“A demonstrated phenomenon!” Dr. Takumi said. “Ha!” She banged her moderator’s gavel for emphasis.
“Are you saying passion doesn’t exist?” Dr. Ping said, getting very red in the face.
“I’m saying one measly experiment is hardly a demonstrated phenomenon.”
“One measly experiment! I spent five years on this project!” Dr. Iverson said, shaking his fist at her. “I’ll show you passion at a distance!”
“Try it, and I’ll adjust your fractal-basin boundaries!” Dr. Takumi said, and hit him over the head with the gavel.
Yet finding a paradigm is not impossible. Newtonian physics is not a machine. It simply shares some of the attributes of a machine. We must find a model somewhere in the visible world that shares the often bizarre attributes of quantum physics. Such a model, unlikely as it sounds, surely exists somewhere, and it is up to us to find it.
Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address
I went up to my room before the police came. Darlene still wasn’t there, and the phone and air-conditioning still weren’t working. I was really beginning to get worried. I walked up to Grauman’s Chinese to find David, but he wasn’t there. Dr. Whedbee and Dr. Sleeth were behind the Academy Award winners folding screen.
“You haven’t seen David, have you?” I asked.
Dr. Whedbee removed his hand from Norma Shearer’s cheek.
“He left,” Dr. Sleeth said, disentangling herself from the Best Movie of 1929-30.
“He said he was going out to Forest Lawn,” Dr. Whedbee said, trying to smooth down his bushy white hair.
“Have you seen Dr. Mendoza? She was supposed to get in this morning.”
They hadn’t seen her, and neither had Drs. Hotard and Thibodeaux, who stopped me in the lobby and showed me a postcard of Aimee Semple McPherson’s tomb. Tiffany had gone off duty. Natalie couldn’t find my reservation. I went back up to the room to wait, thinking Darlene might call.
The air conditioning still wasn’t fixed. I fanned myself with a Hollywood brochure and then opened it up and read it. There was a map of the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese on the back cover. Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner didn’t have a square together either, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy weren’t even on the map. She made him waffles in Woman of the Year, and they hadn’t even given them a square. I wondered if Tiffany the model-slash-actress had been in charge of assigning the cement. I could see her looking blankly at Spencer Tracy and saying, “I don’t show a reservation for you.”
What exactly was a model-slash-actress? Did it mean she was a model or an actress or a model and an actress? She certainly wasn’t a hotel clerk. Maybe electrons were the Tiffanys of the microcosm, and that explained their wave-slash-particle duality. Maybe they weren’t really electrons at all. Maybe they were just working part-time at being electrons to pay for their singlet-state lessons.
Darlene still hadn’t called by seven o’clock. I stopped fanning myself and tried to open a window. It wouldn’t budge. The problem was, nobody knew anything about quantum theory. All we had to go on were a few colliding electrons that nobody could see and that couldn’t be measured properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And there was chaos to consider, and entropy, and all those empty spaces. We didn’t even know who May Robson was.
At seven-thirty the phone rang. It was Darlene.
“What happened?” I said. “Where are you?”
“At the Beverly Wilshire.”
“In Beverly Hills?”
“Yes. It’s a long story. When I got to the Rialto, the hotel clerk, I think her name was Tiffany, told me you weren’t there. She said they were booked solid with some science thing and had had to send the overflow to other hotels. She said you were at the Beverly Wilshire in room ten-twenty-seven. How’s David?”
“Impossible,” I said. “He’s spent the whole conference looking at Deanna Durbin’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and trying to talk me into going to the movies.”
“And are you going?”
“I can’t. Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address in half an hour.”
“He is?” Darlene said, sounding surprised. “Just a minute.” There was a silence, and then she came back on and said, “I think you should go to the movies. David’s one of the last two charming men in the universe.”
“But he doesn’t take quantum theory seriously. Dr. Gedanken is hiring a research team to design a paradigm, and David keeps talking about the beacon on top of the Capitol Records building.”
“You know, he may be onto something there. I mean, seriousness was all right for Newtonian physics, but maybe quantum theory needs a different approach. Sid says—”
“Sid?”
“This guy who’s taking me to the movies tonight. It’s a long story. Tiffany gave me the wrong room number, and I walked in on this guy in his underwear. He’s a quantum physicist. He was supposed to be staying at the Rialto, but Tiffany couldn’t find his reservation.”
The major implication of wave/particle duality is that an electron has no precise location. It exists in a superposition of probable locations. Only when the experimenter observes the electron does it “collapse” into a location.
The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,
A. Fields, UNW
Forest Lawn closed at five o’clock. I looked it up in the Hollywood brochure after Darlene hung up. There was no telling where he might have gone: the Brown Derby or the La Brea Tar Pits or some great place near Hollywood and Vine that had the alfalfa sprouts John Hurt ate right before his chest exploded in Alien.
