While discussing the part of Zulus in which Alice, while imprisoned in the rebel camp, apparently gives birth to herself, I could not help but be reminded of a video I watched a while ago about the “Banach-Tarski Paradox.” The paradox is a theorem that apparently proves that an item can be duplicated, resulting in an exact copy without any loss of density (clearly the comparison is not perfect, as the second Alice Achitophel that is spawned from the first is a thinner version). The video was created by one of my favorite YouTube-ers, a man named Michael Stevens who owns a channel called “Vsauce.” In the video, Stevens prefaces the Banach-Tarski Paradox with a discussion regarding infinity, talking about the different kinds of infinity and their properties. Then, he gives an in-depth explanation of the theorem, which shows that, my naming each point on a sphere and manipulating them in a certain way, you can get two perfect copies without any loss of material.
The various minds working on the paradox have yet to prove or disprove it. I am sure Moran would have a lot to say regarding what we must to make any progress in the matter, as interdisciplinary efforts are critical. While the theorem seems possible mathematically, it is the responsibility of mathematicians to work with physicists to find out if it is possible in the real world. While this purely theoretical mathematical anomaly may not seem to have any practical uses, scientists have actually already have found a possibly link between the Banach-Tarski Paradox and the particle collisions that occur in the Large Hadron Collider, some of which seem to result in more particles than they started with.
Although it seems unlikely that Percival Everett had the Banach-Tarski Paradox in mind as a mechanism for Alice’s confusing birth, it is still interesting to entertain as a possible explanation, and it at least lends a modicum of plausibility to the extremely confusing occurrence. At the end of the video, Stevens reminds us that we should not let common sense interrupt our understanding — just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean that it is. The math for the theorem is correct, so in immediately labeling it as impossible threatens our progress. Similarly, when I was reading Zulus and I got to the part in which Alice gives birth to herself, I was so busy trying to find out if what happened was real or not that I likely missed some of the meaning Everett was trying to convey (through symbolism, imagery, metaphor, etc.). I was so occupied by whether what happened was possible that I failed to make key connections