The Universe Allows You to Rewrite History

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are defined by history, and those who define it.

Bob Dylan and Coco Chanel belong to the second category. Each left an indelible mark on the twentieth century: one recalibrated the moral compass of popular music with a battered guitar and a handful of verses; the other dismantled and rebuilt the entire language of women’s fashion with a pair of scissors and a radical instinct for simplicity.

But step closer to their private histories, and a different resemblance emerges: one that has nothing to do with art. Both of them lied. Systematically, creatively, and without apparent remorse. They falsified their origins, erased inconvenient chapters, and conjured alternative selves from thin air. Taken at face value, this looks like straightforward deception. Approach it through the lens of quantum mechanics, however, and something stranger comes into view. What they did may not have been a betrayal of reality. It may have been an intuitive grasp of how reality actually works.

Part One: The Self as Raw Material

In the winter of 1961, a twenty-year-old walked into the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and began telling stories about himself. He called himself Bob Dylan, a name quietly borrowed from the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, and left his given name, Robert Allen Zimmerman, buried in the snowfields of Duluth, Minnesota, where he had grown up in a comfortable, stable, thoroughly unremarkable middle-class Jewish household.

The name change was merely the opening move. In interviews, Dylan constructed an elaborate alternative biography: he was an orphan who had ridden freight trains across America, apprenticed himself to itinerant folk musicians, and absorbed the sorrows of the open road. It was a story perfectly calibrated to the cultural imagination of the era: part Kerouac, part Woody Guthrie. The reality was rather more mundane. His father ran a hardware shop. Dylan had never slept a single night on a freight train.…