by Ulf Wolf
Now, as in all of quantum physics, much of what is observed depends upon the observer, and the same holds true for the electrons: the exact axis of rotation, for example, is never determined until the observer chooses to look for a definite axis, at which point the electron will accommodate the observer and present its axis as both locatable and measurable.
The crucial point of the EPR experiment is that once the observer chooses to observe the axis of one of a pair of electrons and has determined a definite spin around that axis; at that very instant its twin, which—theoretically—may be thousands, even millions of miles, if not light years away, also acquires a definite spin along the same determined axis. How does the twin know which axis (which angle) was chosen, and which direction the spin? There is no time to receive that information by any conventional, space-traveling signal. The speed of light—the fastest thing there is, according to Einstein—simply is not fast enough.
And this is where Einstein disagreed with Bohr. Since, according to Einstein, no signal can travel faster than light, it would be impossible that the measurement performed on one electron would instantly determine the axis and direction of the other electron’s spin, thousands or millions of miles (or light years) away.
Bohr—correctly—maintained that even though the two electrons were far apart in space, they were nevertheless linked by instantaneous, nonlocal connections. He further maintained that connections were not signals in the Einsteinian sense: they transcend conventional notions of information transfer, something Einstein simply refused to believe.
“Bohr was correct,” said Ruth. “Which is what you proved in 1999.”
“He was,” Julian agreed.
“And you proved it to everyone’s satisfaction.”
“Nearly everyone’s.”
“There are always those who refuse to see feet at the end of their legs as a matter of principle.”
Julian laughed. Whether at what she said, or whether because she—such an unlikely source—had said it, he wasn’t sure. Things were slipping a little toward a quantum reality where nothing would sit still for very long, if at all. Shifting.
“Yes,” he finally said. “There are always those.”
“But all who matter agreed, isn’t that so? The theorists?”
“Did Kristina tell you about that, too?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, the theorists agreed. At least those who mattered.”
“And the experimenters? Any dissent there?”
What ten-year old used the word “dissent?” he thought. Then let the thought go, he simply had to get used to this.
“No,” he answered. There was no dissent in that camp either.”
Ruth shifted in her chair, then pulled one leg up and tucked it in under the other, then straightened her skirt as a matter of course. “You showed the world that non-local communication exists. Proved it beyond a doubt. It didn’t get much press, did it?”
“I had expected more,” he admitted.
“It should have changed everything,” she said.
One hell of a statement. But he, himself had thought precisely that, and more than once. “Yes,” he said. “It should have changed everything.”
“Then, why didn’t it?”
“Honestly, I don’t know.” Then he heard himself add, “Do you?”
She did not voice her answer, but only shook her head slowly while she asked her next question. “What are you working on now?”
“Specifically, or in general?”
“Either.”
“Well, both then. I, as well as many others today, am trying to isolate the fundamental particle.”
“The God particle?”
“Yes, that’s what Lederman called it.”
“And you don’t?”
“It’s as good a name as any.”
“So it’s not the quark then?”
“We don’t think so. I don’t think so. We have never been able to detect one, only theorize one.”
“Is it a string?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wasn’t it Geoffrey Chew who pointed out that what we actually detect in subatomic particles is the energies of their internal interaction. And doesn’t that mean that what particles we can detect all have structure—constituent parts, in other words—or there would be no internal interaction to detect?”
Julian at this point was too stunned to answer. He only looked across his cluttered desk at the impossibility talking to him.
So Ruth continued, “Would it not then follow that a truly elementary particle, one without any form of internal structure, would not be subject to any forces that would allow us to detect it? The fact that we know of the particle at all implies that it has an internal structure, constituent parts, and so cannot be elemental.”
He followed the argument, of course he did. He had pondered this precise question more often that he’d care to admit. The impossibility of their quest. Then, again, he tried to reconcile the logic—the clearly stated and very perceptive logic—with its ten-years something source. It did not compute. Could not be. Again, he engaged, with some effort, the suspension of disbelief, or the conversation simply could not go on.
“I’ve considered the problem,” he said finally. “Often.”
“Is Chew right?”
“As far as it goes, yes.”
“As far as what goes?”
“In so far as what we have detected so far is precisely that internal energy.”
“The energies of the internal structure? The interaction?”
“Yes.”
“So, then, would an elemental particle, if there is one, in fact be detectable?”
“I don’t know.”
Ruth considered this for a while. Looked out the window briefly, then back at Julian. “Do you think there is an elemental particle?”
“There must be. Mustn’t it?”
“Must there?”
This was another thing which Julian had considered; often, and at some depth. He looked again at his the most unlikely of guests. Incongruous didn’t even start to describe the young girl at the other side of his desk. Large, and very awake blue eyes regarding him in turn, unblinking, unwavering, waiting for his reply. But he had no reply, he only had the question that now was gaining rapid momentum, and could no longer be contained for it cried out for an answer.
