Story of Your Life

Author: Ted Chiang

Spoilers. Don’t read past the first paragraph if you plan to read.

“Story of Your Life” is the short story on which the movie Arrival is based. The story around the writing of the adaptation is almost as interesting as the movie and the short story. I watched the movie twice not long after it came out. I read the short story a few nights ago and was mesmerised. Now I want to see the movie again. I think over time, I will go back and forth between reading the story and watching the movie again and again. Highly recommended.

I now realise most of what impacted me in the story is there in the movie. I don’t tend to analyse while watching, but do when reading. When reading I can stop and think and not miss any of the action. The other T can parallel process. This T must read the book or watch the movie many, many times to catch the underlying concepts.

I was impacted by the story’s application of Fermat’s principle of least time, the path taken by a [light] ray between two given points is the path that can be traversed in the least time. For this to happen, when the ray of light starts, it must know its ultimate destination to calculate the fastest path. But how is this possible? This was the first principle of physics the Earth scientists discovered were held in common with the aliens. Makes sense, as the aliens do not experience time linearly; they fully understand the concept of knowing the future from some time in the past.  

I love Ted Chiang’s writing because he goes where angels fear to tread. He directly attacks the question about free will. If I know the future, I have the will to change it, don’t I? No, you don’t. Once you escape linear time, your ability to change the future is equivalent to our current ability to change the past.

So why do it? If you know the future, what is the point of experiencing the present? Because remembering the future is no different than remembering the past. The remembered experience does not compare to the actual experience. The aliens in the story know what will happen, when and why. Our protagonist conveys the peace and calm they exude, and in the end we have an understanding of why.

All my life I have been in pursuit of The Peace that Passes All Understanding. How do you get that? I think you live that when you know the future as well as you know the past. This cannot happen for us in this life, but I think Jesus tells us this is the way The Three see life, and it’s all going to be okay. They are not worried, so trust in that and don’t worry, deal with today.  

When I took physics in high school, I learned light is a wave and a particle, sort of. My hypothesis at the time was science would discover a third characteristic of light. That was a long time ago. Now we see that this applies to “every particle or quantum entity”.

My current hypothesis is this: God will be found in the smallest places, everywhere. Which makes sense to me.