The Wide Present

Hard-SF about dilated “now.”

De: Ian N. Rank

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The Wide Present — Hard-SF about dilated “now.”
On the dawn shift in Cambridge’s new Cavendish Laboratory, Callum Wright brings an entanglement rig online—and slips into a mind-state that correlates his awareness with moments scattered across his own life. He can witness past and future with laboratory clarity, but not touch them…yet. The setting is real and recent—the Ray Dolby Centre, the Cavendish’s state-of-the-art home, handed over in late 2024 and set for full operation in 2025.
This is hard science fiction with its feet on the optical table: time-/energy-entanglement in classic Franson interferometers, Hong–Ou–Mandel “dips” that prove two-photon indistinguishability, and the unglamorous heroics of single-photon hardware—SNSPDs with vanishingly low dark counts and jitter, all time-tagged at picosecond resolution.
As Callum widens his “now” from minutes to days, then to a life-sized present, the story stays rigorously inside physics’ guardrails—no faster-than-light messaging, no paradox-hunting cheats—while asking the human questions those guardrails force: What do you owe the people you love if you can see their futures? What proofs count when the truth lives in your head? And how do you keep ethics steady when time itself starts to feel editable?
Set against misty courts, bike lights, and humming cryostats, The Wide Present braids a Cambridge coming-of-age with a precision thriller of ideas. It’s a novel for readers who like their wonder measured, logged, replicated—and who suspect the quietest revolutions begin with a careful alignment and a single, impossible observation.