{"id":959,"date":"2015-06-10T16:20:36","date_gmt":"2015-06-10T16:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/?p=959"},"modified":"2015-06-10T17:21:42","modified_gmt":"2015-06-10T17:21:42","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story-jiffy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2015\/06\/10\/the-story-behind-the-story-jiffy\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the story: Jiffy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/nature.com\/futures\">Futures<\/a> story is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v522\/n7555\/full\/522250a.html\"><em>Jiffy<\/em><\/a>, by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino. The story takes a look at our Universe from a fresh perspective \u2014 a perspective that offers a somewhat disconcerting view. Here George and Charles explain the thought processes behind the tale. As ever you should <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v522\/n7555\/full\/522250a.html\">read the story<\/a> before diving in.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Writing <em>Jiffy<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>George Zebrowski:<\/strong> <em>Jiffy<\/em> emerges from a certain kind of imaginative perversity, an impulse that I am sure many scientists and science-fiction writers feel, that the Universe might be otherwise than the one we know, that perhaps something may go wrong with the vastness in which we swim. I&#8217;m reminded of Ernst Mach&#8217;s idea that gravity may be due to some large acceleration of the Universe as a whole, or that once it seemed that ships might sail over a vast torrential falls at the Earth&#8217;s edge.<\/p>\n<p>Our story refers to the world below our senses, in the microverse, for which we devise measurements useful in our perceptual realm, to suggest a final threat to our existence, to face our human emotions with an inescapable ending that our senses cannot experience even while our intellects comprehend.<\/p>\n<p>Curious, that we can say this much \u2014 something but not everything, to recall Richard Feynman&#8217;s view of the sciences.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">* * * * * * * * * * *<\/p>\n<p><strong>Charles Pellegrino:<\/strong> George started this abstract fantasy of the \u2018flicker\u2019, observed down at the quantum level of manifolds and \u2018Branes\u2019. Sometimes, when George and I are on the phone or thrown into the same room, it&#8217;s like throwing hypergolic propellants together and one never knows where the explosions of scientific speculation will end up. If you read between the lines of <em>Jiffy<\/em> \u2014 a fun thought experiment on the size of things \u2014 and if you consider the approach of a universal tragedy rendered directly observable in 11-dimensional space-time, think back again to the old question about the observer influencing the observed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week\u2019s Futures story is Jiffy, by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino. The story takes a look at our Universe from a fresh perspective \u2014 a perspective that offers a somewhat disconcerting view. Here George and Charles explain the thought processes behind the tale. As ever you should read the story before diving in.&nbsp; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2015\/06\/10\/the-story-behind-the-story-jiffy#more-959\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2015\/06\/10\/the-story-behind-the-story-jiffy\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}