According to Fermat’s principle of least time, the path taken by a ray of light to traverse from point A to B is the one that requires the least time to traverse. A fictional character, Dr. Louise Banks (a linguist), extrapolated from this principle that a ray of light has to know its destination before it can choose the fastest possible route amonorting the Bāṇārasī Mind: What Do Linguistic Catg the several available alternatives. She applied this principle in her quest to decipher the language of some Heptapods, or aliens who had landed on Earth. She postulated that the Heptapods do not write a sentence sequentially, one semagram at a time, but simultaneously, and therefore they must know the entire sentence before they begin to write. Furthermore, because the language of the aliens requires simultaneous expression of all thoughts in a sentence at once, the Heptapods’ experience of the world must also be teleological, and not causal as it is for humans. This led to her discovery that the Heptapods know the future.