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"That was the last news they could expect for many months.... But she argued, logically enough, that the time must come to an end, all time does; there is nothing so inexorable as a ship, plodding away, plodding away, all over the place, till at last it quite certainly reaches that small speck on the map which all the time it had intended to reach. Philosophically speaking, a ship in its port of departure is just as much in its port of arrival: two point-events differing in time and place, but not in degree of reality. Ergo, that first letter from England was as good as written, only not quite... legible yet."
Above, a short excerpt from Richard Hughes' 1929 best-seller, "A High Wind in Jamaica," the 29-year-old Hughes' first novel.
That paragraph stopped me cold when I read it the other night.
I wonder how I reacted to it when I first read this wonderful book perhaps 30-40 years ago, or if it even struck me as worth stopping and thinking about.
This time around I made sure to make note of it because as a result of my enchantment in recent years with Hugh Everett III's 1957 Princeton University doctoral dissertation —"'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics" — Hughes' musings on the simultaneous existence of two locations "in time and place" of a single ship clearly anticipate Everett's "many worlds."
FunFact: Everett was born in 1930, the year after publication of Hughes' epic.
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