“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law
Robert Jordan’s fantasy series The Wheel of Time features what readers like to call a hard “magic” system (RJ did not like to use that word and it does not appear among the series’ 4 million words). This post is going to elaborate on what I suspect is the secret lore behind the One Power, and what its presence in the Wheel of Time suggests about Robert Jordan’s personal epistemology and writing philosophy. I’ll try to push spoilers for the books to the end. Thanks to the WoT nerds who contributed to theoryland.com and especially the Innkeeper.
Q: Regarding the One Power, in a universal sense, like your physics background, is it more of a force like gravity would be, weak electromagnetic and strong electromagnetic, or is it something more of on a quantum level? Is it on a quantum level in your universe or is it a macro power? (For the moment, don’t mind the confusion in the fan’s question)
RJ: I think you are going to have to think of it as being on a quantum level.
Q: How did your background in physics influence how you structured the world of the Wheel of Time? RJ(paraphrased): Largely it was to make things realistic, as realistic as I can. Background in physics and engineering; I also tried to structure channeling as if it were a science or technology. No eye of newt, hair of dog. There are real limits, there are rules, there are technological structures to channeling which I think are fairly obvious to anyone who looks at it. That was the major influence.
Q: You’re a scientist, you have a degree in physics I saw.
RJ: Eh, yes. I’m not sure I’d call myself a scientist, but, my degree is in physics, yes.
It’d be logical for a physicist to write science fiction, and not fantasy. How did you come to fantasy and not science fiction?
RJ: Because I write what I want to write, really, but I’m not certain I’d say that it would be logical for a physicist to write science fiction. Are you aware of the paradigm called Schrödinger’s Cat?
No.
RJ: It’s a mind test in a way, really. If you can wrap your mind around it in the right way, believe it, then you are ready for higher physics. Imagine a cat, sealed in a lead box, and there’s no way to look into the box. Inside the box there is a flask of cyanide gas. Attached to the flask of cyanide gas is a Geiger counter. The Geiger counter is pointed at an atom. The atom has a 50-50 chance, in any given second, of decay. Now tell me, is the cat alive, or is the cat dead?
He’s fifty-fifty.
RJ: No, no, no, is the cat alive, or is the cat dead? I’m not asking you to give me odds. Is the cat alive, or is the cat dead?
Ah, he’s alive.
RJ: No.
Why not?
RJ: If you’re an engineer…If you have an engineering mindset, you’ll say that the only way to do it is to open the box and check. If you have the mindset that could take you into higher physics, you’re willing to accept that the cat is alive and dead, both, and will be fixed in one state or the other when the box is opened. But until the box is opened, the cat is alive, and it is dead, simultaneously.
Yeah, that’s fifty-fifty.
RJ: No, it’s not a fifty-fifty chance. A fifty-fifty chance says that it’s fifty percent chance that the cat is one way, and fifty percent that it’s the other way.
So it’s either way.
RJ: No, the cat is not either way; it is both. It is 100% alive, and 100% that the cat is dead, and both things are true. And must be acceptable as true. If you cannot accept this as true, then you are not ready for quantum…for the most basic quantum physics, much less getting into anything beyond. But the thing is that if you can wrap your mind around Schrödinger’s cat, you can also wrap your mind around fantasy. As a matter of fact, the thing that I find very interesting is that…I don’t really follow theoretical physics to any degree now, and haven’t for more than twenty years. But when I find myself talking to a theoretical physicist, I sometimes get stuck on panels with theoretical physicists. I’m always afraid that I’m going to be left way behind because I haven’t kept up in the area, but I find that I can keep up quite nicely. As long as…while they’re discussing theoretical physics, I discuss theology. And ah, I find myself able to keep up quite nicely, talking about the same thing.
I won’t try to describe the basic experiments in quantum mechanics that lead to the notions of indeterminacy and superposition. You can look at an MIT lecture here, or this book by David Albert for that. I just need to point out that the experiments do not allow us to pick a particular story about what is going on inside the box with Schrödinger’s cat. These stories are interpretations of the basic experimental facts and the mathematics necessary to predict outcomes. And there is a sense in which those two things – observations and mathematics – are really all we have as physicists. What we add on top to connect the two is just philosophy or, as RJ would sometimes say, theology.
The books take place in the 3rd age in the WoT universe, the One Power was discovered at the end of the First Age, which RJ described as our own. Its discovery led to the 2nd age, a Utopian condition called the Age of Legends. There are thousands of years between our own time and when the books are set. As far as I’ve found, RJ gave no full canon description of how the One Power was discovered, and a core conceit of WoT is that cultural memory fades and becomes jumbled, and names are transliterated and translated many times across millennia. Eventually, knowledge is lost and replaced like in the game of Telephone. Because the books rely on not just unreliable narrators, but the culture-bound narration of the 3rd age, readers’ ability to dig into the history and lore is constrained by the concepts, representations, and experiences the characters have access to.
I have heard some WoT theorists suggest that a nuclear exchange ended our current era, and that One Power channelers appeared as a consequence of genetic changes from the fallout. I don’t prefer this idea because that’s overdone in comics, and I’d like to think RJ knew about X-Men/Spiderman and would rather have something more unique. Also as a nuclear engineer, it doesn’t seem likely he had the negative attitude about the technology that the idea requires.
