During the first day, all present spoke. All save Einstein.
On the morning of the second day, Louis de Broglie revealed his new theory of “pilot waves” that explained the movement of the electron as though it were travelling on the crest of a wave like a surfer. He was attacked pitilessly by Schrödinger as well as by the Copenhagen physicists. Unable to defend himself, de Broglie looked to Einstein, who maintained his silence. The timid prince would not open his mouth again for the rest of his time there.
On the third day, two accounts of quantum mechanics faced off.
Full of confidence, Schrödinger defended his waves. He explained that they described perfectly the behaviour of an electron, even if, admittedly, six dimensions were required to represent two of them. Schrödinger had convinced himself that his waves could be something real, and not merely a probability distribution, but he could not persuade the rest. At the end of his presentation, Heisenberg indulged himself with the remark: “Herr Schrödinger trusts he will be capable of explaining and comprehending in three dimensions the results arising from his multidimensional theory once our knowledge has progressed further. I see nothing in his calculations to justify such a hope.”
That afternoon, Heisenberg and Bohr presented their vision of quantum mechanics, which would come to be known as the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Reality, they said to those present, does not exist as something separate from the act of observation. A quantum object has no intrinsic properties. An electron is not in any fixed place until it is measured; it is only in that instant that it appears. Before being measured, it has no attributes; prior to observation, it cannot even be conceived of. It exists in a specific manner when it is detected by a specific instrument. Between one measurement and the next, there is no point in asking how it moves, what it is, or where it is located. Like the moon in Buddhism, a particle does not exist: it is the act of measuring that makes it a real object.
What they were proposing was a ruthless rupture with tradition. Physics ought not to concern itself with reality, but rather with what we can say about reality, they said. The being of atoms and their elementary particles was not like that of the objects of everyday experience. They live in worlds of potentialities, Heisenberg explained; they are not things, but possibilities. The transition from the “possible” to the “real” only occurred during the act of observation or measurement. There was, therefore, no independently existing quantum reality. Measured as a wave, an electron appeared as such; measured as a particle, it adopted this other form.
And then they went further.
None of these limits were theoretical: they were not a failure in the model, an experimental limitation or a technical difficulty. There simply existed no “real world” outside that science was capable of studying. “When we speak of the science of our era,” Heisenberg explained, “we are talking about our relationship with nature, not as objective, detached observers, but as actors in a game between man and the world. Science can no longer confront reality in the same way. The method of analysing, explaining and classifying the world has become conscious of its own limitations: these arise from the fact that its interventions alter the objects it proposes to investigate. The light science shines on the world not only changes our vision of reality, but even the behaviour of its fundamental building blocks.” Scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.
The proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation concluded their lecture with a peremptory verdict: “We consider quantum mechanics to be a closed theory. Its underlying physics and mathematics are no longer amenable to modification.”
This was more than Einstein could bear.
The iconoclast physicist par excellence refused to accept such a radical change. That physics should cease to speak of an objective world was not only a change in its point of view—it was a betrayal of the very spirit of science. For Einstein, physics must speak of causes and effects, and not only of probabilities. He refused to believe that the facts of the world obeyed a logic so contrary to common sense. Chance could not be enthroned at the expense of the notion of natural laws. There had to be something deeper. Something not yet known. A hidden variable that could dissipate the fog of Copenhagen and reveal the order that undergirded the randomness of the subatomic world. He was convinced of this, and over the next three days proposed a series of hypothetical situations that seemed to violate Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which was the basis of the Copenhagen physicists’ reasoning.
Every morning at breakfast—mirroring the official debates—Einstein would proffer his riddles, and every night Bohr would arrive with a solution. The duel between the two men dominated the conference, and divided the physicists into two opposing camps, but, in the end, Einstein had to yield. He had not found a single inconsistency in Bohr’s reasoning. He accepted defeat grudgingly, and condensed all his hatred of quantum mechanics in a phrase he would repeat time and again in the succeeding years, one he practically spat in the Dane’s face before his departure:
“God does not play dice with the universe!”
