“I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics,” observed the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. That’s not surprising, as far as it goes. Science makes progress by confronting our lack of understanding, and quantum mechanics has a reputation for being especially mysterious.
What’s surprising is that physicists seem to be O.K. with not understanding the most important theory they have.
When the rocks tumbled down on Thursday night, they came to rest just short of Rauma — which was received with joyful relief by residents, who watched from a safe distance as the event was broadcast on national television.
“I cried on national TV,” Lars Olav Hustad, the town’s mayor, told reporters. “We could all see the rocks,” he added, and described an “enormous noise” as Little Man fell.
“It was really emotional,” he continued. “I was so happy for the people who had been in this trouble for five years, and then, the tears came.”
Maybe it was easier to be friends with an older person outside of my family because families live with one another’s faults. With Cora, I didn’t have any baggage; we shared no memories. We were free to be friends: to be frank with each other about our hopes and fears and flaws. Though it was cut short by her death, my friendship with Cora ranks among the most important I have ever had. Even now that she has been gone for nearly a year, our conversations still guide me. I would recommend that anyone in need of connection seek friends beyond the generational divide. What you find there might surprise you. We are more similar across generations than we are different: all human, all, to some extent, still figuring out who we are.
The street is wrong; it is obvious now. On the way back to the house, wrapped square in right-hand pocket, the disarrangement is visible to her. It is in the position of the branches. Last night she heard the storm, her eyes locked on the claw marks of ceiling light, her ears dividing the sounds into subcategories: paper whipping the pavement, a somersaulting tin can, the low vocal scrape of a plastic lid. The downed branches lie where the storm left them. The way they lie is wrong. The detail takes time to present. She stands for a while looking and eventually it comes into focus.
A tree loses twenty branches to a storm. They fall to the street. This is street physics. Street physics is not clock physics; it is relatable to any child. Throw some sticks and they will land in a random pattern according to angles and energies. The branches here, though, are crossed, fallen in X formations. The street is paved with these indicative marks. Indicative, she knows, means agency.
Instead The Second Sleep develops into something more contemplative: an exploration of a world that is both unfamiliar and as old as time, and of the consequences of our flagrant disregard for the existential perils of our own era. A convincingly imagined future world requires a steady accretion of small, telling details and there are sections in Harris’s novel that feel frustratingly inconsistent or approximate. But if his dystopia lacks the political and social coherence of, say, Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, he has contrived in The Second Sleep to do something rather brilliant and new. He has put us at the heart of the mystery. Whatever disaster has struck the world it has struck because of us, our greed and ambition, our arrogance. We are all responsible. As Fairfax edges closer to the truth, the reader is left with at least as many questions as answers, and most of those questions are directed at ourselves.
This novel is less a motorcycle than a double-decker bus, but it does handle gracefully. The plot never stalls. There’s a fervent anti-Trump streak. And King still really knows what to do when he gets his characters out on the road.