I have retired from my airline job but my passion is still flying. I want to write and teach as much as I can, here as long as I can.

Here I am with one of my grandsons.

I can be reached at chris@formercaptain.ca
As I struggle to learn to write (difficult, pills painful, intoxicating) Arcadia has become my parallel universe. It is not my native Canada but it is a close cousin. It is not true (fiction) but it is me – my experience, my history, my imagination.

In 1957 Hugh Everett put forth the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, where the uncertainty of the quantum state was resolved by positing parallel universes. I have always thought his theory patently ridiculous. If each and every quantum particle divides the world in two as it collapses, then the number of universes is two to the power of the number of particles in the universe, or something. It is bigger than infinity: it is an infinity if infinities. It boggles the mind.

Of course that has no bearing on its truth. And after reading Dream Machine in the May 2, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, I am changing my mind about Everett. As Riva Galchen says in her article, physics advances by accepting absurdities. So perhaps it is more to the point to question the usefulness of a theory and let its truth fend for itself in future generations.

After all, do we not all live in parallel universes? Are our worlds exactly alike?