Top Highlights

• That is the other familiar element—the horror of what he can’t see. Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die. No blood, no screams, no human figures at all, and into this emptiness, the obliging imagination set free. The fight to the death in the cockpit, a posse of brave passengers assemblin...
• And such reasoning may have caused the fire on the plane. A man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe. Among the terrified passengers many might be praying—another problem of reference—to their own god for intercession. And if there are to be deaths, the very god who ordained them will soon be funereally petitioned for comfort. Perowne...
• spiritual exercise, a form of prayer: it’s not easy to escape from the clutches of the believers. The best hope for the plane is that it’s suffered simple, secular mechanical failure.
• A cat, Schrödinger’s cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is li...
• What then collapses will be his own ignorance. Whatever the score, it is already chalked up. And whatever the passengers’ destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now.