We bought a combination microwave cooker to replace our existing basic one so that we could also use it as a grill but we discovered that the grill function wasn’t adequate for our purposes, so wanted to return it, get our money back and continue using our old microwave. However, as we had used the device we could only get a refund if it was faulty. The device immediately obliged us by exhibiting a fault in that the actual microwave power was significantly lower than that specified by at least 30% so that food needed to be cooked longer than it should have taken. A technician sent by the manufacturer to check the device couldn’t think of a way of repairing this peculiar fault so the manufacturer agreed to refund our money as we had only owned the product for a few of weeks. Could the device actually have responded to our wishful thinking or had this just been a fortuitous coincidence?
Oddly my wife’s recollections of the fault and mine differed in that she thought that the cooker hadn’t been cooking correctly ever since we’d bought it while I thought that the problem had only started after we tried out the grill some days after using just the microwave function for a while, but maybe that was simply because she modified the cooking times all along to get the desired results while I only became aware of the problem once it became relevant to our future.
The interesting aspect of this coincidence is the parallel between what happened and details that I incorporated into my novel thirteen years earlier. That novel described a time capsule that moved its occupants outside of reality to a place where they could meet people from the future and so learn about future events which they could then influence when the capsule returned them to their own time. When the capsule returned everything in their reality was exactly as it had been before except for their memories of their own experiences within the capsule. I conceived this situation in order to conform to the conventions of our physical reality but there was a notable exception which I called the sandhi effect. The word sandhi is actually a grammatical term describing the way that words change to make the overall text pronounceable. The best example in English is “a” changing to “an” depending on what word follows it, as in “a lion” but “an eagle”. As my story only existed in a textual reality it seemed reasonable to me that the reality it described could itself be affected by what was normally a purely textual effect, unlike our physical reality. Therefore I allowed myself a small relaxation of physical conventions in that any change in future events resulting from events inside the time capsule would cause an irrecoverable power loss within the capsule’s system which would not be eliminated when it returned to its original reality, so the batteries that powered it would hold less charge than they had before the trip. This was of course against the laws of conservation of energy but the sandhi effect also caused the past to be changed so that the batteries had evidently never been fully charged previously. This smoothing out of events backwards in time was an exact parallel to a change of the second word in my previous examples of a linguistic sandhi above resulting in the first word also changing to produce a consistent spoken flow. In other words in both cases changing the future also influenced the past for consistency. In the story the only person directly aware of the sandhi effect was the engineer operating the time capsule as he was responsible for monitoring the charging of the batteries prior to a trip and would clearly recall checking that they were fully charged then. Even in our reality human memories cannot be proved to represent the real past, assuming that such inconsistencies are accepted as being commonplace, such as in the case of our differing memories about the fault in the microwave.
Another feature of the time capsule worth mentioning is that apart from the temporal field, which caused it to shift outside of real time, it generated an interactive field, which enabled it to read the minds of its occupants and respond to their thoughts. Maybe the magnetron in our microwave cooker which generated the field of microwaves that cooked the food, albeit inadequately, was also susceptible to our thoughts. The way that magnetrons start and sustain generation of microwaves is complicated and could possibly be disturbed by a far weaker effect in some way, but any theory behind that notion is far beyond my comprehension. Given my other similar experiences it seems more likely that my present knowledge of this purely coincidental experience with the microwave cooker influenced the details that I incorporated into my novel many years ago, but either way something strange appears to have happened.
As a final thought, even the refund of our money was only a conceptual change in reality as nowadays money itself is little more than a fictional concept arising from widespread mutual trust between people which, unlike energy, has no natural law governing its conservation. We can so easily forget just how fragile our perception of the nature of reality actually is.