Parallel Thoughts from Parallel Worlds

Hi and welcome to Monday Muses with Jessica! This week I’m discussing Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and science enthusiast. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center

I found this book after falling through a wormhole of videos on physics and the Universe. I found Michio Kaku so engaging and incredibly fascinating. With some more Internet searching I found his books Parallel Worlds and The Future of the Mind. So, I got both! Physics has become a fun hobby of mine, when I’m not obsessing over the perfect cuppa tea.

" This is the theory that the smallest material particle in the universe is not a point in space but a string, and how that string vibrates determines the element."

In Parallel Worlds, Kaku takes us on a journey through the creation of the Universe. He talks about String theory, which I think is one of the most beautiful explanations of everything! This is the theory that the smallest material particle in the universe is not a point in space but a string, and how that string vibrates determines the element. Changing the vibration results in a different element. In other words, music, everything that exists is music! (Or at least that’s what I understand it to mean). String Theory’s latest iteration, M-theory, which proposes that our universe is just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. In this journey, Kaku explores black holes and time machines, multidimensional space, and the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own.

Anyway, this book is fantastic and magical and available at the tea shop if anyone wants to borrow it! --Jess

Monday Muses: The Immortalist

For this months book club we read The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. I have to admit I really struggled with this book. There is something about the writing style that just doesn’t jive with me. The story was broken up into points of view of each of the characters, and as a whole depicted how each character’s actions affected the other. For me, there was no real climax or real closure for the final character. We can only speculate what happens. That being said, I think there was a real good lesson on living life with earnest. Seeing life as a gift to experience at its fullest.

The book begins in the late 1960’s when a fortune teller tells four siblings their dates they would die. How would it affect your life? This is what the four Gold children do and we follow them through the years after this incident.

The two youngest, Simon and Kharla, leave for San Francisco before Simon is of legal age to follow their dreams. We follow both of their experiences, Simon as a club dancer and Kharla as a magician. While the two older siblings are back at home with their mother, leading more ordinary lives than their siblings. But are they really just ordinary lives? Once told the date of your death, would you ever forget it?

One has to wonder how much the characters knowing when they would die affected their life choices and whether or not they died because of it?

Monday Muses: Exit West

Today on Monday Muses, I’m talking about a book I just finished called: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. This book was lovingly brought in to me by a customer at the tea shop. I was excited to read it, but it was a fiction novel. I love fiction, but I have a silly rule that I only read fiction when I’m overwhelmed and stressed. So, it sat for a couple of months untouched. Until, you know, I needed it. Last month, between family illnesses and new challenges at the store, I was ready for an escape. Exit West was the perfect read for how I was feeling.

Spoiler Alert! (If you want to read the book, I would stop reading now)

Exit West begins as a factual novel detailing the life of what it would be like living in a war torn city. The characters, seeking normality, continue taking classes, shopping, scrolling through their phones, trying to forget the chaos that surrounds them. The story depicts the lives of two characters that meet in class and begin to date. We watch the characters relationship evolve as their country falls apart.

As the city begins to fall, we hear rumors of secret doors leading to other places. At first, I thought the characters were so desperate to leave their situation, they were driven to madness and that the doors were imaginary. Then, just as the city is falling the two characters are taken through a door. Again, I found myself intellectualizing that it must be a tunnel underground. The door leads to the Greece. There the characters join a group of refugees. Soon, the camp began running out of supplies so the characters travel through another door, London.

This is where I really fell in love with the book. All over the world doors began becoming enchanted and lead to different places in the world, like random doors, sometimes in people’s homes. This gave people in the story the freedom of escaping bad situations (like civil wars) and made the world almost smaller in a sense. In the sense that we stop feeling that people and places are too far away to impact each other’s lives. In turn, increasing empathy for one another through greater interconnectedness.