How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Agreed. This is a party, after all. Thing is, your husband has gone after some big fish here. His tachyon experiment takes Einstein's ideas a step further, in a way. The discovery of particles traveling faster than light means those two moving observers won't agree about which event came first, either. That is, the sense of time gets scrambled." (5.52)
We generally think of change as existing in linear time. First there was A, then something happened, and now we have B. But opening time up to exist in the timescape kind of throws all that into question. If A and B both exist at the same time in the timescape, can we really say that things can change? We have a feeling our brains are going to be as scrambled as our sense of time soon.
Quote #2
The move from New York had severed his connection to all that mumbo jumbo of dietary laws and Talmudic truths. Penny told him he didn't seem very Jewish to her, but he knew she was simply ignorant. The WASPland she'd grown up in had taught her none of the small giveaway clues. (8.53)
Gordon finds himself stuck between his NYC and Southern California selves here. On the one hand, he is no longer a practicing member of Judaism, but on the other hand, he still views Penny and her worldview as WASP—that is, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Quote #3
"Do we? How do we know this isn't the result of the experiment we're about to do? That is, if Renfrew hadn't existed and thought of this idea, maybe we'd be worse off. The problem with causal loops is that our notion of time doesn't accept them. But think of that stuck switch again." (9.209)
Renfrew's experiment brings up all sorts of questions regarding change and time, but this is a particularly interesting one. Is it possible the world of 1998 is precisely the result of Renfrew's experiment, even from before Renfrew came up with the idea? That is, is change impossible because the script has already been written? Deep.