The Garden of Forking Paths

Dr. Albert remarks that Tsun’s ancestor Ts’ui Pên did not agree with older thinkers like Newton and Schopenhauer on the subject of time and the universe. Ts’ui Pên’s concept of time as a web has more in common with newer modes of theoretical physics with which Borges would have been familiar. Around the turn of the 20th century, physicists began to understand that the motions of the universe might be more complex and unpredictable than previously supposed. Scientists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein examined the behavior of light and the structure of atoms; their work upended traditional understanding of time, perception, and relation.

By the time Borges wrote “The Garden of Forking Paths,” multiple Nobel prizes had been awarded to scientists for their work in relativity and quantum mechanics. Theories refining our understanding of atomic structure became more popularly discussed, as with Erwin Schrödinger’s famous 1935 thought experiment, the cat in the box. In this thought experiment, a paradox emerges in which a cat is both dead and alive until someone observes the cat, at which point the act of observation determines whether the cat is dead or alive. In other words, the paradox is that the quantum system can exist in multiple states simultaneously, not unlike the Borgesian forking paths. The cat question also engaged concerns about whether particles truly have defined properties independent of observation and, thus, whether observation can influence material outcomes (contrary to previous belief).

Though Schrödinger originally intended his thought experiment to illustrate a misinterpretation of quantum theory, over time the scenario has been used to explore various nascent ideas about quantum mechanics. One such idea is that quantum particles can also correlate with one another, as if one particle can perceive another particle’s properties, even from far away. This theory suggested a kind of mirroring on the most minute level. Measuring the state of one particle, scientists could predict the properties of its twin—something that, in a 1947 letter to physicist Max Born, Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” (M. Born, editor. The Born-Einstein Letters. Macmillan, 1971). This particle behavior became known as “entanglement,” and its observation as it naturally occurs in the real world provided a foundation for quantum computing. While Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” provides layers of metaphor representing mirroring, possible unobserved futures, and an alternate understanding of time, the labyrinth metaphor also seems to anticipate 21st-century work on “freedom of choice” or loophole theory in physics. The contemporary question of quantum entanglement versus superdeterminism embodies the central action of “The Garden of Forking Paths”: Either we determine our path, or the path determines us.