Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  The uncertainty that is the defining feature of the quantum realm—the role of chance in the behavior of tiny particles of matter—made sense to scientists in the seventies. Randomness seemed compatible with events in the larger world. With far-fetched experiments like the metaphase typewriter, the members of the FFG hoped to push the idea of entanglement even further, to elucidate human consciousness. Instead, entrepreneurs have used entanglement to devise encryption systems for financial and other data. The fact that entanglement today is working out for banking and information technology rather than for parapsychology must disappoint those among the group’s members who are still living.

  A few days after our conversation in the car, Jack asked me to tell him about the scientists who had tried to invent a machine to talk to ghosts. I explained that an American physicist named Nick Herbert, along with a group of friends, hoped to be able to reach the spirits of the dead, in particular Harry Houdini. I told him that people had been designing instruments for this purpose throughout human history, but that this had been the only attempt I knew of by real scientists. First, Herbert had obtained a sample of thallium. He chose that element because it was a readily available radioactive material—and maybe also because it sits right between mercury and lead on the periodic table, elements associated with alchemy. Herbert and his friends were fascinated by the ideas of Evan Harris Walker, a physicist and parapsychologist, who believed that the brain is actually a quantum mechanical system. Walker thought that leftover human consciousness—what you might colloquially call a “soul”—persists after a person dies, and sometimes inhabits a living body. He speculated that the soul could dictate human behavior quantum mechanically, just as one entangled particle can influence another from a distance. The Fundamental Fysiks Group considered it unethical to try their consciousness experiments on human subjects, and so they invented a machine, through which those dead souls might be tempted to speak to the living.

  Jack wasn’t interested in any of this history, of course. He just wanted to know how the machine was supposed to work. I explained, without much hope of him understanding, that thallium is a radioactive element, which means that it can decay. When that happens, it releases tiny, energetic particles. We call radioactivity a typical quantum event because it’s uncertain—you can’t predict exactly when this energy will be released, or in what form. You can only give an average interval between the decay of individual thallium atoms. Herbert hooked his thallium sample up to a Geiger counter, and the Geiger counter to a teletype machine. (How my father would have loved tinkering with the metaphase typewriter, if he’d been in Berkeley in the seventies.) If the thallium atoms decayed at the average rate for that element, as measured by the Geiger counter, the teletype machine printed one of the most common letters in English—E or S. When the rate departed from that average, a statistically rarer letter, like J or U, was printed. I explained to Jack that the FFG invented this complicated machine mostly for fun, and that the word “metaphase” is actually meaningless in physics. The idea was that the scientists might induce the dead to enter the machine and spell out messages to the living: they proposed to contact a recently deceased colleague, who’d known the inner workings of the experiment. It was never clear to me why, if the dead could enter human minds and influence behavior, they wouldn’t simply encourage a pair of hands to type out a message on an ordinary typewriter—but I also have to admit that the Fundamental Fysicists were probably enjoying themselves a lot more than we do in our symposia and colloquia today.

  Jack and I looked at an FFG member’s website, and I showed him a sentence the metaphase typewriter had created:

  WIRN OF ACERIONINE SE IND BE B WHAD ATHE OROVESSOUNDRO

  He laughed, because there’s nothing so amusing to children as the failures of adults, and even a second grader could see that the “words” were nonsense.

  “The machine printed a common letter when the thallium released particles at a normal rate, and an uncommon one when the rate was more unusual. It worked the way it was supposed to,” I told him. “It’s just that there aren’t any ghosts floating around out there, trying to talk to scientists.” I said this on purpose, to clear up any confusion that might have been brought on by Charlie’s death, and Jack really seemed to understand.

  He nodded, and said, “Right.”

  * * *

  —

  I talked to Andrea, and as I’d guessed the last time I’d seen her, she and Günter had no plans to leave the apartment. I was afraid Terrence would be even less inclined to seek me out once I told him, but in fact the opposite was true. He’d texted right back that it wasn’t a problem—he was looking around and would certainly find something soon. We made plans to get the kids together after school, and then we began texting about them, first in brief, and soon at greater length. He was one of those people who put each thought in a different bubble, and sometimes there were six or seven of them chiming into my phone at the same time. I always wrote back, always with the same feeling of eagerness, a feeling that I had no desire to examine, or to discuss with my sister.

  I was scrambling a little that semester, between the Relativity seminar and a Physics II survey I was teaching for undergraduates. I had my postdocs and my graduate students to advise, including two who were close to completing their theses, and I’d been invited to speak at a conference outside Vienna just after Christmas. The physics institute at Pöllau wanted me to talk about my second book, Into the Singularity, which was being reissued, an invitation the German publisher encouraged me to accept. It occurred to me that going to the conference in January would preclude another big trip in February—to India, where Neel was getting married.

