Timescape - Gregory Benford, Hilary Benford Page 0,179

Bohr on, had let in some metaphysics at this point, Markham remembered. The wave function collapsed and that was the irreducible fact.… But with tachyons that dab of metaphysics had to go” (Chapter 31). His last thought replaces the dab of metaphysics with multiple universes: “Markham felt a sudden stab of perception. If the universe was a wholly linked system with no mythical classical observer to collapse the wave function, then the wave function did not have to collapse at all.… Markham thought of a universe with one wave function, scattering into the new states of being as a paradox formed inside it like the kernel of an idea.”

Markham himself splits into two states of being along with his world because of the paradox forced by the message sent from 1998 to 1962–63. He dies in one reality but not in the other. The message creates a world that will not suffer the ecological disaster that prompts the sending of the message. The tachyon theory that is the foundation of Timescape makes sending the message back through time credible—but the resulting paradox still has to be dealt with, both in terms of the scientifically grounded view of spacetime presented in Timescape and in terms of its story.

The moment of conceptual breakthrough is the climax of the theoretical scientist’s work, and the key to it here is acknowledgment that the classical observer, that purely objective scientist who in no way interacts with what is being observed, is a mythical creature. The limitations on the possibility of scientific objectivity that are recognized in Timescape are naturally reinforced by the inevitable subjectivities of characters in human situations. Gordon sees Penny in terms of his New York Jewish imprinting and misreads her accordingly, denying her own reality. Peterson’s Don Juan-ism clashes with Wickham’s lesbianism, and each views the other with hostility; conflict between Peterson’s upper-class and Renfrew’s working-class attitudes also impinges on their work together. Personality differences affect Bernstein’s work with his student Cooper and cause him to reflect on opportunities that are missed in science when human clashes make effective collaboration impossible. That science is a human activity is very evident in Timescape. “Theories are based on pictures of the world—human pictures,” Markham acknowledges (Chapter 24). The fact that subjectivity is inevitable in any frame of reference chosen by the scientist is basic to the scientific argument about the nature of spacetime.

Though scientists have idealized objectivity, they now find it theoretically impossible to set themselves apart from the system whose truths they hope to discover. Heisenberg tied the observer into the quantum mechanical system. Gödel showed that there are truths in any system that cannot be proved from within it, so attempts to establish such truths perpetually enlarge the system that contains the truth seeker. Markham broods on the hopelessness of even imagining an independent observer in his cosmicscale problem in which tachyons tie the whole fabric of spacetime into a single system. The world of science and the world of humanity now share an inevitable subjectivity. This recognition is the key to Markham’s conceptual breakthrough, and it translates into a picture of multiple universes that invites us to reorient ourselves in a paradigm quite different from the traditional one that assumes a unique reality discoverable by objective science.

Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth, and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing. What makes Timescape distinctive is its combination of features that are less frequently found in science fiction: the detailed portrayal of contemporary science, the attention to character development, and the relationship between literary and scientific approaches to ideas about subjectivity, interconnectedness, and multiple realities. In Timescape the traditionally clear distinction between “hard” science fiction and mainstream literature is not so clear.

In an article in the February 15, 1982, issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine called “Why Is There So Little Science in Literature?” Benford, who dislikes the term “postmodern,” chooses “irrealism” to describe the strain of mainstream literature in which writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem “deliberately accent some aspect of the agreed-upon world, achieving a kind of super-realism that seems both recognizable and bizarre.” In Borges’s writing he finds the recognition that “the fundamental notions underlying our consensual reality are themselves strange, bewildering, even unhuman, when studied in the full glare of literary