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4 out of 4 stars
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Timewise by Robert Leet opens with a meeting between Ron Larsen and Regina Russo. Ron is a fourteen-year-old orphan and chess player while Regina is a Physics Professor a little more than twice his age. As the story unfolds, a platonic relationship develops between Ron and Regina to the extent that she becomes his mentor.
Robert Leet has designed the story such that a teenage Ron is in love with his mentor. I suspect that the author is describing quantum entanglement on a human level depicting Ron and Regina as entangled entities. She responds to him later in the book, when he asks her why she cared about him, that maybe someone helped her once, or even that she just felt their lives were entangled.
Ron admits that he is good at chess which is the only way he could make some pocket money. Regina is the first adult who takes an interest in him thus inspiring him to study harder. When he turns eighteen, the state loses interest in him and so he is forced to look for a job.
By the end of high school, Ron realized that there was no money to be made in chess, he becomes addicted to poker and spent hours computing the odds of various hands and how they changed when some of the cards were known. It is at this point that the reader starts to detect a sense of dualistic progression. Chess is opposed to poker, math as opposed to physics. The uncertainty principle with the indeterminacy of location and momentum and the photon as a particle/wave ultimately leads to awareness creates time. There is an underlying suggestion that mind and matter are indistinguishable.
I was sucked into this dualistic book because both aspects attracted me, the story of Ron's journey through life on one hand and his exploration of quantum physics was equally intriguing. His relationship with Cheryl and the lessons she taught him about seeing the entire surface of the Earth, land, air, and water, as a single organism helped to reinforce the concept that man believes in magic only when he does not understand that his consciousness is integral to the creation. Similarly, his relationship with Louis/Louise was used to reinforce a concept that we view the new and unknown by what we already know. Louis/Louise illustrated the point that the greatest strength in our ability to understand the universe might be a limitation. Had Ron looked closer he might just have discovered another person/universe in front of him.
I like this book because there is a scientific side and a human interest side. Regina teaches Ron quantum physics, and it is this mentor-student tutelage that affords the reader with no physics knowledge, the opportunity to follow along. Ron gets accepted into the Ph.D. program at the university going on to have a successful life with a wife and business.
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel hence the reason I give it a rate of 4 out of 4 stars, especially since I found no significant error in the book. I must admit that it may not appeal to everyone because of the high scientific content, but I am unable to identify any aspect of the work that I did not like.
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Timewise
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