Friday 22 January 2010

The Nth Page of Henry Lamberton's Journal


Henry Lamberton first appeared on the  DAC with an entry in the last page of his Journal . I have bought him back this week with the Nth Page in his Journal...


[SPOILER ALERT!] I would recommend reading the stories first, before continuing with the below..[/SPOILER ALERT!] 

I made a comment, where I wrote about the Bhagavad Gita ,  how you sometimes read a New scientist article(several times!) and though you don't understand it, you enjoyed reading it. I remember one such article, about three years ago, about Quantum Mechanics. I think through the tons of text, the point they were trying to make, was it was all well and good, but they don't know if they are looking at things the right way up - They don't know how to tell up from down.

This got us thinking, and I made a post in a forum afterwards along these lines
'
If im walking past a person in the street who i have never met before , then that night i have a dream where that person who i passed is in it.

That Person who i dont know now exists in three states.

There is there real state - which I dont know
There is the state where I passed them
There is the state where I dreamt them


Now Say that person who I passed did exactly the same thing. I now exist in three states except I know my real state and they dont...

Original post here

And this is the starting point of Henry Lamberton's tale. I rewrote it first just to make if from his point of view. The first draft, after feedback came across a bit illogical,  so I went off and watched quite a few videos on youtube about quantum mechanics. I was interested more in the language, than the science and I think the main theme I picked up on  was about Observation.

For example, Here is Dr.Quantum explaining the Double Slit experiment


It does seem observation, plays a lot in Quantum Mechanics , another example is Shrodingers Cat . So I went through and put the focus on observation. I am most annoyed, that due to the 1000 line word limit on flash fiction, I could not work in the paragraph where I explained about the restrictive observation point of Victorian gentlemen, due to over starched collars - Hence why he can not verify his existence in the first state.

The other, and more harder thing, was Henry Lamberton's world is a pre Einstein world and he has a chip on his shoulder about Newton. I tried to make this piece sound if it could come from someone whose view of the universe is Newtonian based. I will know if this has worked, if anyone picks up on my Relativity joke in the piece.

To end with, Here is Dr. Quantum explaining entanglement - just to confuse your day




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