BY KIRK MCCOY, SCIENCE REPORTER

A SCIENTIST WHO describes himself as very clever says the reason there are no visitors from the future is that there is no future.

“I don’t mean that the earth is going to be wiped out any time soon, I mean the concept of future we hold to it all wrong,” insists Buck Ming a theoretical physicist from the Chinese Institute of the Mandate of Heaven, a Buddhist foundation based on a lake in the mountains of Tibet.

“We humans tend to look on the future as a solid form, like the past, but that is not the case. The future is an endless series of possibilities which remain to be settled. The present is the settling of those future possibilities. So the only solid ground we have, apart from the past, is the present. Anything beyond that has not yet happened and so no one can visit us from it.”

Ming, who claims Chinese and American parentage, and has an IQ of 185, says he is “really very clever”, and argues that anyone who actually understood the nature of entropy and its role in creating the present from the future, would agree with him. “The future does not exist until it happens and once it happens it is the present and in the same instant, the past. It’s like watching a loom create patterned cloth out of loose strands of fabric. Out in front is chaos; behind is order. And we’re in the middle.”