggle; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the creation of conditions for the final victory of the working class.” This was written in 1887. Amazing accuracy in some details, although this cannot be required of a forecast of any order. From individual statements by F. Engels accompanying the forecast, it follows that the proposed world war will be the result of long-term trends in the development of Germany and Europe: “This is where, gentlemen, kings and statesmen, your wisdom has led old Europe.” Behind this is a generalization of an even higher order, connected with the level and quality of general historical ideas, the level of theory: war is a product of the logic of the development of capitalist relations, which inevitably leads to the final victory of the working class. There was no victory then, but the First World War was most directly and directly related to the victory of the October Socialist Revolution of 1917. F. Engels’ forecast was made, so to speak, in passing, about an event that did not correlate in its significance with the scale of the predicted phenomenon, which in this case, it does not contribute to deciphering the structure of thinking that gave rise to the forecast in question.

Here is another example of a realized forecast. In July 1917, G.V. Plekhanov (1856-1918) published an appeal to the ruling elite of Russia in the newspaper Unity.

And one more prediction. In 1902, in one of his letters, M. Gorky wrote: “Old man Klyuchevsky said the other day: “Since I know Russian history and history in general, I can unmistakably say that we are present at the agony of autocracy.” About Nicholas II, the writer responded like this: "This is the last tsar, Alexei will not reign." And here there is no author's interpretation of the forecast, except for a reference to knowledge of Russian history. VO Klyuchevsky aphoristically briefly and accurately expressed the essence of the problem of forecasting: in order to look into the future, you need to look back. However, even J.W. Goethe (1749-1832) called the historian "a prophet who predicts backwards." The historian, indeed, can be called a prophet, relying on the past and - let's add - on contemporary events. The larger the events, the more important it is to look back in search of their roots, origins, and, consequently, possible consequences. The origins and course of events and processes, the logic of their development allow us to judge with some probability about the possible outcome, about the future. Is it possible, however, to specify the factor of reliance on the past as a source and basis for forecasting? One of the modern authors, V. Kozhinov, tried to go further than V.O. Klyuchevsky in the matter of forecasting. He wrote: “The only method for a proper understanding of where we are going is to look back into history. There is no other method. Everything else is fortune-telling on the coffee grounds. In order to understand where we are going, we need to find a similar situation in the past and see what awaits us in the future.

In fact, the concretization of forecasting proposed by V. Kozhinov is not a rational option for developing the corresponding views of the great historian. It contradicts the fundamental feature of the phenomena of the social environment - their individual originality, which excludes their literal repetition and leads to different consequences even from very similar historical situations. It should be emphasized that a forecast is a look into the future, but the impetus for this comes from the current situation and relies on the past. Each of the links of the historical process is always very specific in its content and meaning, which makes the forecasting procedure just as specific and incompatible with any stereotypes of thinking.

In addition, two levels of forecasting should be noted: on the scale of specific events or processes, and on the scale of history as a whole, since the question "Where is history going?" is not idle at all. Reliance on the past in the framework of history as a whole is just as necessary as in specific forecasting, however, in this case, an ordered approach to the past is important, which provides only one level of thinking - general historical theory. The rational version of such a theory links together the understanding of all the links of the historical process - past, present and future - which already contains a certain idea of the logic of the movement of this process, and hence the potential opportunity to draw a conclusion about its probably distant or not very distant by the standards of history. the future. The structure and content of the theory depend on the development of history, therefore, at this level of foresight there is no possibility to reduce the structure of thinking to some kind of stereotype that does not depend on a specific historical situation and on the corresponding state of cognition.