William A Gardner
7
August
2024
Culture and Societies
Occasional Blog
The Time Has Come
Alice in Wonderland was a popular story by Lewis Carroll published in 1865. In this story there is a Chesire Cat which mysteriously appears and disappears. It represents the idea of illusion, ambiguity and uncertainty. The cat in the story predates quantum mechanics yet the idea of the disappearing cat was used in the proposition of Schrödinger's Cat used to elucidate the strange nature of quantum mechanics.
Alert: The original seventeen stanza poem has been removed pending more clarification of Canada Bill C-63 designed to control online free speech.
Notes and References
Victorian nonsense poetry was a genre during a period of great change in the late 1800s. One of the poems in this genre was The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodson) of which I always remembered one verse in particular which started, "the time has come, the Walrus said." At that time the Industrial Revolution was forcing huge changes in society and affecting people's lives for both good and bad. Charles Dickens was another writer at that time who chronicled the effects of these changes.
Today our society is experiencing changes of a similar magnitude with the Information Revolution and the shift to a multipolar geopolitical world. This decade of the twenties is and will be a time of confusion, challenge, and change..