Neville recounts an earlier exchange with a scientist he calls Inmar (also called Larry in the same telling), who insisted that the past is fixed and unalterable ('entropy') and dismissed Neville's claim that imagining the future could still shape it. About two months later, while Neville was in New York City, the scientist sent him a clipping from the Science Newsletter describing a lecture Professor Feynman had just given at Cornell University on the newly discovered positron, along with a letter apologizing for having argued his position so firmly.