The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one. But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles. If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.
Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?
To get my once-in-a-generation story down onto the page, in my laptop, though, I’m going to need your café’s Wi-Fi password. Sorry, I don’t know if you heard me: I’m going to be writing a novel here in your café today! How exciting for you!
That’s the thing about writing a novel. You think you can get by without the World Wide Web. I mean, isn’t my imagination the widest web of them all? However, I will need to connect to your Wi-Fi to do some online research in order to fill my story with historically accurate details. Sure, I’ll spend most of my time staring at my ex’s vacation photos on Facebook, but it’s all just a part of the writing process.
The Word for Woman Is Wilderness is unlike any published work I have read, in ways that are beguiling, audacious and occasionally irritating. It’s a British debut in which 19-year-old Erin leaves her Midlands home and heads for Alaska by land and sea in order to write a feminist narrative about the wilderness: a revision of the works of Jack London and John Muir for the millennial generation. Along the way, she muses on space travel, mutually assured destruction, climate change and physics.
The Adulterants, from its punning title onwards, is brilliantly knowing about its knowingness. It knows the only way we’ll tolerate a narrator as annoying as Ray is to punish him for the very virtues that make him a good narrator – nosiness and eloquence.