EPILOGUE
Einstein returned from Brussels to Paris with de Broglie. When he got off the train, he embraced him and told him not to despair, and to continue developing his ideas; there was no doubt he was on the right path. But de Broglie had lost something during those five days. Although he received the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his doctoral dissertation on matter waves, he capitulated to Heisenberg and Bohr’s vision, and spent the rest of his career as a simple university professor, cut off from everyone by a kind of veil, a shame that served as a barrier between him and the world, one not even his sister managed to lift.
Einstein became the greatest enemy of quantum mechanics. He made countless efforts to find a way back to an objective world, searching for a hidden order that would unify his relativity theory and quantum mechanics and manage to uproot the chaos that had infected the most exact of all sciences. “This theory reminds me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts,” he wrote to one of his friends. He struggled to arrive at a grand unified theory and died without achieving it, admired by all, but completely alienated from the younger generations, who seemed to have accepted as definitive Bohr’s response to Einstein at Solvay decades before, when he heard his sniping remark about God and dice: “It’s not our place to tell Him how to run the world.”
Schrödinger too came to detest quantum mechanics. He contrived an elaborate thought experiment, a Gedankenexperiment, the result of which was an apparently impossible creature: a cat that was, at once, alive and dead. His intention was to demonstrate the ridiculous character of this manner of thinking. The proponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation told Schrödinger that he was absolutely right: the result was not only ridiculous, but paradoxical. And yet it was true. Schrödinger’s cat, like any elementary particle, was alive and dead (at least until it was measured), and the Austrian’s name would remain associated forever with this failed attempt to negate the ideas he himself had helped give rise to. Schrödinger made contributions to biology, genetics, thermodynamics and general relativity, but never again produced anything comparable to what he had done during the six months following his stay in Villa Herwig, nor did he ever return there.
Fame accompanied him until his death in January 1961 at the age of seventy-three from a final attack of tuberculosis that besieged him in Vienna.
His equation remains a pillar of modern physics, though in a hundred years nobody has been able to unravel the mystery of the wave function.
Heisenberg was made a professor at the University of Leipzig at twenty-five—the youngest professor in the history of Germany. In 1932 he received the Nobel Prize for the creation of quantum mechanics, and in 1939 the Nazi government ordered him to investigate the feasibility of constructing a nuclear bomb; after two years, he concluded that a weapon of this type lay beyond the reach of Germany or any of it
s enemies, at least for the duration of the war, and he could hardly believe the news of the explosion over the sky of Hiroshima.
Heisenberg continued to develop provocative ideas for the rest of his life, and is considered one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.
His uncertainty principle has never been disproved.
THE NIGHT GARDENER
I
It is a vegetable plague, spreading from tree to tree. Unstoppable, invisible, a hidden rot, unseeing, unseen by the eyes of the world. Was it born of the deep dark earth? Was it brought to the surface by the mouths of the tiniest creatures? A fungus, perhaps? No, it travels faster than spores, it breeds inside tree roots, buried in their wooden hearts. An ancient, crawling evil. Kill it. Kill it with fire. Light it up and watch it burn, torch all those sickly beeches, firs and giant oaks that have stood the test of time, douse their trunks wounded from a thousand insect bites. Dying now, diseased and dying, dead as they stand. Let it burn and watch the flames reach up to the sky, for left alone it will consume the world, feeding on the death of others, nurtured by all the green grass turned grey. Quiet now, listen. Listen to it grow.
