Author's note: No man is an island, entire of itself
- The title comes from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: Meditation 17.
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
- Arthur's email 'schrodingersemail@gmail.com' (which is already in use, dammit) is a reference to Schrödinger's cat, a thought experiment that shows the paradoxical nature of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
NOTE: I am not any kind of physicist and this is a very basic explanation that doesn't touch on a lot of things. Don't use this for your science homework and my apologies to quantum physicists.
The experiment (which has never been conducted) would involve a cat being locked in a completely sealed box along with a container of hydrocyanic acid (lethal poison) and a Geiger counter containing a small amount of a radioactive substance. If that radioactive substance decays and is measured by the Geiger counter, a hammer will break the container of acid which will kill the cat. However, the atoms in the radioactive substance could just as easily not decay at all. Thus if you don't touch the box for an hour you have no way of knowing if the cat is alive or dead until you open it up.
The Copenhagen interpretation implies that because we can't observe whether the cat is alive or dead the cat is both alive and dead. Schrödinger thought this was a bit silly.
To get back to Arthur, lover of paradoxes and knowledgeable about physics, he replaced the cat with an email and 'alive and dead' with 'read and unread' - which state is the email in after you send it?
- Joanna, Travis, Kenrick, Marisol, Magnus, and Ivy (along with Arthur's cheese making, cloth weaving, doesn't-have-a-name-yet mother) are all characters from an upcoming fic. I hope to finish that fic (right now I'm just trying to get past the beginning to be honest) but I like these characters so much I used them for this prompt. I may fold bits of this fic into that fic (and I might add Mike and Suzanne too!) so this is kind of a taste of the back story I've got going for Arthur. Still, that fic will be long and a long time coming so this might be the only airing they get. I hope they passed muster as OCs!
- There are actually four Star Wars quotes, either verbatim or paraphrased. You go Glen Coco if you recognise the fourth. There's also a reference to a classic British comedy that I will be very impressed if somebody gets.