  I told Vincenzo Goia, my colleague down the hall, that I was going to Pöllau, and that I could stop in at CERN on the way home, which would be useful for our current project: a paper about exploring electroweak symmetries in the Large Hadron Collider. It shouldn’t have been an especially difficult paper to write, but Vincenzo and I often disagree about language. My colleague tends to sprinkle his written work not only with Italian, but with French and German words as well, possibly to impress the postdocs with the (admittedly impressive) number of European languages he speaks fluently. Vincenzo thinks of himself as an especially stylish writer of physics papers; if there is anything that writing the trade books has taught me, it’s that the words we choose have real consequences for the version of reality that we’re describing, and that it’s almost always best to go with the simplest possible option. According to Vincenzo, this preference is symptomatic of a certain American obstinacy on my part.

  I shouldn’t have been thinking of anything but the paper and my academic responsibilities, but the reissue of Into the Singularity activated a part of my brain that had been dormant for a while. I’d made a kind of promise to myself when I had Jack that I would put aside writing for a lay audience, at least until he was in high school. I would be on sabbatical in the spring, though, and it didn’t seem worth rearranging our life in order to travel somewhere for just a couple of months. I thought I could use those months instead to start work on a new book: an astrophysical history of precious metals. I would be betting on the idea that LIGO would record not only the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, but from pairs of neutron stars, exploding in what is called a kilonova. The most massive elements in the universe are created in kilonova explosions; without them, nothing heavier than iron would exist on our planet.

  I thought I would call the book Kilonova: A Cosmic History. I hoped the subject would have an element of human interest, in the sense that the metals created in a kilonova explosion—gold, silver, platinum, and uranium—are the most precious materials on Earth. (The gold in any wedding band, for example, came from a long-ago stellar explosion, millions of light years from Earth.) The fact that their cosmic infrequency is what makes them valuable, and even beautiful, I thought added a philosophical element to the
science. I thought I could point out an irony as well: that these explosions create not only human wealth, but also the most powerful weapons we use to fight for it.

  This was in October, and like everyone, I’d heard the rumors about what was going on at LIGO. The first clue was in Neel’s email—I have something else to discuss with you, he had said—and when I saw the tweet from Bob Wertheim at the University of Colorado, I knew. Everyone was furious at Wertheim because the scientists on the project were taking such dramatic measures to keep the detection quiet until they could be sure. LIGO had had several false alarms in the past, but all of the information that was leaking out of the collaboration suggested that this was the real thing.

  If the rumors were true, LIGO’s first detection of a gravitational wave had happened even before the billion-dollar experiment had officially started, during one of the final test runs. Ten milliseconds apart, the two interferometers had recorded a major gravitational wave signal. All the work the scientists were doing was to confirm the signal as the first record of a gravitational wave, as well as the first direct evidence that black holes actually collide in space. A confirmed signal would surpass even the Higgs discovery, and the three architects of the project would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize.

  I couldn’t pretend that a book about kilonova explosions wasn’t motivated at least in part by my excitement about LIGO; just like Arty’s student Jason, I wanted in on the action. I knew I would have to rely on Neel for some of the inside information—although, when I’d first conceived of the idea, I’d never imagined that we would do more than exchange a few emails about it. I’d assumed that Neel would remain at Caltech, working on an exciting project that hadn’t yet come to fruition. Instead, Neel would be arriving in the department of the university where I occupied a chair just as the LIGO team had its moment in the international spotlight. I was envious in a way I knew Neel hadn’t been when I’d been awarded the Blumhagen professorship—he had always preferred pure research to teaching—or when my second book made the New York Times best-seller list. Like most of my colleagues, Neel considers writing about physics for non-physicists too boring to contemplate.

  If we hadn’t been communicating about his engagement, I would have called Neel as soon as I heard the first rumors. The science was exciting enough that I wouldn’t have let professional rivalry get in the way under any other circumstances. It even occurred to me that Neel might be offended that he hadn’t heard from me. The fact that it wasn’t official, and that everyone at LIGO was trying their best not to spread information before they actually published their results, gave me an alibi, but it wasn’t the reason for my silence. He would arrive in Cambridge just before the holidays, with Roxy, and I would let him tell me then.

  24.

  Jack and I went trick-or-treating with my friend Vicky, whose son Dylan is on Jack’s soccer team. Halloween is a big deal in our neighborhood, and by the time we got home, Jack had substantial loot. I made him a grilled cheese to soak up some of the sugar, and then we sat on the blue rug in the living room while he sorted it into piles by color.

  “Dylan said he’s going to wear his costume every day now.”

  “He was the Flash, right?”

  Jack nodded. “In case there are bad guys.”

  “I don’t think there will be bad guys.”

  “But bad guys are real.”

