Of course, much more goes on here than just that. We meet an interesting character who is a linguist hired by the government to help us communicate with a new alien species. In addition to learning about her progress in this difficult task, we see how she is courted by, marries, and eventually divorces her partner in the project who is a physicist. In fact, the "your life" of the title is the life of the daughter from that marriage.

At first, the physicists and linguists are both having trouble communicating with the aliens. The linguists are bothered by their nonlinear writing system which seems to require thinking of the sentence as a whole rather than as a string of words stretched out in time. The physicists start making headway when they try to talk to the aliens about the refraction of light. Somehow the aliens make it clear that they think about this phenomenon along the lines of Fermat's principle: that light takes the path from point A to point B which will get it there in the least time. Of course, this statement requires that you imagine the light knowing where it will be going before it gets there (sort of like the problem with the sentences, eh?)

In fact, Fermat's principle is just an example of the application of variational mathematics to physics. If you've had some calculus you can probably get a vague idea of what the calculus of variations is. Remember how some points were "critical points" because the slope of the tangent line was zero there? The idea is the same but replace x (the variable) with a function itself and you get a sort of infinite dimensional generalization in which some FUNCTIONS are critical points because some sort of derivative of a function of the function is zero. Sounds weird, I know. In fact, we do not resort to using it too often because it does seem a bit too abstract. But the fact is, as this story relates, much of physics can be stated in these terms in a way that completely eliminates the notion of time passing or events causing other events.

The idea of this story is to explore a different mind-set in which the calculus of variations, rather than algebra, is the most elementary form of mathematics.