The Pink Car is still up for sale on eBayPrincess Trust on eBay. Here’s the link
The Little Princess Trust helps children suffering hair loss due to cancer treatment. A great cause, so if you’re in the market for a new old car, it’s a
They are hoping to get over £1000 – the paint job is worth £2000!
You have to work at these things slowly.
I grew up in the Atomic age. Science was the answer to everything. I agreed. I loved science – If only I could have made the maths add up I would have been a scientist myself. In fact the first job I applied for and was offered was as a Scientific Officer with the Ministry of Agriculture and food. ( I turned it down. It involved staring at microscopic worms in Lincolnshire onions all day long.)
Every week throughout my childwood, the must see TV programme, Tomorrow’s World, painted glorious pictures of the fabulous future that awaited us. Apollo landed on the moon. Energy was going to be so cheap it wouldn’t be worth metering. “Put your faith in Science”, we were told. That now sounds a bit religious to me.
Then the science began to get really complicated. No one understood it anymore, so we were sold technology instead. Technology is the bit that’s easy to understand – like the boxes with screens that do stuff for us, that were once going to create the Leisure Society. Can you remember how we were seriously discussing what people would do when they didn’t need to work any more? How we would have to prepare new styles of government and social control?
Scientists are High Priests, locked away in their inner sancta, seeking the ultimate truth. We go along with this, paying our tribute every time we upgrade our computer or TV. We encourage them to go further, make new discoveries, apply those discoveries to even more amazing products we can upgrade every couple of years – and lets not worry about the effect on our physical and mental health or the state of the environment. “Don’t look at the man behind the the curtain.”
Evolution has now given us the ultimate high priest in Richard Dawkins. Of course you must be a little bonkers to believe in creationism- the evidence against such a simplistic story is just too strong. But people still choose to believe it – against all evidence. And Richard Dawkins asks us to believe in Science as the Truth. But the truth he asks us to believe is so incredible that what he is really asking for is Blind Faith.
I cannot see any difference between a story about a star moving across the heavens to be over the birthplace of one particular child and a tale about electrons that exist in many places at the same time that react differently depending on whether anyone is looking – (actually that sounds a bit like a description of the Norse God Loki now I think about it).
Quantum Mechanics are so incredible that one is required to accept it’s workings on trust. Yet the same scientists that ask us to believe their incredible truth think that faith in anything else that is equally unbelievable or intangible is wasted effort.
Perhaps it’s time Religion and Science began to talk to each other. They both seek the ultimate truth and both ask us to believe and accept as fact that which our brains our incapable of understanding. Maybe there is one truly simple truth – a unifying theory – the knowledge of which makes sense of everything else. If the High Priests found the answer, would they tell us? Would they want to hold that power to themselves? Which ever way you look at it, Science and Religion are both looking for the same answer. They just use different methods.
My dear son, Ed, came with us to see the Time Traveller’s Wife, last night. Afterwards, he had quite a lot to say about the practicalities of time travel and the way it was represented in the film.
Everything he said was right, but then everything he said was wrong. He was only prepared to discuss time travel from the Quantum Mechanics point of view, eventually admitting that Quantum Mechanics is the best explanation of how things work that we have at the moment.
But once, Newtonian Physics was the best explanation and before that Hobgoblins and the Philosopher’s Stone. In their times each theory was the best to hand and therefore, “The Truth.”
Quantum Mechanics only works at quantum levels. In our everyday macro mode, Newtonian Physics still makes the most sense to people who need to keep their feet on the ground. These are models of our Universe, but there are many more. To make the models work, you have to believe in them. At the same time you have to suspend belief in what you can see and feel and touch around you to be able to get a handle on the amazing idea that is Quantum Mechanics.
If we disbelieve the story of Quantum Mechanics, (it does have holes in the plot) then we have to believe something else is at work. That is the wonderful, bonkers nature of humanity – it is just as easy to believe in fairies as it is to believe in gravity being both a wave and a particle at the same time.
One of the possible outcomes of Quantum Theory is the Multiverse, where each and every possible version of history is played out at the same time in an infinite number of “slices”.
Isn’t that how a story works? When a writer sits down to write a story, the plot can go in a million different ways. Different characters and situations exert their own gravity on the plot, pulling it and distorting it every which way. The writer guides us through their best interpretation of the story. The slice that tells the most satisfying version of the story.
They say there are only seven stories. Maybe there are only seven Multiverses and writers merely show us different slices. Each slice a different possibility in time and space for that particular story Multiverse?
When we hear or read a story, we suspend belief and go along with what we are told for the duration of the tale. Sometimes the story makes perfect sense and the story becomes ubiquitous, rewritten and retold over and over again. Sometimes the story doesn’t work – it sits on the shelf where no one reads it – a slice of multiverse that went wrong. It doesn’t mean that another author can’t take the same plot and fashion a more interesting or meaningful version of the same story – show us a different, more satisfying slice of that Multiverse. It happens all the time. Remember – there are only seven stories.
So however much you may argue about the realities of the time travel plot in the Time Traveller’s Wife, The plot works perfectly in this slice of time and space or should I say my slice of time and space? Quantum Physics has a lot to say about the how and by whom events are observed.
Something about the plot is right because it has resonated with the millions who have read the book and seen the film. For those millions, it stands as a unified theory, one they seem to accept and understand for the moment.