The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pen conceived it.

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. This network of times, which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, 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, not you; in others, both of us.

Through our daily rambles on the web, where each array of links is a bifurcation of alternatives, labyrinthine time has become a familiar part of our lives.


—Paul Halpern