Five Years Writing a Novel About Physics: What I Learned
— Writing — Substrate
Part of the Substrate science series for Wherever It Leads.
I did not set out to write a novel about quantum physics.
I set out to write a novel about grief — specifically, about a particular kind of grief that I had been trying to understand for a long time. The grief of someone who has lost a person they loved, and who cannot stop asking whether that person is somewhere or nowhere. Not as a religious question. As a genuine question about the nature of reality.
The physics came later. It came when I started reading seriously about the foundations of quantum mechanics, and discovered that the questions I was trying to write about — questions about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, about what it means for something to be real, about whether the universe is the kind of place that could contain the things we most need it to contain — were not just literary questions. They were open scientific questions. Genuinely open. Not settled.
That discovery changed the novel. It took five years to write, and most of those years were spent trying to understand the physics well enough to write about it honestly.
Here is what I learned.
The Physics Is Stranger Than the Fiction
The first thing I learned is that the actual state of quantum mechanics is stranger and more interesting than any fictional treatment of it I had read.
Most fiction that engages with quantum physics uses it as a backdrop — a source of atmosphere and metaphor, a way of gesturing at weirdness without committing to anything specific. The many-worlds interpretation gets invoked to justify parallel universes. Entanglement gets used as a metaphor for connection. Uncertainty gets treated as a general principle about the limits of knowledge.
None of this is wrong, exactly. But it misses what is actually interesting about quantum mechanics, which is not the weirdness in the abstract but the specific, precise, unresolved questions that the weirdness points to. The measurement problem. The observer problem. The hard problem of consciousness and its intersection with the foundations of physics.
These questions are not metaphors. They are open problems in physics and philosophy that the best people in the field are actively working on. Writing about them honestly required understanding them precisely enough to know what was established, what was genuinely open, and what was speculation.
What I Got Wrong
I got a lot wrong, and I am grateful to the physicists and philosophers who corrected me.
I initially thought the observer problem was a solved problem — that decoherence had closed the question of what counts as a measurement. It took me a long time to understand why decoherence, while real and important, does not solve the measurement problem. The distinction between explaining why outcomes look definite and explaining why there is a single definite outcome is subtle, and I did not understand it clearly until I had read a great deal of material I had not expected to need.
I also initially thought that the various interpretations of quantum mechanics were different theories with different predictions — that the choice between Copenhagen and many-worlds was, in principle, an empirical question. It is not. The interpretations are empirically equivalent with current technology. The choice between them is a philosophical question about what kind of reality you are willing to accept. Understanding this changed how I thought about the novel's central argument.
What Surprised Me
The thing that surprised me most was how seriously the best physicists take the foundational questions.
Popular accounts of quantum mechanics tend to present the foundations as settled — or, if not settled, as settled enough that the unsettled parts don't matter. The working assumption of most physics is that the measurement problem is a philosophical curiosity rather than a genuine gap in the theory.
But when I read the serious literature on the foundations of quantum mechanics — the work of people like David Deutsch, David Wallace, Tim Maudlin, Carlo Rovelli, and others — I found a field that was genuinely uncertain about some very basic questions. Not uncertain in the way that popular accounts suggest — not "we don't know which interpretation is right" — but uncertain in a deeper way: uncertain about what the theory is actually saying about the nature of reality.
That uncertainty is what the novel is built on. Not the weirdness of quantum mechanics as a source of atmosphere, but the specific, precise, unresolved questions that the best people in the field are genuinely uncertain about.
What the Physics Taught Me About the Story
The most important thing the physics taught me is that the questions I was trying to write about are not questions that can be answered by the current science. They are genuinely open. The honest position — the position that takes seriously both what science has established and what it has not — leaves real space for multiple possibilities.
This changed the novel in a specific way. I had originally conceived of it as a story in which the science provides an answer — in which the physics, followed honestly, tells us something definitive about the questions that grief raises. It doesn't. What the physics does, followed honestly, is refuse to close the doors that the questions open.
That is a different kind of story. It is a story about what it means to follow evidence honestly past the point where most people stop, and to sit with the uncertainty that results. It is a story about two people — one who has been following the evidence for forty years, and one who arrives to disprove it — and what happens to both of them when the evidence refuses to cooperate.
The physics taught me that the most honest thing I could do was not to resolve the questions but to follow them. Wherever It Leads is the record of that following.