II
I met him in the mountains, in a small town where few people live save during the summer months. I was walking at night and I saw him, in his garden, digging. My dog crawled under the bushes, ran towards him in the dark, a short white flash in the moonlight. The man bent over, rubbed her head, went down on one knee as my dog offered her belly. I apologized, he said it was OK, that he loved dogs. I asked him if he was gardening at night. “Yes,” he said, “it’s the best time for it. The plants are asleep and they don’t feel as much, suffer less when moved around, like a patient etherized. We should be wary of plants.” When he was a boy, there was a giant oak of which he had always been afraid. His grandmother hanged herself from one of its branches. Back then, he told me, it had been a healthy tree, strong and vigorous, while now, some sixty years later, its huge bulk was ridden with parasites and rotting from the inside, so much so that he knew that it would soon have to be removed, as it towered above his house and threatened to crush it if it came down. And yet he could not bring himself to fell the gargantuan thing, for it was one of the few remaining specimens of what used to be an old-growth forest that covered the land where his house and the whole town now stood, dark, foreboding and beautiful. He pointed at the tree, but in the dark I could see nothing save its massive shadow. It was half dead, he said, rotten, yet still alive and growing. Bats nested inside its trunk and hummingbirds fed on the ruby red flowers of the parasitic plant which crowned its highest branches, the hermaphrodite Tristerix corymbosus, known locally as quintral, cutre or ñipe, which his grandmother used to cut back every year, only to see it regrow with stronger, denser blooms. “Why she killed herself I still don’t know. They never told me she had committed suicide, it was a family secret, I was young, no more than five or six at the time, but later, decades later, when my daughter was born, my nana, my nanny, the woman who raised me while my own mother went to work, told me. ‘Your grandmother,’ she said, ‘she hanged herself from that branch at night. It was awful, terrible, we could not cut her down till the police arrived, at least that is what they told us—“Don’t cut her down, leave her there”—but your father could not leave her hanging like that, he climbed the tree, higher and higher—no one understood how she had climbed so high—and removed the noose from her neck. She fell through the branches, landed with a thud. Your father started hacking away at the trunk with his axe, but his father, your granddaddy, would not let him. He said that she had loved that tree, she always had. She had seen it grow, tended and nurtured it, pruned and watered it, and fussed over every tiny detail. So it stayed there and it’s still here, though it’s going to have to come down, sooner rather than later.’”
III
The next morning I went for a walk in the woods with my seven-year-old daughter and we found the bodies of two dead dogs. They had been poisoned. I have never seen anything like it. I knew the bloodied corpses of puppies on the highway, crushed by tires of unrelenting traffic, I had seen a dead cat disembowelled by a pack of stray dogs, and I even stabbed the neck of an unsuspecting lamb myself and saw her bleed to death in front of the gauchos that I was staying with, who would roast her for an asado, but none of those deaths, however gruesome, came anywhere near the effects of poison. The first dog was a German shepherd, lying in the middle of the forest path. His mouth gaping, gums swollen and blackened, tongue out, five times its normal size, blood vessels filled to bursting point. I inched towards it and told my little girl to look away, but she would not listen and crept up behind me, burying her face in the folds of my jacket and peeking out. The dog’s legs were stiff and stuck straight out, his abdomen had bloated with gases that stretched his skin and made it look like the belly of a pregnant woman. The whole cadaver seemed ready to explode and spill its entrails all over the place, but what struck me most was the expression of unrelenting pain on his features. Such was the agony he had endured that even in death he appeared to be screaming. The second dog was some fifty yards away, to the side of the trail, hidden in the undergrowth. It was a mongrel cross between a bloodhound and a beagle, with a black head on a white body, and even though he had surely died from the same substance that had killed the shepherd, he had suffered none of the disfiguring effects of the poison. Were it not for the flies crawling round his eyelids, I could have imagined he had merely fallen asleep. We did not know the first dog, but the hound was a friend of ours; my daughter had played with him since she was four, he would sometimes walk with us or come scratching at my door for scraps. She called him Patches and while she did not cry as soon as she recognized him, when we stepped out of the forest path and into the clearing, she broke down. I hugged her as hard as I could. She said she was afraid—as I was—for her own dog, the sweetest, kindest animal I have ever met. Why, she asked me, why were they poisoned? I told her I didn’t know, but it was probably an accident; rat poison, slug poison, there are many deadly chemicals used for gardening, and there are many wonderful gardens in this place. They had probably eaten some poison without realizing what it was, or perhaps they had hunted a rat that was itself sluggish after chewing on those tiny wax cubes that people place around the borders of their properties. What I did not tell her is that this happens every year. Once or twice a year, dead dogs. Sometimes one, sometimes a lot more, but, unfailingly, the beginning of summer and the end of autumn bring dead dogs. The people who live here year round know that it is one of them who does the poisoning, one of their own, but no one knows who. He or she puts out cyanide, and for a couple of weeks we find carcasses around town. Strays, mostly, since lots of people from the neighbouring areas come up the mountain road to get rid of their unwanted dogs, but also our pets. There are a couple of suspects, individuals who have made threats in the past. There is a man who lives in the same street as we do, who once told a friend of mine that I should keep my dog on a lead. Did I not know that someone was poisoning dogs every summer? That man lives three houses down from ours, but I have never talked to him, and have only seen him once or twice, standing next to his car, smoking. He nods, I nod, but we do not talk.
