Dark Matter is a novel by the author of the mind-bending works Wayward Pines and Recursion, Blake Crouch. It’s a short, punchy work of fiction that takes some interesting concepts from physics and builds a dynamic and fascinating tale around them. It’s not a perfect book. The characters aren’t always fully developed, and some of the concepts are taken literally rather than metaphorically as intended. But, if you allow yourself to just be carried along by the story, there’s very little chance you’ll find yourself disappointed by the end.
The Plot
The major conceit of the book is, “What if you could find a world where you made all the right choices?” Jason Dessen is decent family man, married with a son, a physicist that was once headed for great things until he chose family life over the time it would take to prove out his theories. Now, he lives a comfortably middle-class life as a professor for a middling college in Chicago. And his best friend just won the Pavia Prize (the Nobel, for all intents and purposes).
He reluctantly meets his friend for a congratulatory drink when, on his way home, he’s kidnapped, stripped, drugged, and then wakes up in a place where everyone cannot believe that he’s finally home. It’s amazing he’s back. They’re all there because of the important work he’d been leading.
As is revealed pretty quickly, Jason has been deposited in another dimension. A dimension where he won the Pavia Prize. Where his friend was a second rate scientist. But where the woman who was his wife barely knows him and his son was never born. See, the Jason in this world chose to go the opposite way when she accidentally got pregnant. And he got everything Jason has originally wanted but not the family.
it does what you should do when you’re dimension hopping, which is to see some neat and unique dimensions that don’t just look like variations on our own
Needless to say, things sour quickly for Jason in this new reality and pretty soon he finds himself on a multi-dimensional journey, searching for his own world where his wife and son are waiting for him and he can take revenge on the version of himself to who did this.
As I said, it’s a story that travels at a mile a minute. And it does what you should do when you’re dimension hopping, which is to see some neat and unique dimensions that don’t just look like variations on our own but where things are fundamentally different. There’s also an interesting mechanic of how Jason travels between dimensions that adds a ticking clock element that’s really well thought out and adds a lot of pressure to the story.
If I have a couple of quibbles, one is with the science. And not even, technically, the science, I guess, but the way a metaphor for the science is stretched far beyond its original meaning. And that, simply is Schrödinger’s Cat. God, this is over-done so much.
The Science
For the two people left who aren’t aware of the concept, it’s the idea that if you put a cat in a box with a radio-isotope that decays randomly and might break a vial of poison, so long as the cat isn’t observed, it’s in a type of “super-position” where it’s neither alive nor dead. It’s both until the observation is made. And in one quantum world, the cat is alive but in another, the cat is dead. Thus, the multi-verse has been tacked onto a metaphor for the way in which observation affects quantum states.
But let’s break down a couple of issues:
This is why Schrödinger’s Cat was originally postulated as a debunking of quantum physics, not as an accurate description of what is happening.
The cat is in a super-position. This is the most metaphorical bit of the metaphor. The “cat” in this case is a quantum particle. And so long as it is unobserved, it’s impossible to know if it’s “spinning” up or down. But by observing it, the photon hitting the particle has an effect and can change its position. This is something unique to quantum physics because we’re talking about something at such a small scale.
In the metaphor, if taken literally, the cat is alive or dead, we just don’t know it yet. The act of observation doesn’t change the result, it just reveals what had been unknown. This is why Schrödinger’s Cat was originally postulated as a ridicule of quantum physics, not as an accurate description of what is happening.
The choices we make spawn a new dimension that branches off our own in which we made the opposite choice. This assumes that the physics of the multi-verse are driven by human determinism. But this just isn’t the case. If the multi-verse theory is correct, alternate universes are being spawned based on the state matter is in and not because I choose Peanut Butter instead of Peanut M&Ms. It’s the aforementioned “spin” of quantum particles. In one universe, the particle spins up and in another it spins down. Because this is so fine grained, it is entirely possible there is a dimension where I chose one M&M type versus the other but that choice is more likely to be based on the state of matter than matter being determined by my own choices.
So there’s some nice poetry to be found in the concepts but they’re more designed to introduce the concept than be used as guiding metaphors for how physics work at this level.
Jason Dessen
My last quibble is sometimes the characterization of Jason. He is very emotional. I know he’s a man pushed to the edge, finding his way back across the multi-verse to his family, but… jesus… there are fewer actual tears from the main character in Bridget Jones than in this book. And for a man of science, in a field that is supposed to be logical… one can be left wondering how any version of this emotional ball of knots was capable of achieving things in his field.
The latter bit might just be entirely my own taste. But I did find it distracting at times. Especially when his motivations were restated for the upteenth time. It’s like, “Yeah, no… I got it. You love your family, next door, please.”
That said, the adventure is worth it. And the science is still better than the average episode of Star Trek. So if the adventures of the Enterprise don’t bother you, neither will this. And the climax is worth the price of entry.
I’m looking forward to getting onto the show so I can rate it on its own merits and then discuss it specifically compared to its source material. This will be a fun series to write and it’ll be great to go into season two with Dark Matter fresh in my mind.
