All of humanity's natural sciences were interpretations of nature, theories based on intuition. For instance, a meteorite falling to the ground would smash out a large crater, and light entering water from the air would refract. These were all theories formed through intuition and causal relationships. Yet quantum mechanics, this doctrine of microscopic physics, possessed certain inherently counterintuitive and acausal theories. Within them, cause and effect did not advance according to linear time. For example, the meteorite would fall into that crater, and light automatically chose the shortest path when entering the water. It was like fatalism, a discussion of free will, speculation over whether an invisible Creator existed in this world—like Orpheus, who murdered his father and married his mother, exiling himself after learning of the prophecy, yet still being unable to alter the fate that awaited him.
Ancient Greek prophetic tragedies were often stories in which resistance to prophecy instead fulfilled it. When someone learned the fate awaiting them and chose to resist, they did not realize that even their resistance was part of that fate. If one could stand on the bank of time's river and look down upon it, transcending the three-dimensional view of space-time and entering a four-dimensional one, surveying everything that would happen from one's birth to death, it would be difficult not to fall into the vortex of nihilism. For this river of fate already contained every possibility, including one's acts of defiance against fate. Nothing one did had meaning; free will did not exist. Every action merely fulfilled the task assigned by destiny.
But for some people, such pessimistic fatalism had no effect.
When someone could see every possibility available to them at a certain point in time, they could make a different choice and completely alter their fate. The river of