IV
I despair at how slowly my garden grows. The winters up in the mountain are harsh, spring and summer are short and very dry, and the soil in my garden is poor, as it was built on a rubbish heap. The former owner, the man who built the cabin and sold it to me, had to even out the terrain with rubble and construction debris, so that every now and then, when I dig into the ground to plant flowers and trees, I find cans, bottle caps and pieces of shredded plastic beneath the ground. There are a great number of fertilizers I could use, but I am fond of my trees as they are, even if they do not grow tall. Their roots have nowhere to go; below the thin layer of soil I have managed to pile over the rubbish lies hard, compact clay, so most will remain stunted, with a strange bonsai beauty, but stunted nonetheless. The night gardener
told me that the man who invented modern-day nitrogen fertilizers—a German chemist called Fritz Haber—was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction, namely chlorine gas, which he poured into the trenches of the First World War. His green gas killed thousands and made countless soldiers claw at their throats as the poison boiled inside their lungs, drowning them in their own vomit and phlegm, while his fertilizer, which he harvested from the nitrogen present in the air itself, saved hundreds of millions from famine and fuelled our current overpopulation. Today nitrogen is more than plentiful, but in centuries past wars were fought over bird and bat shit, and thieves ransacked the bones of the Egyptian pharaohs to steal the nitrogen hidden in their bones. According to the night gardener, the Mapuche Indians would crush the skeletons of their vanquished enemies and spread that dust on their farms as fertilizer, always working in the dead of night, when the trees are fast asleep, for they believed that some of them—the canelo and the araucaria, the monkey puzzle—could see into a warrior’s soul, steal his deepest secrets and spread them through the shared roots of the forest, where plush tendrils whispered to pale mushroom mycelium, ruining his standing before the community. His secret life lost, exposed and bared to the world, the man would slowly begin to shrivel, drying up from the inside out, without ever knowing why.
V
The way this small town is built is very strange. Whichever road you take, it will invariably lead you down to a small patch of woods tucked away at its lowest edge, one of the few areas that survived the giant fire which ravaged the region at the end of the Nineties, threatening the existence of the town itself. The fire raged until it burned itself out. A forest that had stood for two hundred years disappeared in less than two weeks. It was mostly replanted with pine, and the original, native species were all lost, except for this tiny miniature wilderness, which stands in stark contrast to the pruned hedges and decorative gardens that surround it on all sides. It has a strange magnetic power over me, it pulls me in and leads me down and down towards the old path that reaches the lake. I have spent days walking among the trees there, always alone, for the locals seem to avoid the area, although I do not know why, and most outsiders, the rich families who rent cottages for the summer months, visit it rarely, or only see it in passing. There is a small grotto at its centre, carved in limestone. The night gardener tells me there used to be a giant plant nursery that kept its seeds inside the mouth of the cave, in perpetual darkness. It is empty these days, visited now and then by adolescent boys and girls who leave their condom wrappers on the ground or tourists whose soiled toilet paper I have to pick up and bury. The lake lies beyond, and that small stretch of water is where families gather. It is artificial, man-made, more a pond than a lake really, but it looks natural enough for a dozen ducks to nest there. A red-tailed hawk patrols the southern side; a white crane lords over the northern, swampier half. In spring the tiny streams that feed the reservoir trickle and sing, but later they dry up, are overgrown and disappear as if they had never existed. The lake has not frozen over in decades. I was told that a small child drowned after falling through the ice the last time it did, back when Pinochet had just come to power, but no one has been able to tell me the little boy’s name. It’s probably just a tale to keep the children away from the lake at night, one that has survived even though the climate has warmed and ice no longer forms.
When We Cease to Understand the World Page 14