In the minutes before the moon covers the sun and all the remaining sunrays reaching us filter through the spray of its regolith, our faces are colored in a silvery light. As if we were captured on film that someone had left in a warehouse for too long. Even though only a sliver of the sun remains, you still cannot see with the naked eye that something is obscuring it. Only the color is somehow strange. It grows colder. A tightness grips your soul. And when you turn your back to it, when you see the shadow creeping across the landscape at a tremendous speed, as if the entire horizon were lying on a beach towel over which you are trying to cast the perfect angle of shade with a parasol, it becomes undeniable. We are in space.

Everything that is gargantuan by human standards appears as something a child could handle. Or at least Archimedes, whom you believe for a moment. You truly would need only a long enough lever and a fulcrum to move the world. You can sense, quite physically and bodily, the dimensions of the marbles silently tracing their orbits. The moon's gliding is as if a giant were using a thumb to gauge the distance for us to get a better perspective. The sun, which is otherwise always just a two-dimensional circle in the sky, an imprint of light you cannot look directly into, and whose distance you could never guess off the top of your head (it might as well be a shining hole in the blue, a kilometer above us), is actually somewhere behind the moon. It is four hundred times larger than the moon and, in this cosmic moment of ours, exactly four hundred times farther away.

Over coffee and a newspaper, a person might say, "But how is this possible, such a coincidence?" and ponder an alien intelligence leaving such imposing traces of its presence, clues to help us resolve our uncertain existential experience. But at that moment, during the dance of the giants, when the planet, satellite, and star align, and you sit on the crust of the world as fragile as a cobweb shell, you can only think of one thing: How is it that all this immensity does not disintegrate me?

I had, apparently by pure chance, prepared myself quite well for the experience of a total solar eclipse. This spring I finally picked up the novel MANIAC by the Chilean author Benjamín Labatut. I had heard somewhere that the novel was a blend of Wikipedia articles and a few biographies of great scientists interlaced with imagination, and I developed a prejudice against it. I am annoyed by our contemporary culture that adorns itself almost exclusively in borrowed plumes and is reduced to merely writing footnotes in the margins beneath quotes from authors we all already know, just so that nobody, with their undeserved anonymity, might accidentally dare to say something original. (This is probably also the reason why artificial intelligence gets on most people's nerves: although it lacks original ideas of its own, it is highly capable of replaying, classifying, and qualifying the meager register of ideas that we have decided, in these supposedly free times of ours, are acceptable.)

Regardless, Labatut’s MANIAC is the first novel in a very long time that I read in one sitting. The author admittedly excels most as a curator of the material – wherever he inserts his own voice, he quickly wears out his welcome – but the material he so masterfully selects is so damn interesting that I couldn't put the book down. My brain caught fire: I simply had to know more about it all.

And so I read on. First his other book, When We Cease to Understand the World, and then a pile of popular-science and academic works on quantum physics. I was convinced the subject matter was beyond me, that I simply lacked the brainpower for any fulfilling contemplation on the nature of reality. But it turned out the nature of reality is so very strange, and we know so very little about it, that by, say, the fifth book, I was already arguing with the authors that their thinking on certain matters was wrong. It follows that the difference between someone who knows nothing about quantum physics and Einstein – relative to someone or something that knew everything there is to know about it – is truly minuscule. Even humanity’s greatest thinkers are still merely and helplessly scratching the surface of the miracle that is our existence.

What did I learn, then? It seems that our world appears at the intersection of waves. However, we do not understand whether these waves are something real, or if they are merely possibilities. Imagine it, in a very simplified way, like this: if you wake up in the morning and go to work, you will arrive at work only if you also had the possibility of stopping at a newsstand on the way. It doesn't matter whether you actually go to the newsstand or not; in both cases, you will arrive at work. But, if you headed to work, and the newsstand was closed by inspectors in the meantime, you would no longer be able to arrive at work, even if you hadn't decided to visit the newsstand in the first place. This is roughly how the elementary particles of our reality behave. How on earth could the mere possibility of visiting a newsstand affect your arrival at work?

Only if the possibility undulated in sync with your actuality. And the absence of this wave would degrade your actuality. How is this possible? No one knows. There is a multitude of theories. You, the reader, can develop your own, and it has just as much chance of being correct as mine does (Einstein’s, for instance, failed in experiments). But almost all the theories demand that we change our understanding of the world. To limit ourselves to two: either we are inside a single abstract mathematical space in which we are constantly splitting into a massive number of copies, and our single subjective life is like drawing a single path with a marker along an enormous branch of a tree that holds all our possible lives (which are actually realized in worlds we can never access); from the thick trunk we share with our copies down to the increasingly thin, particular twigs of old age ... or, we are not truly in space at all, and the world appears only as a network of local interactions outside of which there is nothing.

According to the first theory, we, as an elementary particle, took both paths – visiting the newsstand and not visiting it – and arrived at work. But if the newsstand was closed, only half of us arrived at work (the half that didn't visit it on the way). Yet since we are an elementary particle, a half is not enough to oscillate with itself, so nobody arrives. According to the second theory, the question of influence is irrelevant, as there is no objective observer that would allow us to equate different paths to work: the path through the world with a closed newsstand is simply different from the one where it is open, and I will only arrive at work if my network of sequences allows it. The idea that the variable was exactly the newsstand is a mere illusion. Clear, logical, and simple, right? (Physicists will undoubtedly have reservations about this oversimplified explanation; amusingly, their reservations will not be the same.)

Whether we are dealing with a multitude of worlds or a network of interactions: either I – out of all my possible selves, in one of all possible worlds – was present at this exact one of all possible cosmic alignments of celestial bodies (which, statistically speaking, is almost impossible), or the superposition of all my possible local environments satisfactorily resolved into the undulation of a network where the planet, myself, the moon, and the sun were momentarily aligned. Which is, at least from my local perspective, probably an achievement of sorts as well. (If you have had no contact with me, according to this theory, from your local standpoint I wasn't there at all until the moment you read this.)