Words, words, words

“As you know, the sophons move at close to the speed of light. The surface of the Earth is a tiny space for sophons. If sophons patrol around the accelerators on Earth at this speed, then, from the perspective of humans, it is as if they simultaneously exist in all the accelerators and can almost simultaneously create erroneous results in all the accelerators.”

There aren't sufficient neurons in my brain to neatly package in a line or two how perfect this book's plot is, how elegantly it glides through science, history, physics, technology, surrealism and respect for intelligent life, to end in the sheer horror of having aliens dabbling with the the Earth's physics in order to discourage all efforts of scientific progress, to lead scientists to madness and suicide because all they have devoted their life to - the rational understanding of reality - is suddenly, constantly proven wrong. Imagine how clueless, how blind, how utterly, utterly powerless any kind of intelligent life would be in a world with no patterns, where observation, deduction and rational thought were irrelevant because phenomena just happened to happen.

That's not the only point of the novel, but if you think you know your horror, and your horror is a monster standing above you with an axe, imagine the madness of a reality were the laws of physics were proven wrong.