At least I knew where Dr. Gedanken was. I changed my clothes and got into the elevator, thinking about wave/particle duality and fractals and high-entropy states and delayed-choice experiments. The problem was, where could you find a paradigm that would make it possible to visualize quantum theory when you had to include Josephson junctions and passion and all those empty spaces? It wasn’t possible. You had to have more to work with than a few footprints and the impression of Betty Grable’s leg.
The elevator door opened, and Abey Fields pounced on me. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “You haven’t seen Dr. Gedanken, have you?”
“Isn’t he in the ballroom?”
“No,” he said. “He’s already fifteen minutes late, and nobody’s seen him. You have to sign this,” he said, shoving a clipboard at me.
“What is it?”
“It’s a petition.” He grabbed it back from me. “ ‘We the undersigned demand that annual meetings of the International Congress of Quantum Physicists henceforth be held in appropriate locations.’ Like Racine,” he added, shoving the clipboard at me again. “Unlike Hollywood.”
Hollywood.
“Are you aware it took the average ICQP delegate two hours and thirty-six minutes to check in? They even sent some of the delegates to a hotel in Glendale.”
“And Beverly Hills,” I said absently. Hollywood. Bra museums and the Marx Brothers and gangs that would kill you if you wore red or blue and Tiffany/Stephanie and the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme.
“Beverly Hills,” Abey muttered, pulling an automatic pencil out of his pocket protector and writing a note to himself. “I’m presenting the petition during Dr. Gedanken’s speech. Well, go on, sign it,” he said, handing me the pencil. “Unless you want the annual meeting to be here at the Rialto next year.”
I handed the clipboard back to him. “I think from now on the annual meeting might be here every year,” I said, and took off running for Grauman’s Chinese.
When we have the paradigm, one that embraces both the logical and the nonsensical aspects of quantum theory, we will be able to look past the colliding electrons and the mathematics and see the microcosm in all its astonishing beauty.
Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address
“I want a ticket to Benji IX,” I told the girl at the box office. Her name tag said, “Welcome t
o Hollywood. My name is Kimberly.”
“Which theater?” she said.
“Grauman’s Chinese,” I said, thinking, This is no time for a high-entropy state.
“Which theater?”
I looked up at the marquee. Benji IX was showing in all three theaters, the huge main theater and the two smaller ones on either side. “They’re doing audience-reaction surveys,” Kimberly said. “Each theater has a different ending.”
“Which one’s in the main theater?”
“I don’t know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons.”
“Do you have any dice?” I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory, not Newtonian. It didn’t matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment, and David was already in flight.
“The one with the happy ending,” I said.
“Center theater,” she said.
I walked past the stone lions and into the lobby. Rhonda Fleming and some Chinese wax figures were sitting inside a glass case next to the door to the restrooms. There was a huge painted screen behind the concessions stand. I bought a box of Raisinets, a tub of popcorn, and a box of jujubes and went inside the theater.
It was bigger than I had imagined. Rows and rows of empty red chairs curved between the huge pillars and up to the red curtains where the screen must be. The walls were covered with intricate drawings. I stood there, holding my jujubes and Raisinets and popcorn, staring at the chandelier overhead. It was an elaborate gold sunburst surrounded by silver dragons. I had never imagined it was anything like this.
The lights went down, and the red curtains opened, revealing an inner curtain like a veil across the screen. I went down the dark aisle and sat in one of the seats. “Hi,” I said, and handed the Raisinets to David.
“Where have you been?” he said. “The movie’s about to start.”
“I know,” I said. I leaned across him and handed Darlene her popcorn and Dr. Gedanken his jujubes. “I was working on the paradigm for quantum theory.”
“And?” Dr. Gedanken said, opening jujubes.
“And you’re both wrong,” I said. “It isn’t Grauman’s Chinese. It isn’t movies either, Dr. Gedanken.”
“Sid,” Dr. Gedanken said. “If we’re all going to be on the same research team, I think we should use first names.”
“If it isn’t Grauman’s Chinese or the movies, what is it?” Darlene asked, eating popcorn.
“It’s Hollywood.”
“Hollywood,” Dr. Gedanken said thoughtfully.
“Hollywood,” I said. “Stars in the sidewalk and buildings that look like stacks of records and hats, and radicchio and audience surveys and bra museums. And the movies. And Grauman’s Chinese.”
“And the Rialto,” David said.
“Especially the Rialto.”
“And the ICQP,” Dr. Gedanken said.
I thought about Dr. Lvov’s black and gray slides and the disappearing chaos seminar and Dr. Whedbee writing “meaning” or possibly “information” on the overhead projector. “And the ICQP,” I said.
“Did Dr. Takumi really hit Dr. Iverson over the head with a gavel?” Darlene asked.
“Shh,” David said. “I think the movie’s starting.” He took hold of my hand. Darlene settled back with her popcorn, and Dr. Gedanken put his feet up on the chair in front of him. The inner curtain opened, and the screen lit up.
Connie Willis has won major awards for her novels and short stories. Her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other works include Doomsday Book, Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Remake, Uncharted Territory, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Passage, and Miracle and Other Christmas Stories. Ms. Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family.
Connie Willis, Impossible Things
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