RC OF THE DAY 13/03/2013 
Attempts to explain prophecy must make suppositions about the future. The most fundamental supposition
is that events in the future do not yet exist and cannot therefore, produce effects in the present. The path
of explanation that stems from this view leads necessarily, to various ideas of the future as a potential that
somehow exists in the present.
In their simplest form these ideas follow the analogy of the seed and flower. A gardener can examine a seed
and predict what flower it will produce. Some premonitions may indeed stem from clues scarcely noticed
in a conscious way. An unfamiliar noise in a car, for example, may give rise to an accurate premonition of
danger. The weakness of the theory, in this form, is that it requires of the precogniser an uncanny ability to
analyze signs and indications that are not only imperceptible to the ordinary eye but also impossible to
deduce theoretically. What clues in a dreamer's environment could prompt an accurate precognition of a
disaster six months and 3,000 miles away? Some extraordinary suggestions have been made to explain
how the future may be unrealized but cognizable in the present. One such suggestion, by Gerhard Dietrich
Wasserman, a mathematical physicist at the University of Durliam in England, is that all events exist as
timeless mental patterns, with which every living and non-living particle in the universe is associated.
This idea owes something to the ancient belief that the universe — the macrocosm — contains innumerable
microcosms, each recapitulating the features and order of the large whole. Thus man was seen as a
microcosm of the earth, his veins and arteries corresponding to streams and rivers, and so on.
By the end of the 17th century the idea had undergone many transformations but was still potent. The great
philosopher and mathematician Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, for example wrote, “All the different
classes of being which taken together make up the universe are, in the ideas of God who knows distinctly
their essential graduations, only so many ordinates of a single curve so closely united that it would be
impossible to place others between any two of them, since that would imply disorder and imperfection.”
Accordingly, the various orders of beings, animate and inanimate, so gradually approximate each other in
their attributes and properties that they form a single chain, “so closely linked one to another that it is
impossible to determine precisely the point at which one ends and the next begins.” In this concept of a
“chain of being” then, the animate, and therefore the spiritual or psychic, are connected with the inanimate
by a gradation of shared attributes. For Leibniz the implication was that someone with enough insight
“would see the future in the present as in a mirror.” Another version of the idea that the future lies hidden in
the present was advanced by Adrian Dobbs, a mathematician and physicist at the University of Cambridge,
in 1965. As events unfold, he proposed, they actualize a relatively small number of the possibilities for
change that exist at a subatomic level. In the process disturbances are caused that create another dimension
of time or what Dobbs calls a psitronic wave-front. This wave-front can be registered by the brain's neurons,
at least in certain especially sensitive people, and be interpreted. A metaphor may help to clarify the
process.
Imagine a pond, at one side of which a toy ship is launched, at the other side of the pond is very small
person. He is unable to see the ship, but as the ship travels forward, the waves it makes reach the shore
on which he stands. As they travel across the pond, these waves pass around certain objects — weeds,
leaves, a log — that are fixed or slowly drifting on its surface. The objects thus create disturbances in the
wave-front, which the small person, who has a lifetime's experience in these things, is able to note in fine
detail. From what he learns of the wave-fronts he not only obtains an image of the objects that produced
them but also calculates how long it will be before they drift to the shore.
In this metaphor the toy ship represents an event unfolding in time. Its course across the pond represents
one of many paths it might take and the dimension of time it occurs in. The pond itself represents Dobbs's
“psitronic wave-front,” and the small person is, of course, the neuronal apparatus that receives the wave-
front and converts it to a prediction. Granting that Dobbs's theory is purely hypothetical and that no
psitronic wave has been discovered, the difficulty is in suggesting a neuronal mechanism by which the
observer distinguishes the wave-front of a particular event from the presumable maelstrom of wave-fronts
produced by simultaneously unfolding events. Again, the farther away the event is in the future, the more
numerous the wave-fronts and the more complex the problem.
Such in general, are some of the theories that regard the future as being, in some way, a potential implicitly
accessible in the present, and such are the difficulties and limitations attending them.
136. All of the following are the intricacies of making correct premonitions except that
a. Extraordinary perception skills may be required as in the car example
b. The future is not yet realized
c. Tremendous insight is required
d. Psitronic fronts are extremely elusive and stay hidden
137. In the toy ship example, the author is least likely to agree with the statement that
a. It is not possible for several events to unfold simultaneously
b. Seemingly intangible wave-fronts can be converted to tangible predictions
c. The toy ship could have followed different paths in the pond
d. An analogy to Dobbs wave-front can be drawn
138. Which of the following is not correct as per the passage?
a. Leibniz was not ready to superimpose other beings on the “chain of being”
b. Leibniz was convinced that animate beings resemble only animate ones
c. Animate beings as per Leibniz, share attributes with inanimate ones
d. None of above
139. The word “uncanny” in the passage specifically refers to:
a. The innumerable microcosms each recapitulating the features and order of the large whole
b. The ability to analyse symptoms and indications that are not visible to the ordinary eye
c. Dobbs version of the idea that the future lies hidden in the present
d. Some premonitions which surely originate from hints hardly noticed in a conscious way
140. The central idea being followed in the passage is regarding
a. The impossibility of deducing the nature of the “future” in the “present”
b. The impossibility of analysing the causal link between “future” and the “present”
c. The complex nature of the causal link between the “future” and the “present”
d. The scientific way of enjoying the “future” and the “present”
Happy CATing 