Narrative non-fiction is a field of prose that isn’t as explored as it, perhaps, should be. Rarely expanding beyond biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, the genre has only recently begun to be explored further: to the extent that even ‘nerdy’ physicists could pass themselves as creative writers. Thousand apologies, Dr Paul Halpern, for you are anything but a ‘nerd’.

Dr Halpern, Professor of Physics and a Fellow at University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, is the kind of professor you’d want as a science teacher. Someone who would teach science as though they were telling you a story -- the kind of academic who gives engaging talks and writes books about what we can learn about science from the Simpsons. It is, then, not a wonder that The Quantum Labyrinth comes from such a writer.

"It is nighttime in Princeton, and we are going on a ghost hunt. The town is eerily quiet; all the shops are closed. A cold full moon illuminates the leafy university campus."

The opening lines of the book make one thing very clear to the reader: Dr Paul Halpern has a rare gift, the gift of weaving fact with fictional description to perfection. He has the skill of a writer and the knowledge of a scientist -- the perfect combination for someone who is about to tell you the true story of the friendship between two of the greatest scientific minds of the 21^st century, and explain all that they achieved in the field. As we read on, the writer takes us back to the times of the Second World War, back to 1939 when the War had just started, and the Nazis were in the process of developing the nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, a student sat alone in the library of Princeton University’s Graduate College, studying classical mechanics. The student was the future Nobel Laureate, and co-creator of the atomic bomb, Robert Feynman.

Feynman had arrived at Princeton via MIT, where he had attained his undergraduate degree in physics. At Princeton, while his graduate studies were underway, he met, for the first time, his future partner in developing the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory: the soft-spoken, small-town Professor, John Wheeler. Of Wheeler and Feynman’s partnership, Halpern writes: "[T]he student-mentor relationship blossomed into a genuine, egalitarian friendship. The kinship between the two physicists only strengthened over the years, as each nurtured the other’s growth. Each was a bold, open-minded thinker, prepared to entertain even the wildest suggestions. Bizarre notions flowed from both of their creative minds -- to particles traveling backward in time, to parallel strands of reality; from a universe crafted from pure geometry to one based on digital information. Arguably, much of the visionary work in theoretical physics in the late-20^th and 21^st centuries derives from their bold discourse, including the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics and all manners of astrophysical concepts, such as the properties of black holes and wormholes".

While Wheeler and Feynman’s more popular collaboration was, perhaps, the Manhattan Project -- the programme developed by the American, British, and Canadian governments to counter the progress of the Germans and to invent the nuclear bomb before the Nazis -- yet what makes The Quantum Labyrinth more novel is its discussion of the other project that they had collaborated over: time, and, especially, its repetitive nature. And it is (mostly) this project that Halpern discusses over the span of eight chapters in his latest book.

When writing about Feynman and Wheeler, Paul Halpern, himself a physicist, could have taken any approach. He could’ve been reserved and academic, he could have been vague in discussing their work and focused better on their lives, or he could have centred his book upon the two’s research, throwing their personal lives in the background. He did not adopt any of these approaches. The path Halpern chose to take, instead, was rather unique: he not only presented a dumbed down version of the research work of the two subjects, he also discussed their lives, and their mutual relationship, especially how their personalities and approaches toward research (which, in turn, were dictated by their own, queer personalities) complimented each other perfectly. It was Wheeler’s wild ideas brought to life by the rugged precision of Feynman’s technical brain that made their match one made in heaven. And it is this ability of Halpern, the ability to cover all aspects of a physicists’ life and present them in a readable narrative form, is what, above all, makes his book attractive and different than a biography (or a physics textbook).

The Quantum Labyrinth is Dr Halpern’s 15^th books. Starting off as early as 1990, Halpern has steadily progressed from a stringently academic approach displayed in his earliest works (Time Journeys: A search for cosmic destiny and meaning, 1990; Cosmic Wormholes: The search for interstellar shortcuts, 1993) to a more laidback one in his more recent works (What’s Science Ever Done for Us?: What The Simpsons Can Teach Us About Physics, Robots, Life, and the Universe, 2007; Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat: How Two Great Minds Battles Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics, 2015).

His last two works have shown an inclination toward creative non-fiction, and considering their popularity, it is safe to believe that Dr Halpern might like to stick with the genre. However, that is not to imply that Halpern is unable to tackle the technical side of our two physicists’ lives; on the contrary, he understands it deeply enough to dumb it down for the casual reader: the detailed analysis that he presents of the movement of a spring in the book’s introduction, for instance, is a good example of his mastery with words as well as physical concepts -- a unique marriage that produced a unique offspring.

The Quantum Labyrinth How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality
Author: Paul Halpern
Publisher: Basic Books, New York
Year: 2017
Pages: 313
Price: USD20.40