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Quote by Margaret Laurence

“Because they don't know [the anger is] there inside them. [...] They think they are sweet reasonableness, and it's you that's in the wrong, just by being, and not being like them, or looking like them, or wanting their kind of life.”

Quote by Margaret Laurence

Book:The Diviners
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Work

The Diviners

In this historical fiction, a family of siblings in the 1930s New York City are drawn together by their shared gift of divination. The story delves into their personal struggles and the societal challenges of the era, as they navigate their unique abilities amidst the backdrop of the Great Depression. more

Author

Margaret Laurence
Margaret Laurence

Margaret Laurence was a Canadian novelist known for her profound psychological insights and depiction of the prairie culture in Canada. Her works often explore themes of personal identity, family relationships, and social change. more

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“If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don't use the "slit detector," then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.”

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“More and more, I have no idea what I think of anything. It’s as if the world were this very strange beast under a big tarp. Writing is a way of poking at the tarp. You can watch what the beast does during the poking and maybe surmise something about the sort of beast it is, but you also don’t want to be too confident in your theories. I really like the fact that, these days, I can’t say what writing is for, what it’s supposed to do, or how it’s supposed to affect us. I just like doing it.”

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Author:George Saunders
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“So long as we don’t try to figure out which slit [electrons] go through, they will behave as if they go through both at once. But if we try to pin down which slit they pass through, they only go through one. The mere act of making the measurement – even if we can be pretty sure that the measurement shouldn’t obstruct or influence the electron’s path – appears to turn a wave into a particle. Yes, appears to. Does the electron really pass through both slits at once when we’re not looking at its path? Does it change from wave to particle when we do look? These are, according to Bohr’s view of quantum mechanics, illegitimate questions, precisely because they are insisting on some microscopic description underlying the measurements we make. Bohr argued that there is nothing in quantum mechanics that permits us to formulate such a description. That is not what the Schrödinger equation is about. It just predicts the outcomes of measurements.”

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Book:Beyond Weird
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