“Who are you?” he asked. And he really meant that question.
“I am more than meets the eye,” she replied.
“That much is obvious,” he said.
“Some other time,” she said, and there was no question in his mind about what she meant. Some other time she would tell him who she really was, and there was definitely something to tell. He shuddered inwardly, then took command of himself again. Nodded that he understood, accepted.
“Does there, in fact, have to be an elemental particle?” she asked again.
“How can there not be one?”
Ruth said nothing.
Julian knocked on his desk. And again. “There’s something here,” he said. “And it has to be made from something.”
“Are you close?” she wondered.
“To discovering it?”
“Yes.”
“Some days closer than others, but no. No, not really.”
“But you are sure there is one?”
Julian did not know what to answer. How could there not be one. He could still hear the knock on the tabletop with his inner ear. Unless.
“Unless what?” said Ruth.
His knee-jerk reaction, naturally, was that he had misheard her. But his more fundamental self calmly pointed out that he had heard her just fine.
“Unless it’s all illusion?”
“The atom is mainly space,” suggested Ruth.
“Sure.”
“Sometimes we forget,” she said. “There’s hardly anything but space.”
“I know.”
“Has anybody ever seen an atom? A nucleus?”
“Not yet. Only what it does to light.”
“So maybe it doesn’t exist?”
“It exists all right,” he said. Almost defensively. Then, “Did you hear me think?”
Without hesitation, “Yes.”
“That is not possible, is it?”
Ruth smiled. “Much is possible.”
The she asked, “How do you go about it? How do you hope to detect the elemental particle, if there indeed is one?”
“We smash things together,” he said.
She nodded that she understood. “Particle accelerators.”
“Yes.”
“Fermilab and CERN?”
“Yes.”
“Bubble chambers?”
“Yes. To trace the little bits.”
“But if they’re traceable, they must have internal structure?”
“So the theory goes.”
“So that’s not going to work then, is it?”
“We hope it will.”
“Though futile?”
There was no answer to that, so Julian didn’t bother. Instead, he said, though not with any hope of an answer, of course:
“How would you go about it?”
“I would look,” said the girl. Smiling now.
“Look?”
“I would make myself really, really small, and look.” And still smiling.
“You’re kidding.”
“Am I?”
“Of course.”
“Am I?” Surprise or mock surprise? She did it so well that Julian could not tell.
“Of course,” seemed to be the only two words left in his vocabulary. Then the question walked in and sat down, and he asked it of her:
“Do you think matter longs for matter?”
If she was surprised at that question, she did not show it. But there was no hiding his own surprise at her answer:
“As in gravity?”
:: 76 :: (Pasadena)
He is a brilliant man, this Julian Lawson. Kristina Medina was clever to have introduced us. He knows on many levels, and he is knocking on the final door.
And he knows the language of deep science. Yes, he is indeed my next teacher.
I see in his heart that he loves Kristina Medina. Deeply. Hopelessly. Strangely, I also see that he is resigned to, and quite happy with this. He is an unusual man.
And then he asks me if I think matter longs for matter. Which, of course it does. So I answer him:
“As in gravity?”
And his eyes spring open, very wide, as if I had turned ghost.
“Do you know?” he says after a long while.
“I know many things,” I tell him.
“About gravity?” he says. “Do you know about gravity?”
“About the longing?”
“Yes, about the longing.”
For him, it is a matter of what the world calls a strong intuition—an intuition so strong as to border certainty, though not crossing that border. He knows with his deeper roots, of course, but the leaves that are his current life have had no direct dealings with those roots for many lives.
Yet, he sees with the clear eye of intuition, matter pulling matter, this universal affinity at work, this strong need and yearning to return to elemental particle, before its sundering into universe.
Finally, I answer, “Yes.”
Then he falls silent again, scrutinizing me, visually probing surfaces as if the answer to his now growing question lies in my face, my eyes, my hair, or in the air surrounding.
Then he asks it, again:
“Who are you?”
Shall I avoid, ignore, or answer the question? But when he asks with such earnestness, with such intensity, he does not really leave me a choice. And besides, he deserves to know. So I say:
“Can you keep a secret?”
:: 77 :: (Pasadena)
Julian did not sleep much that night. Perhaps he didn’t sleep at all, he couldn’t really tell. Some of his ponderings felt like sleep, or at least next door to it, but even here he was partly awake, for how can you fall away from such a revelation?
If true.
And how could it possibly?
The rational part of him, the part he sometimes thought of as C & B—Checks and Balances, as if the name of some accounting firm—issued warning after warning not to be taken in by the apparent romance of this mystery; for how could it possibly?
Romance? he’d argue back with himself. Romance?
