Here’s a quick update of the book Quarantine by Greg Egan I’ve started reading. There’s way too much quantum physics jargon but some very interesting concepts discussed. The story revolves around a giant shroud that’s covered our entire solar system by some alien species that shuts out the light from the stars. The assumption is that Earth has been quarantined for some reason from the rest of the universe. That’s pretty out there for starters. But now one theory has come up that suggests the reason why we’re being quarantined is because of our ability to collapse the quantum wave with (it turns out) our brains. It’s thought there are species out there that live within those super-positioned states and we’re essentially committing some kind of act of genocide upon them whenever we collapse the quantum state. Mind blowing!
I finished the Greg Egan book, Quarantine. It was tough going in the end, with the quantum jargon coming thick and fast. I ended up skimming large chunks of the latter part of the book. I got to this particular passage, an account of efforts to control quantum fluctuations (I think!), and it did my head in: ‘Both Von Neumann and Hypernova have facilities for true random number generation – as opposed to the deterministic pseudo random sequences produced by purely algorithmic means. They employ groups of neurons especially tailored for the purpose, balanced on a fractal knife-edge between firing and not firing, stuttering chaotically in the sway of nothing but intracellular chemical fluctuations and, ultimately, thermal noise.’ (p157). Phew! It feels like reading pure Maths. There’s only so much of that abstract stuff I can take before my head explodes. In the end the story became something of a ‘stop the madman letting the world-ending virus loose’ plot, with the virus being a world that is in perpetual quantum flux. Egan writes impressively about what a world like that might look like – it ain’t pretty! It was good cyberpunk ala William Gibson stuff, but it asked for a lot of patience and concentration from the reader. Don’t know if I was up to it. It hasn’t soured me on Egan – I’ll definitely check out some more of his stuff. But I will be wary.