DEATH TO THE GODS OF MOUNT OLYMPUS FUCK THE OLYMPICS

Sebastian Olma sees a surprising reemergence of Bergson in Peter Lynds' novel theory of time

For those who haven’t even got their head around quantum theory, the world is about to get a lot more challenging. James Flint on the highs and lows of computer-aided Parallel Universe Theory.

It’s been a year now since IBM got the world’s first quantum computer up and running. A year in this universe, at least – how long it’s been in the many universes created by the computer itself, I have no idea. Some of those universes may not even, any longer, exist. But this it what the quantum theory that the computer is designed around suggests: that in order for the computer to function the five atoms that hold the bits of information need to be in what’s known as a superposition of states; and in order for them to be in a superposition of states, several parallel universes have to be conjured into existence.

Although its evolutionary theories were by no means unanimously accepted, Elaine Morgan’s 1982 book The Aquatic Ape caused something of a perceptual seismic shift and formed the perfect companion to her 1972 feminist classic The Descent of Woman. Luciana Parisi suggests our cyberspace surrounds make Morgan’s number due to come up again.

As all good cultural anthropologists know, Y2K is a time bomb which decrypts the computer calendar’s digital codes, disrupts the linear counting of the Gregorian clock and sets time back to zero. More than a regression in the history of civilisation, this cipher marks the cybernetic rewinding of evolution and, in doing so, drags the first woman Eve down into the digital sea.