Flash Forward (Sawyer)

I have yet another novel to report, because this is the rut in which I am squatting at the moment. This book hooked me with the premise. All of humanity simultaneously and inexplicably loses consciousness for about two minutes. For a lot of people it's a natural disaster. Planes drop out of the sky, there are innumerable traffic accidents, and staircases become death traps. For the survivors it's a supernatural event; most experienced a two minute jump of consciousness twenty years down their timeline. The book is fiction wrapped around a hypothesis. What would silly sentient bipeds do if they had some idea of the scenery down the road? How do they adjust to a known future?

It's a cold read, but the chill is somewhat offset by the exploration of various theories for time, the observer effect, and predestination. Don't we love physics at play?

A sample:

"A standard argument in favor of the many-worlds interpretation is the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat: put a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison that has a fifty-fifty chance of being triggered during a one hour period. At the end of the hour, open the box and see if the cat is still alive. Under the Copenhagen interpretation - the standard version of quantum mechanics - until someone looks in, the cat is supposedly neither alive nor dead, but rather a superposition of both possible states; the act of looking in - of observing - collapses the wave function, forcing the cat to resolve itself into one of two possible outcomes. Except that, since the observation could go two ways, what MWI proponents say really happens is that the universe splits at the point at which the observation is made. One universe continues on with a dead cat; the other, with a living one."