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.