Laurel Brett

“You explained to me theories about different realities. What if this is true for all of us, and we are unaware of these realities, in the same way we can’t hear a dog whistle or see ultraviolet light, but we know those sounds and sights are real? What if there are as many Garretts as there are Daphnes? What if reality is so complex that there are worlds upon worlds of alternate realities and alternate Carolines, Garretts, Daphnes, and Toms? What if there’s a Garrett who is running a rat experiment right now, and one who’s a physicist and one who is serving his country in Vietnam, but we have no access to these realities?” “Exactly,” I said. “What if?”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“I reviewed these implications in my mind, assuring myself that I understood what I had just read: Daphne was a set of possibilities, and each possibility became manifest in a new universe when the universe branched off, as Borges had said it would. But once this new universe branched off, it could never interact with the previous universe. They split completely. But the question still remained: why could I interact with all four?”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“Everett’s model insisted that I could never get two of the girls together. The laws of physics as described by Schrödinger’s equation, and interpreted by Everett’s hypothesis, prohibited it. That much I understood, but then why could one Daphne see another’s portrait? Why had one Daphne glimpsed another at a school teach-in? Why could I see all four? Which reality was I in?”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“These were stunning thoughts—that Caroline and I were already parents, that Daphne was not the anomaly but the rule, and that the only weird circumstance would be the unexplained break in the membrane keeping these different realities separate.”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel