I have just made another impulsive Amazon purchase but this one is a bigger gamble than usual. Risky, because I am drawing on 35 years of memory and therefore not entirely sure that it is the right one.When I was a young teen I read a book from the school library called The Cloudwalker. Arthur C. Clarke said of the author Edmund Cooper (1926-1982) that he 'writes with great authority and skill'. His fans believe he was one of the sci-fi greats but often sadly forgotten (possibly because he was a contemporary of Clarke's)
I don't remember much about the book apart from one descriptive paragraph that had such an effect as to ensure that the name of the book stayed squarely planted in my memory. This particular passage described one of the book's characters encountering an impenetrable doorway and simply de-materialising into an essence of something, slipping under it and re-materialising on the other side. To my adolescent brain and even more so today, this seemed perfectly believable, even reasonable. The Amazon review gave me a further clue as to why this book made such an impact on me:
In this short but powerful story of an artist & aspiring aviator in an oppressive future, the criminally neglected Edmund Cooper returns to one of his favorite themes: the need for the imagination to soar & find its own life, its own reason for being.
It seems that my trajectory was set all those years ago. I am now completing the cycle through my doctoral research and entering the field of quantum physics where I am discovering that science has finally caught up with science fiction as Brian Swimme outlines:
...in quantum physics, it turns out that the vacuum is actually pure generativity. It’s constantly foaming forth with reality, elementary particles that then cascade back into nonexistence.....some physicists have thought about it very deeply, and David Bohm has a radical interpretation that has withstood a lot of criticism. He says that when you have a particle that is in existence, like an electron, the way it goes from here to there is that it dissolves into the unmanifest.
It has taken me 35 years to find the scientific backup for something I intuitively knew to be true. Science really is very slow and cumbersome but finally at least it seems there will be a reconciliation, which is also something I felt would happen eventually.