  “Well, yeah—I mean, there are bad people out there. They don’t turn into giant lizards, or climb up the sides of buildings like they do in your comic books.”

  Jack had stopped listening. “Who started Halloween?”

  “I think it was the Irish.”

  “Why?”

  I hesitated for a moment, thinking how to put it. “They believed in—spirits back then, and so people chose a night to go out in costumes and scare them away.”

  “You mean, ghosts?”

  “Right.”

  Jack was examining a package of gummy worms. He looked up in surprise. “Grown-ups did?”

  “I think so.”

  “But not anymore.”

  “That’s right,” I said. I thought this was mostly true, at least among the grown-ups I knew.

  “Then why—”

  “Have you heard of wishful thinking?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “People want to believe in ghosts because they miss people after they die. They’re something we imagine to make us feel better.”

  Jack had taken off his hood, but he was still wearing the black ninja costume. He traced the curved plastic blade of the sword on the rug next to him. “What’s your favorite candy?”

  “Peanut butter cups.”

  “Not Milky Way?”

  “I like the name of that one, but you know peanut butter’s my favorite.”

  Jack examined his orange pile. I could see him counting. Then he carefully pushed a peanut butter cup across the rug.

  “Hey, thanks.”

  He nodded and chose one for himself. There was a pause, in which I thought I was doing a good job hiding what were suddenly strong feelings. Jack peeled off the wrapper, a little at a time.

  “Are you going to be sad forever?” he said.

  * * *

  —

  It was several weeks before we saw Terrence and Simmi again. At MIT the campus had the frantic energy typical of November, as if everyone, students and faculty, were competing to see who was the busiest, who had the most to get done before the holidays. It wasn’t yet truly cold, but wind coming off the river made you glad for the warmth of the labs and lecture halls, especially as the afternoons bled earlier and earlier into night.

  On one of those short fall afternoons I was sitting in my office when I got another message.

  Are you writing a book?

  It felt eerie, but it was three o’clock on a Friday, and so it was reasonable to guess that I’d be at work. I tried not to overthink my response. The point was to keep a channel of communication open:

  I’m busy these days with my students, and with a paper I’m co-authoring, but I do have an idea for another book. Not sure if you read the earlier ones? Are you interested in physics?

  Along with the article on scientists to watch, these messages seemed to confirm that their author was someone interested in me specifically, perhaps someone who’d read my books. If that were true, it only reinforced my instinct not to upset Terrence further by telling him about the messages—at least not yet. Under these circumstances, I would be much better at convincing the thief to return the device than Terrence would, or indeed even than the police. What police department was going to spend time on mysterious (but ultimately nonthreatening) messages sent from a phone stolen in another state?

  I imagined handing Charlie’s phone to Terrence. I thought I could see the look of gratitude and relief on his face. I imagined myself telling him that I hadn’t looked at any of its contents—although it did occur to me that I now knew the passcode. If I somehow were to recover it, would I have the discipline not to invade Charlie’s privacy? What were the rules regarding the privacy of the dead?

  The phone was silent for about twenty minutes. When it pinged again, I reached for it eagerly—but this time it was Chendong, asking if she could stop by to talk about figure 2 in the electroweak symmetries paper. I agreed, trying to suppress my disappointment. It struck me that I was anticipating messages from “Charlie” the way I did when I met a new person-of-interest: my ordinary life buzzed with possibility every time I looked at my phone. I put it away and looked purposely out my window, but already on that dark afternoon it had the quality of a blank screen, reflecting my blurred image back at me.

  25.

  Chendong and I got embroiled in the paper until just before five, when it was time for me to leave to get Jack from aftercare. He was in a buoyant mood because Terrence and Simmi were coming over.
I’d invited them for dinner, but Terrence had insisted on bringing it; he’d said that he missed cooking at his in-laws’, and wanted to make a lamb stew. They arrived at six, Simmi in a new silver parka, preparation for her first Boston winter. Terrence’s only concessions to the fall weather were a cap with the now-familiar cursive Z on it, and a lightweight down vest he was wearing over his T-shirt. He was carrying bags from Whole Foods.

  I have an aversion to fancy supermarkets, not for any of the valid reasons people dislike them—the expense, the hypocrisy of consumerism dressed up as environmentalism, the pretense that food is art—but because they make me feel inadequate as a mother. I was never going to make homemade lamb stew for Jack. Charlie had been a good cook, of a different kind than her husband. She didn’t like recipes, but could look in an empty refrigerator and whip up something elegant—frittata, or salade niçoise.

  Terrence had bought two full bags of ingredients, perhaps because he didn’t trust me to have anything on hand. He went straight to the kitchen, while the children went to Jack’s room, and so I was able to sit in the living room and finish an email to Chendong. Then I started filling out paperwork related to the conference in Pöllau. Soon wonderful smells began coming from the kitchen.