Now, lets discuss a bit about quantum gravity. There are a lot of videos about this(try PBS Spacetime or Fermilab’s Don Lincoln), but very briefly: At the quantum scale, physicists are free to completely ignore the effects of gravity for most situations. This is because gravity is extremely weak compared to other forces – it takes the whole Earth’s mass to accelerate your body towards it at 1 g, and only those electrons’ charge near the surface of your feet to hold you up. When large quantities of mass or energy are confined to small spaces, as in black holes or at the instant of the big bang, gravity is no longer negligible and a method of understanding gravity – and therefore space and time – at a more fundamental level must be developed.
Obviously, RJ wrote the first WoT book during the 1980s and published it in 1990. Most of the history of attempts at a theory of quantum gravity isn’t reflected in the books, but it is worth noting that physicists today agree that no one is even close to a good theory. I remember reading the blog of one researcher, where he wrote he was “an expert in our ignorance.” There is a general sense that we are just thinking about things the wrong way, and our basic framework will have to be altered very radically to make progress on quantum gravity in particular. RJ was known to say he thought most modern physics would be “put in the same file as phlogiston,” referring to the theory that preceded modern chemistry and oxygen(details here, or here).
Modern physics recognizes four “fundamental” forces. Gravitation, Strong Nuclear, Weak Nuclear, and Electromagnetic force. The electric and magnetic forces are combined into one for reasons owing to special relativity. One might consider this to be the first unification of a sort.
Study the picture below. Temperature and (equivalently) Energy are on the vertical axis. This is a description of the high energy regimes that followed in the very short time-scales following the big bang. Physicists reach these high energy regimes and reproduce the conditions of the big bang by colliding particles. Only the lowest branching point in this chart has been experimentally realized. The picture spans many orders of magnitude. For reference, the Large Hadron Collider reaches energies of 
The 1979 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for a successful theory of the electroweak force. What this means is there exists an energy level above which the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force cease to be distinguishable – they become one force. There is another Spacetime video describing this:
It was in the 1980s that the prospect of a Unified Field Theory first began to seem real to physicists. Such a theory describes how all of the forces of nature symmetrize and become one. It is also called a theory of everything. A Unified Field Theory is a theory of quantum gravity.
If RJ really did use a hypothetical unified field as a basis for the One Power, it means WoT has something in common with some of the best science fiction, in that the conceit of the Wheel allows him to explore the way societies’ prevailing assumptions about nature on long time-scales evolve in response to technology. In just the same way we use a First Principle to establish a theory and root our reasoning in physics, he’s applied the Wheel’s core conceit to absolutely everything in the story.
It would also mean that WoT hybridizes the SciFi and Fantasy genres to a greater extent than is usually noticed, and is making a point about the course of the history of science. Like phlogiston in our own history and the Aristotelian classical elements that are reflected in the books, the way we first choose or are taught to conceptualize a phenomenon can result in constraints on what we are able to understand. That this is true both in the fantasy world of the books and in our own real world where we must describe things, in part, with fantasy.
The following section will contain spoilers for all the books, and will only be of interest to people who think WoT theorizing is fun.
WoT Lore:
- The Mirrors of the Wheel are a totally unambiguous reference to Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum superposition. I assume pretty much everybody noticed this.
- Where do channelers come from, though? I have kind of an off-the-wall idea about this, but I don’t have space here to get into it. It has to do with a transliteration/corruption analogous to ‘Anla’ or Lenn in the belly of an eagle: Alan Turing to Ring of Tamyrlin. That, and genetic engineering.
- The One Power isn’t in addition to the laws of nature in WoT, it pertains to the most fundamental law of nature, which gives new meaning to statements about the True Source driving the Wheel.
- Along with magic, energy is another word I don’t recall seeing in Jordan’s WoT. It did appear in Sanderson’s writing but I think may have been an error – if energy was an off-limits word for RJ, I would guess it’s because a rigorous understanding of energy in our time only occurred after the advent of the steam engine. It suggests RJ was thinking about what scientific concepts 3rd Age people had access to and which they didn’t through their experimental limitations. Like new physics students are known to, we might expect them to confuse the concepts of field, force, energy, and power.
- Some types of psychological blocks on channeling only affect one person, like Nynaeve’s or Theodrin’s, but others affect whole groups of channelers. If there is a block that affects all channelers in WoT, there would be little clue: in A Memory of Light, pure saidin, saidar, and True Power are channeled, which suggests the five elements are not actually fundamental and might be attributed to a population-wide block. That doesn’t account for why the two halves and TP exist, though. Or the taint, for that matter.
- There is a slight reference in book 3 to what some people have called ‘perpendicular worlds’. When I read this I immediately thought of extra dimensions. In another book, don’t recall where, it is stated that the One Power works differently in the realm of the Finn. Assuming that the realm of the Finn exists in a perpendicular world, this would be a tiny hint at a unified field origin for the one power: Some versions of string theory, for example, use 11 dimensions to account for gravity’s weakness. These extra dimensions would be perpendicular to the 3+1 we’re familiar with.
Ex Nihilo 