Category Archives: Death’s Handmaiden

This is NOT the announcement of Death’s Handmaiden‘s release. Soon. This IS technically a spoiler for Bitter Wind, but it’s not much of a spoiler, so I’m doing it anyway.

I have just had the surreal experience of discovering that one of my outlandish ideas is a real, scientific theory.

Last week, I dropped an idea into a character’s exposition regarding the science of magic. Basically, it went like this:

• In quantum mechanics, the ‘observer’ is all important. Quantum superpositions only collapse when observed.
• There is a problem – the fine-tuning or Goldilocks paradox – which questions why the laws of physics seem to be so finely tuned for the existence of life.
• The solution is that the universe did not really exist until the first observer made their first observation. At that point, reality ‘collapsed’ into a state which allowed that observer to exist and the possible variations which did not allow for the observer ceased to exist.

I thought this was a cute but probably wrong solution to fine tuning. I don’t really believe that conscious minds are needed to make a superposition collapse, but it was a nice solution.

Today, I bought a copy of New Scientist because they were doing a special report on the nature of reality. That stuff is always good for ideas. Then I got to a bit called ‘Do We Make Reality?’ and what do I find there but pretty much the exact same hypothesis I wrote in Bitter Wind last week. It’s a real interpretation of quantum mechanics!

Of course, it’s just a hypothesis and there are other ways to interpret the physics. The idea that a conscious observer is needed to make measurements is by no means a certainty and some inanimate objects may possess a form of consciousness (at least for this purpose). Still, my mind was a bit blown. Apparently, I can still have clever ideas. I’m pretty sure my old physics lecturers would never have believed I’d grasped enough of the subject to come up with that one.

PS. As I write this, Amazon have shifted Death’s Handmaiden back into ‘In Review.’ I may have been premature about when it’ll be ready.