Alice and the Quantum Cat

From Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Few works of fiction have inspired more reworkings than Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. From Disney's 1951 animation, Tim Burton's 2010 adaptation. Grace Slick's White Rabbit, Alan Moore's Lost Girls to the definitive Annotated Alice by Scientific American's Martin Gardner, this little Victorian girl's adventures in a world of fantasy have captured the imaginations of millions.

"Why shouldn't Alice's story be brought up to date and used to illustrate the bizarre nature of quantum reality?" reasoned William Shanley, an East-Coast media personality. So Shanley engaged myself and a number of others to refashion Alice's adventures to explicate the mysterious world of quantum physics. Shanley's passion to be all things to all people brought more and more writers into the project each with their own point of view. Every author invented their own new worlds for Alice to explore and the manuscript soon became a giant kaleidoscope of altered states. Shanley sold the script to a German publisher who brought out a version called Alice Zwischen den Welten. Later a Japanese version appeared called Alice's Quantum Space with a beautiful dark blue cover showing a girl and a rabbit looking into outer space.

Alice's Quantum Space in Japanese

After her initial debuts in Germany and Japan, Shanley's brainchild recently found an English publisher in physicist David Peat's Tuscany-based Pari Publishing and yesterday I received a copy of Alice's quantum adventures in English. Because so many writers have contributed to this book, Alice's adventures span many different fields from quantum theory to modern cosmology to art history presented into twenty chapters. Because of its many different perspectives and styles, Alice and the Quantum Cat is not a book to be gulped down in one sitting but is best approached like a box of assorted chocolates to be savored one by one. My favorite chapter is (not surprisingly) one of my own called Queen Rosie--in which Rosie warns Alice about Science's Patriarchal Biases.

See for yourself. Each copy sold buys a can of cat food for Onyx, my very own quantum cat.

Quantum Alice appears in English