from
Old Left-handed Time
Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect a short history
by Andre Sud, D. Div.
Triton
After Raphael Merced published his dissertation, Chen Wocek secured a junior professorship for him at Bradbury. Merced turned down several far more lucrative offers in order to take it and remain near his mentor. At Bradbury, Merced began further investigations into his idea that theory was a kind of by-product of phenomena and that the laws of nature were only a limited way to understand experience. When he was twenty-seven, Merced devoted himself entirely to experimental physics, and it was at this time that he and Beat Myers began their famous “Fifty Worlds to Sunday” correspondence that is a seminal text in the modern study of aesthetics and its relationship to the scientific method.
Merced built larger and larger Josephson-Feynman time machines and extended the duration in which he could study the graviton up to several seconds. It was in the course of these experiments that he began to notice a peculiar aspect of the particle. Gravitons seemed to possess a property that was singular and asymmetric. It was a property that only expressed itself under conditions of extremely complex paradox resolution.
“It was as if the little buggers were making informed decisions after thinking about something for a while,” wrote Merced. “That’s why I called this behavior judgment. It was as if, within the locality of my apparatus, nature became teleological—that is, it acted as if it had will and purpose. There were singular instances of paradox resolution that didn’t obey any statistical laws I had ever heard of, and they certainly weren’t predictable by any standard mathematical means. They were, by definition, little miracles. And that’s why, in the equations I developed to express this behavior, there is always a point where I wrote ‘and a miracle happens here.’ ”
Merced called this method evolutionary calculus. Four years after publishing the Grand Unified Field Theory that linked all the known forces of nature, Merced’s contemporaries openly pilloried him and he was kicked out of the two major associations of scientists of the day. Wocek fought a rearguard action at Bradbury and managed to save Merced’s position there. Merced was too engrossed in his research to take much notice of the brouhaha.
“I cannot tell you if the universe as a whole has any meaning,” said Merced. “This may be fundamentally unknowable. But what I was seeing in my experiments was that the universe was acting as if it had meaning locally. After a while, I was forced to the conclusion that this wasn’t just appearance. Individual gravitons were exercising judgment just as a person does. The universe is teleological locally. By locally I mean any distance that is contained between quantum-entangled particles that are pressed into complex time-related paradoxes. I would force these paradoxes on the gravitons, and it was as if they had a little town meeting and came to a decision about how to handle each paradox. These decisions were never precisely the same, but all had the general tendency of preserving reality as we know it. From there it was only a short step to reasoning that one aspect of the ‘judgment’ property was that it brought about instant information transfer at a distance. After continued work, I discovered that I could influence what this information would be, and I could cause the gravitons to carry messages that I wanted. I discovered a number that acted as a sort of code key of time. This is what I called the Teleological Constant. If you know the Teleological Constant, you could send and receive information instantaneously over great distances—as far, in fact, as you chose to separate two entities that you originally observed to be entangled on a quantum level.”
This instantaneous transfer of information is what we call the Merced Effect.
Merced was thirty-five years old by this time. His experiences with the scientific establishment had left him extremely leery. He chose to publish the results of his experiments in his friend Beat Myers’s poetry journal, Flare. The November 2646 issue of Flare was almost wholly devoted to Merced’s paper, which was interspersed with poetry by Myers and others in the Flare generation. During his life, Merced always insisted that reprints of his paper, “The Teleological Constant and its Relation to Instantaneous Information Transfer at a Distance,” be printed with the poems included.
The November Flare did not make much of an impact at first. Merced continued his work, and by that time had several graduate assistants under him. One of them was a brilliant young nanotechnological engineer who had been raised in an orphanage in the asteroid belt. His name was Feur Otto Bring. Bring was an incurable victim of Tourette’s syndrome, and conversations between Merced and Bring would often consist of Merced patiently explaining a problem to Bring, followed by Bring swearing uncontrollably at Merced. Then, usually within days, Bring would have the engineering solution or the apparatus that Merced had envisioned.
One day in 2648, Merced casually suggested to Bring that it ought to be possible to invent a nanotech time machine that incorporated his Josephson-Feynman setup and that, if such nano were properly disseminated, there could be instant information shared over whatever distance the nano covered. Bring is reported to have stormed from the room shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you, cocksucker!”
Within a week, he and Merced had designed and created such a thing. With little modification, that design is still with us, permeating all our lives. It was the design of what we now know as grist.