Fuzzy Thinking

I’ve been trying to get this blog started for more than an hour now, and I have to say it’s been tough going. I feel kind of blank idea-wise, so I thought I’d try stream of consciousness typing and see where that takes me. (Sidebar: I recently had knee joint replacement surgery and I’m not convinced the pain meds are completely out of my system yet.) Hang on, here’s a thought or two:

If you’ve read The Traveler series, you know that Harry’s story balances on a thin border between “actual” science and “wouldn’t it be cool” science. Like, wouldn’t it be cool if we could ignore the historic premises of how space-time works and our more outlandish experiments did not consequently destroy all known reality? Of course it would, but think of all the science fiction plots that would bury. Or, what if (a) time travel was possible; and (b) all the concern about altering the timeline by causing paradoxes didn’t apply.

If we find ourselves in that situation, it seems to me the easy out is we’d have to consider the multiverse theory. Otherwise, you’ve got a single timeline that’s constantly shifting to account for fundamental reality changes in order to stay attuned to some unknowable baseline; at some point that just has to blow up. In the multiverse, though, all those paradoxes become an infinity of alternate realities. If you really want to bend your brain into other dimensions, cogitate on that for a while.

Recent quantum mechanics experiments have proven that quantum entanglement is real and works at both very short and very long distances. Those results have engendered expanded theories from scientists about whether human consciousness relies on entanglement, and if it does, what does that mean for understanding our shared reality within the context of space-time? Is it possible that human consciousness effectively exists in a state that operates across physical and non-physical boundaries? (More on that in The Traveler, Book 4, hopefully to be released early in 2025.)

Science fiction has always bounced back and forth across the border between proven science and metaphysical theories that transcend the physical reality we inhabit. I’m not a scientist, but I have noticed that the more we study and experiment with quantum mechanics the more it looks like those metaphysical theories aren’t so outlandish after all.

According to Albert Einstein, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”