ABSTRACT
The first story of his to arouse censors, laughed Kurt Vonnegut in a letter from 1996, was about time travellers to the Holy Land at the time of the Crucifixion. Mirroring the internal chronology, the genesis of Timequake records its own series of time loops. By way of a scrambled-eggs chronology, Vonnegut mixes and remixes a handful of themes into the books’ leitmotifs. The 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics went to Richard Feynman for his work on quantum gravity. Experimental studies of quantum nonlocality—known more colourfully as a spooky action at a distance—appear, however, to call into question the inviolability of the speed of light. The best theory to date to account for this difference is that the two kinds of particles travel at different rates in time. A similar psychological displacement is reported by prisoners released after lengthy terms in jail, aggravated by solitary confinement.
