I did enjoy this guest essay at the New York Times (gift link):
I fantasised about multiple timelines, and it nearly ruined my life
Many things I like and have commented on over the years get a mention: Hugh Everett, Narnia, the recent bad decision to over-use the multiverse in Marvel movies, and the sometimes unclear messaging of Everything Everywhere All at Once. And it starts with something I hadn't heard of before:
The patient was elderly and lived alone. She was showing signs of depression, but it was clear that something more was amiss. She insisted she was trapped in the wrong timeline.
The ward to which she’d been committed was unstuck in time, she told her doctors. Outside, the future had already arrived, and it was not a good one. “She described then that the world outside the ward had been destroyed,” reported the doctors in Exeter, England, who wrote a report about the case in a 2019 issue of the journal Neurology and Neurosurgery.
The woman was diagnosed with a variation of Capgras syndrome. First defined a century ago, Capgras typically describes a person’s belief that someone close to him or her — a spouse or a child — has been replaced with a duplicate impostor. But in this case, the patient believed that the whole world — everything she could observe of it — was a duplicate, a fake.
Go read the whole thing...
I'd not heard that C S Lewis was interested in quantum physics before and, while it may be true, I have some doubts. Lewis's conception of Narnia came more from his wide reading of science fiction, his fondness especially for David Lindsay's esoteric 'Voyage to Arcturus', and age-old ideas about fairyland.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah Tim: I did think when I was reading the essay that that sounded like a very dubious claim. It's a little hard to imagine CS Lewis taking an interest in the latest chat about quantum interpretations, or paying attention to physics of any kind. Anyway, I forgot to make that comment in my post.
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