Communion Of Dreams

Scientific American has a great piece about making a quantum eraser at home, with complete explanations of the science behind the experiment. Even if you don’t want to try the experiment yourself, read the article and be sure to go through the slide show of the experiment. Wonderful stuff, and explained very well.

I love physics, and when I was young (up into junior-senior high school) wanted to go into some branch of physics as a career. Alas, I discovered that my aptitude for math wasn’t sufficient, and followed other interests. But I have continued to read and keep up with the advance of physics on a ‘popular science’ sort of level. And I have enough respect for the things that science has provided us that I tried to stay true to known science when writing Communion.

[Spoiler alert.] The single biggest leap in Communion is the bit in chapter three where I talk about Hawking’s Conundrum – the supposed break-through treatise that Stephen Hawking writes, but leaves to be published after his death. I only describe the revolution in physics that it creates, and the technology that it enables, I don’t actually try and explain how it works. Because I’m just not that smart, nor even knowledgeable enough to fake being that smart. Fortunately, the standards of science fiction writing are such that we don’t actually have to come up with complete explanations for everything.

Still, if you take the supposition that such a breakthrough in theory does occur, which somehow resolves some of the glitches in both quantum mechanics and string theory the same way that the theory of relativity resolved some of the problems with Newtonian physics, then add in sufficient time for the implications of the theory to be understood and applied, then most of what follows in the book should be accurate. No, really.

I am reminded of a half-remembered anecdote (and if anyone can remember it more completely, please drop me a note or leave a comment – I’d be much obliged). I believe that it was Jerry Siegel, one of the creators of Superman, who once was challenged by a reader asking how Superman was able to do some particular thing. Siegel replied that he could say that it was due to this, or that, but that basically it was because he created the character and said so.

I’ve always loved that. Yeah, sure, you want to have enough plausibility to allow the reader to suspend their disbelief, but when fans get so wrapped up in all the insane details of some piece of fiction (whether it is Superman, Star Trek, or Harry Potter), then I can’t help but feel that they’ve lost a bit of perspective, and can no longer appreciate the forest for being focused on which particular lichen is growing on a rock at the foot of one of the trees. Don’t get me wrong – I would *love* to have the kind of fan base that would so get into my book that they would get sucked in to the minutia of my universe – but the larger story in each of those cases is more important, just as I like to think that the larger story of Communion is more important than the details of the tech used.

Jim Downey