ATDTDA (13) - bilocations

[David Morris]

Last week I started reading Flann O'Brien's *The Third Policeman,* on
the suggestion of someone (I forget) on this list.  It's very
enjoyable.

The first-person narrated main character (who is never named) is a
devotee of a fictitious scientist/philosopher named "de Selby," and
the book periodically explains some of de Selby's obsessions/theories.
 One of these has to do with mirrors, and comes intriguingly close to
the ATD machine which uses photographs (if you are worried about
spoilers, you should stop reading this now).

"de Selby's" theory was that the image you see in a mirror is slightly
"earlier" an image than your present state because of the speed of
light.  He proposed a mirror-to-mirror contraption whereby one could
employ a telescope to see far back in time, this contraption only
being limited in its view back in time by the optical power of the
telescope and the curvature of the Earth.

Sounds very similar to ATD to me...

On 7/16/07, kelber at mindspring.com <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> P. 355 in the Iceland Spar section of the book seems to pave the way for the upcoming Bilocations section.  It's a small, pithy passage which seems to cover some of the major themes of the book - light, space, time, entropy:
>
> Zambini the magician:
>
> " Bringing out a small, near-perfect crystal of Iceland spar. 'Doubles the image, the two overlap,  with the right sort of light, the right lenses, you can separate them in stages, a little further each time, step by step till in fact it becomes possible to saw somebody in half optically, and instead of two different pieces of one body, there are now two complete individuals walking around, who are identical in every way, capisci?'" (bottom of p. 354-355)
>
> The process is irreversible, he explains.  It's not an optical problem, it's a problem of the unidirectional nature of time. The result:  Zambini's created a series of doubles, leading to lawsuits and other headaches.  The film "The Prestige" came out a couple of weeks before ATD and deals precisely with this intersection of magic and science.  Worth seeing for anyone who hasn't already (and much better than the book version).
>
> Laura