Chris Else
Entanglement by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press, 2021), 268pp, $35
When I was fifteen I discovered the joys of mathematics. The experience was a Damascene moment that confirmed me on a path to study science despite my love of language and story. I found, however, that when I got to university all my friends were arts students. Many of them felt that science was an arcane business somehow inimical to the things they cared about. How could I want to write poetry and short stories while at the same time attending lectures in maths and physics? For my part, I was mystified by their mystification. The pleasure I found in an elegant piece of logic was aesthetic and the ideas of science seemed a fertile field of metaphor. For example, the paradoxical square root of minus one, represented by the symbol i and the basis for the system of imaginary numbers, called to my mind the I of personal consciousness and identity, which seemed equally strange and inexplicable. [Read more…]