When They Came from Another World

“What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein.”

“Arrival is a movie of philosophy as much as adventure. It not only respects Chiang’s story but takes it further. It’s more explicitly time-travelish. That is to say, it’s really a movie about time. Time, fate, and free will.”

“Maybe the word doesn’t mean only “weapon”; maybe it can be read as “tool” or “gift.” The heptapod language is “semasiographic,” Louise explains (in the story, not in the movie, understandably): signs divorced from sounds. Each logogram speaks volumes. They carry the meaning of whole sentences or paragraphs.”

“And here’s a curious thing. The logograms seem to be conceived and written as unitary entities, all at once, rather than as a sequence of smaller symbols.”

“Principles of least time, or least “action,” as they are also known, crop up everywhere in physics, and Ian begins to suspect that this is the key to the heptapod worldview. Instead of one thing after another, they see the picture whole. In the film he explains this to Louise—a cameo by Fermat and a microtutorial in physics—but you’ll miss it if you blink.”

“Another clue: Ian asks Louise about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistics, the notion that different languages create different modes of thought. “All this focus on alien language,” he says. “There’s this idea that immersing yourself in a foreign language can rewire your brain.” Eventually it will dawn on us: Louise can see the future.”

“We start to sense that Heisserer and Villeneuve are strewing clues for us like breadcrumbs. “I asked about predictability,” Louise says. “If before and after mean anything to them.” As she becomes proficient in the heptapod language, she starts getting headaches and having dreams.”

“As Richard Feynman put it, “Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, ‘These are the conditions, now what happens next?’” Meanwhile, other physicists have learned about chaos and quantum uncertainty, but in the determinist’s view chance does not take charge. What we call accidents are only artifacts of incomplete knowledge. And there’s no room for choice. Free will, the determinist will tell you, is only an illusion, if admittedly a persistent one.”

“Even without help from mathematical models, we have all learned to visualize history as a timeline, with the past stretching to the left, say, and the future to the right (if we have been conditioned Sapir-Whorf-style by a left-to-right written language). Our own lifespans occupy a short space in the middle. Now—the infinitesimal present—is just the point where our puny consciousnesses happen to be.”

“Einstein felt that this was fundamentally a psychological matter; that the question of now need not, or could not, be addressed within physics. The specialness of the present moment doesn’t show up in the equations; mathematically, all the moments look alike. Now seems to arise in our minds. It’s a product of consciousness, inextricably bound up with sensation and memory. And it’s fleeting, tumbling continually into the past.”

“Still, if the sense of the present is an illusion, it’s awfully powerful for us humans. I don’t know if it’s possible to live as if the physicists’ model is real, as if we never make choices, as if the very idea of purpose is imaginary.”

“It’s always like this—a trick somewhere. Time travel violates everything we believe about causality. The best time travel succeeds by hiding the trick.”

“No one, not even the most devout of physicists, behaves as though their life is predetermined. We study the menus and make our choices. If we knew—really knew—that the future was settled and our choices illusory, how would we live? Could we do that? What would it feel like?”

“He offers another paradox—as he says, a Borgesian parable. Let’s say you get to see “the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future.” You flip through it until you find the page on which, it says, you are flipping through the Book of Ages looking for this very page, and then you read ahead, and decide to act contrary to what is written. Can you do that? Logically, no. If you accept the premise, the story is unchanging. Knowledge of the future trumps free will. And maybe that’s all right.”

““What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person,” Louise muses. “What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?””

““Two very different interpretations,” she sees:

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.”

“In the same way, language can be seen as purposeful and informative, or it can be seen as “performative.””

““Now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know,” says Louise. “Those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.””

“So, as she comes to understand her gift, she feels like a celebrant performing a ritual recitation. Or an actor reading her lines, following a script in every conversation. The rest of us don’t know we’re following the script. Are we, too, trapped? Enacting destiny? The only alternative is Woody Allen’s version of Buñuel: just walk out of the room.”