While reviewing a friend's request to revisit the fourth-dimension chapter of his own book Out of This World, Neville describes reading the editorial page of a Sunday New York Times a friend had given as a Christmas gift subscription. The piece reported that a major gathering of scientists at the New York Hilton had just concluded the Saturday before, discussing a model of the universe expanding to a limit, contracting into extreme density, and possibly repeating the cycle. Neville uses their prediction of the universe's future as an analogy for his teaching that the future already exists and can be foreseen.