A stubbornly persistent illusion

[avram]

I’m about halfway through Tim Powers’s latest, Three Days to Never, which, like most Tim Powers books, tosses a bunch of real-world people and history against each other to reveal a magical secret history behind it all. This one involves Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, the Harmonic Convergence, the Mossad, and strange beings from outside the observable universe. It’s only now that I’ve done what I shoulda earlier — looked up Chaplin’s and Einstein’s biographical entries on Wikipedia. The Einstein entry gives a different translation of the famous “God does not play dice” quote (from a 1926 letter to Max Born) than I’m used to:

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.

Yeah, well, that’s something to inspire a Tim Powers book.