Parallel Universes
The quantum mechanics of fly fishing.
Many years ago now, I remember a conversation I had with a fellow professor who taught in the Physics department. We were sipping wine, eating cheese at a faculty meeting. I was trying to make idle chit-chat, and I asked him about quarks—a word I was fond of as a writer, just for its inherent strangeness/silliness. I knew little to nothing then about the world of quantum mechanics, but still, I was shocked by his reply. He tried, as best he could, to convince me that the universe was much more intricate than anyone could imagine; not only were there the three dimensions of space and a fourth dimension of time, but there were likely as many as nine or ten “extra dimensions,” and the tiniest of things was far smaller than a quark, an infinitesimally small, vibrating string. The thing that really got me—he told me it was quite likely there were parallel universes residing right alongside ours, moving through and about us, but impossible for us to perceive. At the time, I was convinced my colleague had spent a little too much time in the Physics laboratory. His somewhat maniacal smile when he told me about these things and his strange guffaw of a laugh sent me for a refill and hopefully a more grounded conversation.
I was surprised to soon discover that what he spoke of really was “accepted” by many in the Physics community. An ever-growing number of physicists believe in extra dimensions and even in parallel universes. I started researching the topic and reading books like The Elegant Universe and Warped Passages by two respected physicists in the field. This stuff was legitimate, and it grabbed my imagination deeply. More recently, I’ve come to realize that part of my obsession with reading about and trying (albeit vainly) to understand quantum physics and string theory—and their perhaps inescapable conclusions that parallel universes do in fact exist and are part of the essential fabric of our own universe—is also intertwined, as are so many things in my life, with my deep love of fly fishing.
Stepping down the muddy spring banks of a local river, hoping the spring striped bass have roused themselves from their winter slumber and will chase my olive and chartreuse Clouser, putting my neoprene-wadered feet for the first time into the April-cold, slow moving Housatonic waters, moving in carefully, to calves, knees, thigh-deep...I am half in another universe—casting my line through one, watching it land upon, then penetrate another. Anglers continually envision a world of fundamentally different physics and dimensions, where things hover and swirl, rise as well as fall, where air is replaced with something thicker, slower, more palpable. As anglers we always inhabit two universes simultaneously.
The critical element to being a good fly angler and one who can comprehend extra dimensions and universes, I think, is imagination. Anglers, especially serious fly anglers, “see” part of their line resting on the surface of the water but feel, and hence see in another way, what’s happening beneath the surface, on the other side. We must imagine a universe of flow and backflow, of eddy and current and clarity and cold. We must think in a parallel way about the world we inhabit and the world our flies and the fish we seek inhabit—a double-awareness. The wind and the trees hanging close to the bank require certain things of us in this world; the boulder-strewn streambed, the creek coming in strong and dirty just above where we stand, the deep cut in the center and the way the shallows just downstream force the stream up and outward in a rapid pulsing motion…require things from us in the other world.
And just as there are those sad souls among us who will just walk by the loveliest of trout streams, a pod of blitzing blues along a beach without the thought of wetting a line, it’s also possible—and likely—that most of us will never cast our lines into the idea of parallel universes—will never make that imaginative leap.
Granted, it’s on a whole different level. The “universe” of water is a far cry from the infinitesimally small and/or unfathomably vast dimensions we can neither imagine nor encounter that quantum physics and string theory postulate. We can swim in water ourselves and feel its effects on us. The parallel worlds that are possibly swirling all around us, and we are always swimming in, are likely never to be directly proven or experienced. But accepting they might be there, that what is seen and felt in the universe we experience is not all there is—that there is something more, something harder to grasp—awakens something also essential to the fly fisherman in me.
Fly anglers are already willing to accept the limits of their senses; they yearn to enter into a different modality of thought, seeing the world they think they know on totally different terms. When canoeing on a river with students I coached on my school’s outdoor team, I was constantly aware of the river I saw as a canoeist versus the river I would see as an angler. The boulder several careless students swing toward in a plastic craft means one thing alone: “danger!” As a fisherman, however, that self-same boulder creates slower holding water, a conveyor belt of insects rushing by, and the challenge of getting a fly to drift drag-free to the wary trout who lie in wait. The novel Flatland imagines a world of only two dimensions and what happens when a three-dimensional being appears there. Fly anglers, I’m convinced, would not be surprised to encounter such an extra-dimensional creature, for we readily embrace the unseen and the mystery that springs from accepting the limits of our perceptions every time we set forth with rod in hand.
We largely find and catch fish based as firmly on what’s not happening as upon what is happening. Sure, there are those days when it’s a literal, Newtonian, macro-physics kind of day, bugs popping everywhere, trout gobbling anything that floats by or moves through the currents, blues and stripers “blitzing” wildly through plentiful pods of small baitfish.... But many a fishing day is spent in the world of quantum theorizing. The trout are not rising to the small olive duns floating freely in the surface, but they must be here, must be eating something. Could it be they’re focusing on emergers? No, I’d see the humps of their lovely dark backs looking almost like another ripple in the stream rising briefly into air. It could be they’re taking the nymphs only, for whatever trouty reason, and I tie on a hare’s ear nymph fly and add some weight and start the Zen-like practice of flipping a cast upstream, holding the rod tip high, imagining what’s happening in that other universe where my fly drifts along, until I feel a bump, or not even a bump really, not really anything but the absence of what would have happened had a trout not briefly taken hold. And in response to this lack of what should have been, I instinctively lift the tip up, and the trout is there, the alive weight of it, something like magic, the light, barely-there-at-all rod suddenly something altogether different in my hand.
Quarks...muons...pions...superposition...quantum entanglement (“spooky action at a distance,” Einstein called it)...a world inside our world where things can pass through solid objects and are somehow in two places at once...things we are just starting to understand through those unfathomably complex equations physicists love to scribble on chalkboards and all those inconceivably small bits of matter they send spinning through miles and miles of particle accelerators…. On a smaller, more manageable, but no less ineffable scale, fly fishing awakens something in us that likewise pushes against our minds, our imaginations, challenging us to embrace the mystery and beauty that always flows along parallel to our own, ordinary lives.
Go to my affiliate page at Bookshop.org to purchase Warped Passages or The Elegant Universe, both excellent and very readable books on the nature of string theory and the very real possibility of parallel universes.
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Schrodinger's fish. The stream is both full of fish and empty of fish at the same time. The only way to find out is to cast your line.
Wonderful article, beautiful pictures. Love those clear, crisp, still October days!