Quantum Weirdness


If you think this is the way atoms are, then you're back in 1910
--Richard Feynman

If you are still left wondering which hole the electron really went through or if Schroedinger's cat is dead or alive, then just imagine that the whole universe at every instant of time splits into an infinity of universes. All those quantum never-never lands become real....One can imagine all sorts of incredible things happening in those other universes--everything that can happen, will happen. In some universes none of us were even born to wonder about quantum reality.--Heinz Pagels

From The Garden of Forking Paths

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths - Ts'ui Pen

I have some understanding of labyrinths: not for nothing am I the great grandson of that Ts'ui Pen who was governor of Yunnan and who renounced worldly power in order to write a novel and to construct a labyrinth in which all men would become lost. Thirteen years he dedicated to these tasks, but a stranger murdered him--and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth....I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involved the stars. The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows....

"Here is Ts'ui Pen's labyrinth...An invisible labyrinth of time....Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. Ts'ui Pen died; no one in the vast territories that were his came upon the labyrinth; the confusion of the novel suggested that it was the maze....

"In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the novel of Ts'ui Pen, he chooses--simultaneously--all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork....All possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings....

"In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. The network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centures, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me, you have arrived at my house...."--Jorge Luis Borges