The New Physics and Middle Passage: Scientific Allusions by Travis Ferrell “Could it be that in a dimension alongside this one I was a dwarf sitting in a Chinese robe, telling a white mate I captured a European god and, below us, the holding was cramped with white chattel? Preposterous!” (Johnson 102). At least, this is what Calhoun thinks in response to Falcon’s suggestion that the Allmuseri god might “sustain alternative universes, parallel worlds and counter histories where, for example, you [Calhoun] are captain of the Republic and I’m the cook’s helper” (Johnson 100). As counterintuitive as this is for the reader, it very much is a serious suggestion of modern physics. In many respects, the Allmuseri god is informed by “Schrodinger’s Cat,” a famous experiment in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics dictates that very small particles are not so much in one place and not in another so much as they are more in one place and less in another. All the places a very small particle might be are called a quantum field. The reason that people do not see this phenomenon under microscopes is that observation collapses the “wave function,” or rather, looking makes it one or the other. What happens to all fact that the particle was a little bit in other places from the one in which the observer sees? The Multiple Possibilities Theory of Quantum Mechanics dictates that for every place it could be, there is a universe where it does end up being when the observer looks. The Schrodinger’s Cat experiment is as follows: place a cat in a box. Have a food source be dispersed to the cat based on the random decay of a radioactive source. If it decays one way, the cat is fed poisoned food. If it does not decay, the cat is not fed poison food. In modern physics, the cat is both alive and dead until the observer opens the box. Two states, life and death, which are completely opposed states to the human mind, actually do occur at once. Only observation collapses the wave function and creates the reality of the cat being either dead or alive. If the observer finds a dead cat, that might well mean that in another universe a live cat was found. The Allmuseri deity is very much informed by this idea. It is a creature in a box that creates realities and, as Falcon states, “contradicts itself” (Johnson 101). The god “can’t know its own nature...[f]or itself, it can’t be an object of knowledge” (Johnson 101). The alive and dead cat, once it is either alive or dead, does not act as if it had been alive and dead just a moment ago. It cannot collapse the wave function because it cannot observe the decay of the radioactive sourse. I am not suggesting that the Allmuseri god is entirely or even mostly a function of the New Physics. Certainly, the deity is meant to reflect the circular belief structure of the Allmuseri and non-Western philosophy in general; nonetheless, quantum mechanics does inform and add credence to the Allmuseri’s non-liner thought. All things that can happen may very well happen. The physics that supports this idea is very much in line with Johnson’s interest in “transcending relativism.” Johnson deliberately brings into the theological discussion between Calhoun and Falcon scientific principles that not only suggest that reality is far different from how we traditionally conceive of it, but that it is so different that other realities spring forth from our observations of reality. Ironically, Falcon states that “empirical knowledge is own man’s side” (Johnson 101). Falcon’s perspective does not celebrate a circular view, but Johnson’s placing a scientific principle which allows for both death and life to occur at the same time hardly seems happenstantial given Johnson’s intellectual vigor.

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