the third policeman

I've just finished The Third Policeman, my discovery of Flann O'Brien's hilarious and extremely witty work. I've enjoyed so much this novel that i had to find an alibi for posting it here. But that was easy. Let me introduce to you the prolific and sadly forgotten Irish physicist and philosopher de Selby, whose highly original theories constitute a reference frame of sorts in The Third Policeman's plot. We learn in there, for instance, how de Selby foretold modern ideas about the problem of time:

Human existence de Selby has defined as 'a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief' […] From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or serialism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even 'living'.

Granted, other ideas of his were much more debatable, as his theory about night being caused by black air accumulation, but to err is the mark of genious. Other characters are also prone to philosophical digressions. For instance, one would say that policeman MacCruiskeen is well acquainted with some of our modern theories of quantum gravity:

That is the real point, said MacCruiskeen, but it is so thin that it could go into your hand and out in the other extremity externally and you would not feel a bit of it and you would not see nothing and hear nothing. It is so thin that maybe it does not exist at all and you could spend half an hour trying to think about it and you could put no thought around it in the end. The beginning part of the inch is thicker than the last part and is nearly there for a fact but i don't think it is if it is my private opinion that you are anxious to enlist.

And there's more, including a theory of everything based on a single, possibly relational, entity: the omnium. But i won't spoil the fun by giving up the plot, which, to tell the truth, has nothing to do with physics, but rather with the Carollian travels of an unnamed murderer through a surrealist, almost quantum world. (In case you're not yet convinced, here you have yet another excerpt from the novel; or see here for more about O'Brien.)