"Ts'ui Pen, an ancestor of the narrator, sets himself the task of writing a novel with a cast of thousands: an enormous guessing game, or parable, in which the subject is time. In most novels, when a character reaches a fork in the path, they must choose: this way, or that way. Yet in Ts'ui Pen's novel, all possible paths are chosen. This creates a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. The garden of forking paths is infinite."
"In a 2005 essay, The Garden of the Forking Worlds, the physicist Alberto Rojo investigated this claim. Did the physicists read Borges? Or did Borges read the universe? It turned out that Bryce DeWitt hadn't known about Borges's garden. When Rojo questioned Borges, he also denied everything: This is really curious, he said, because the only thing I know about physics comes from my father, who once showed me how a barometer works. He added: Physicists are so imaginative!"
Multiple notable anniversaries fall in 2026, including the 85th of a famous 1941 short story. The tale centers on chance, labyrinths and an impossible novel in which an ancestor attempts to write a vast book portraying time. Rather than forcing choices at forks, the novel enacts every possible path, producing an expanding web of divergent, convergent and parallel times that forms an infinite garden. The story is often linked to the multiverse or many-worlds idea in quantum physics. A 2005 inquiry found key physicists unaware of the story, and the writer claimed no scientific knowledge, underscoring ambiguous links between fiction and scientific theory.
#branching-time #multiverse #many-worlds-interpretation #fictional-foreshadowing #literature-and-physics
Read at www.theguardian.com
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