The wish for the unbelievable to be believable, C & B said, the thrill of transcendence, that romance. That dream.
But how do you explain?
C & B said nothing, for he had nothing to say to that. Julian reached out for his alarm clock and brought it close to his face. He had to press a small button for the face to illuminate, and he did. Two-thirty-three. He carefully placed the clock back on his bedside table. The Buddha.
It was a thrill, all right. He laughed into the still night, wondering fleetingly what someone who heard that might think of the madman inside. Then he laughed again. Let them.
For the deeper part of him that considered C & B nothing but an auxiliary view—the part of him he sometimes thought of as groundwater—knew. Just knew that the impossibility that called itself Ruth Marten now made sense.
Not that he knew much about the Buddha. In fact, all he knew at this point is that it rang true. The name, the person, and her mission, as she had put it, to marry the mystery of science with the mystery of religion, for they are one and the same.
One and the same.
And he laughed again.
Then climbed out of bed to fix himself some chamomile tea, perhaps that’ll relax him and help him sleep.
It did and it did not.
:
Another person who slept little, if at all, that night was Ananda.
Ruth had been unusually quiet, subdued even, when she came home from Cal Tech that afternoon. Both Ananda and Melissa had wondered how it had gone, had she gotten along with Julian?
Sure. Nodded.
“Oh, well,” said Melissa, “Sounds like you got on like a house on fire.”
“Maybe not a house,” she’d answered. “And maybe not on fire.”
“You didn’t get along?” Melissa concerned now.
“Oh, we got along just fine.”
“What then?”
“Nothing. Just a lot to think about.”
And give Melissa credit, she does give Ruth “space” as they call it these days, and does respect her privacy, especially when, like this, she’s a little pensive.
But there was more to it than that. When Ruth maintained what struck Ananda as her brooding, and at dinner only picked at and hardly ate any of her food, he just had to know—he had come to suspect, but had to know.
“You told him, didn’t you?” he said.
Melissa nearly dropped her fork, then actually did drop her fork in her quick turn to face him then Ruth then him again. There was something she wanted to say but it seemed like she could not catch it.
Ruth didn’t answer.
“Am I right?” Ananda repeated.
“Is he right?” Melissa finally managed, fork retrieved.
“It was the right thing to do,” said Ruth.
Ananda’s first impulse was to tell her the precise opposite, but he checked it, for something not so much in Ruth’s external demeanor as in the Buddha Gotama’s internal air seemed too certain, too resolved.
“What did you tell him?” asked Melissa. “How much.”
“Name, rank, and serial number,” said Ruth. “And mission objective.”
“You did not,” said Melissa, having retrieved her dropped fork held on to it this time.
“She did,” said Ananda, though smiling now.
“Julian is an amazing person,” said Ruth. “And very perceptive. I could not have kept this from him for long, and if a river has to be crossed, might as well cross it now rather than later.”
“How did he take it?” said Anan
da.
“Time will tell,” said Ruth.
“Did he believe you?” said Melissa.
“He will soon enough, if not already,” said Ruth.
“Are you being flippant?” asked her mother, and not kindly.
“No, I am not.”
But now, in the middle of the night, both Ruth and Melissa asleep, Ananda did worry that it might not have been the prudent thing for the Buddha to do. What did they know about this Julian Lawson? Other than that he was a good friend of Kristina Medina, Ruth’s teacher, who, from what Melissa was saying, had her own suspicions. It was all too soon. Too soon, that was his main worry.
He wondered what time it was, but decided he did not want to know. Instead he turned over to face the wall, and willed sleep to come.
:
He rang the doorbell shortly after eight. If this was too early, well so be it. This could not wait. He had to do two things: confirm, and warn.
The woman who opened the door was obviously Ruth’s mother, she had the most startling blue eyes he had ever seen, and not incongruously so either.
“Can I help you?” she asked him.
“You are Ruth’s mother,” she said.
“And you are?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “Julian Lawson.”
“Ah,” she said. “Julian Lawson. Ruth’s hi-tech friend.”
“Well, Cal Tech, anyway.” Which, a fraction too late, struck him as an exquisitely lame thing to say.
And unrewarded, since the woman did not smile. “What can we do for you?” she said, a little more pointedly this time, really wanting to know his business.
“Could I see Ruth?” he asked.
“It is a little bit early,” she said.
“Julian,” said Ruth, arriving at the door. Her mother turned to look at her, and then seemed to make up her mind. Stepping aside, she let him in. “Well, since she’s up,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Julian. “I appreciate it.”
“He’s here to see you,” she said.
“Actually, I’m here to see both of you.”
“You are Julian Lawson,” said an older man with cropped hair, hardly longer than a whisper, who struck Julian as friendly and pleasantly gaunt. He offered his hand. “Ananda,” he said. “Wolf.”