She considered him. “Welcome to the world,” she suggested.
“Well I don’t like it,” he muttered. Then he added, more bitterly: “As if anyone knows. As if they know anything about it.”
She stared at him for a while. “I think I know what you mean. So, you suffered the slings and arrows of youthful geekdom.”
Fred nodded. Trying to remember: but in fact he was better at not remembering. “I guess so. But quantum mechanics gave me a way to—to do something. I could do the equations, I mean it’s a math, just like any other math, not that hard compared to some maths, but the results—or what the equations suggest about reality, because they work—it’s so counterintuitive. So bizarre compared to what we see in our sensory world, that, I don’t know. I found it interesting. And not everyone gets it. It’s not that hard as a math, but it is hard as a thing to understand. Like impossible. So I pursued it, and now, there’s more and more technology that is quantum mechanical. Including secure communications tech, which a lot of people want. So it’s a … it’s a way.”
“A way? To make a living?”
“A way.”
“A way?”
“Just a way. A way to be.”
“Like Daoism.”
“I don’t know. People do like to try to link quantum mechanics to something more tangible. Tangible or mystical.”
“You don’t?”
“I suppose I do. The thing about quantum mechanics is that when you try to make it make sense by analogy to something at our level of perception, it’s always a misrepresentation, so the real thing slips out of your grasp. You’re getting it wrong. So for a long time I preferred to keep it at the level of the math, and not try to explain it at all.”
“For a long time? And then something happened?”
“Well, yes.” Fred sat up on the couch, stirred by the thought. “People are using the math to design and build machines. More and more qubits are being stabilized in various ways. So something real is happening, something physical. So I started thinking about what the quantum realm was really doing, I mean in the physical world. I mean clearly it’s doing something. And the idea that it’s an entirely statistical probability state, that takes consciousness or measurement to make it collapse to an event—or that there are new universes branching out of every moment—none of that was working for me. There are several different interpretations of what the math is describing, because it’s so weird, but most of them just struck me as crazy.”
After he was silent for what might have been some time, thinking about this, she said sharply, “And then?”
Fred thought about it some more. “Then,” he said, “I started thinking more about the pilot wave interpretation. Have you heard of that one?”
She shook her head. “Tell me.”
“Well, people talk about the Copenhagen interpretation, which came mostly from Niels Bohr. His idea was that physical reality was a matter of probabilities, like the equations are, and that things at the subatomic level are undetermined until measured, at which point they become one thing or the other. Waves become particles, and particles add up to waves, but not in ways that make sense according to our senses, so in the end it’s too strange to understand.”
“That’s not much of an interpretation?”
“No. Einstein didn’t like it, Penrose didn’t like it. But the math definitely works, right down to the parts-per-trillion range. So it’s been hard to say how Bohr’s take on it is wrong. But right from the beginning, a physicist named de Broglie said there was another way of understanding it, which was that quantum particles were disturbing fields they were moving in, mostly by creating waves that moved ahead of the particles, like a pilot wave that you see in front of a boat. I’ve seen those from this window, looking at the boats on this bay. So, David Bohm talked about that as being disturbances in quantum fields. Then later they did some analog experiments that were like sending a droplet of oil skipping over a sheet of water, to show the kinds of effects that de Broglie suggested were happening at the quantum level.”
“Wait, what? Oil on water?”
“Yeah, you know how oil and water don’t mix, so when you shoot a droplet of oil across water, there’s a wave—”
“Show me,” she said.
“Well, I think it’s at a pretty small scale—”
“Show me!”
She was standing over him, hand out; when he took it, she pulled him to his feet. And then they had something to do.
They found the biggest pan in the apartment’s kitchen cabinets, a metal sheet pan about two feet long and a foot wide. “I don’t know if this will be big enough,” Fred said.
“It’s what we’ve got. Just make it work.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
One of the few things Fred had done in his youth was to serve as teaching assistant to his high school physics teacher. The teacher had been a nice guy, and had probably given Fred the job to try to get him out of his shell a little. So Fred had worked on wave-tank experiments for a semester of his senior year, and now, remembering those, he found that ceramic chopsticks could be used to create dams across water filling the pan very shallowly; he could place three of them to make the two slits of the two-slit experiment. When they got that arranged, they put this apparatus on the coffee table and started making waves and observing them. It was a little messy, but waves on water can be counted on to spread and rebound in their usual way, and they had time to adjust the amount of water and the intensity of the initiating splashes until these effects were pretty clear, even the secondary waves that got through the two slits and interacted with each other on the other side of the dam. Interference patterns appeared, just as predicted, and interesting as such.
The oil droplets were not so easy. There was some sesame oil in the kitchen cabinet above the sink, but no obvious way to send a droplet of it skittering across the surface of their water to make the pilot wave. They tried a lot of methods, and ended up laughing a lot. Throwing; flicking; spitting; squeezing out of a basting bulb; shooting out of a red plastic water pistol found in a drawer—they kept trying things, they didn’t want it to end. The room smelled of sesame oil. Sometimes the drop would ooze across the top of the water with enough momentum to send a little wave across the water ahead of it. Once that wave hit the two slits hard enough that the little waves on the other sides of the slits were high enough to be seen interfering with each other, and Fred said,
“Yes! That’s the two-slit experiment. Now see, if the oil droplet were then to follow that wave on a certain trajectory, it would only go through one slit, but its wave already went through both. And on the other side, it would get pushed around by the interference pattern of that wave, and where it went then would be stochastic, meaning probabilistic, but its location would always fit the equations, just like they really do in quantum behaviors. And you don’t need an observer making an observation to make that happen. It will happen without an observer. It’s not just a probability state.”
“So—pilot wave!” Qi said, looking pleased. “So you’re an advocate of that interpretation, and it helps you in your work?”
Fred sat back on the couch, shook his head. “No. I don’t know if it helps or not. The math is the same either way. The quantum fields can’t be entered into the equations, and David Bohm was always suggesting they were contiguous to the entire universe. And judging by analogy to gravitational waves, the pilot waves are likely to be really small.”
“Like how small?”
“Like, if two black holes hundreds of times more massive than the sun collide, they make a gravitational wave that by the time it gets to us squeezes the Earth about the width of one proton. So how big of a wave can a photon make in a quantum field the size of the universe?”
“Wow,” Qi said after pondering this for a while. “Pretty small, I’m guessing.”
“Right. So I end up working on things that derive from the usual math. What the math is describing in physical terms doesn’t help m
e that much.” He waved at their wave tank. “Actually I’m not sure seeing it this way has ever helped me. I mostly try to leave that part blank.”
She sat in the armchair looking at him, he could tell; he continued to look at their wave tank. She was amused, he guessed, but maybe exasperated too.
“And you’re very good at leaving things blank,” she said.
“Yes?” He was pretty sure she would think this was a bad thing. “I feel kind of blank, pretty often. Or,” he confessed, “maybe baffled, you might say.”
She was nodding. “I bet you find me baffling!”
“Yes!”
She laughed at him. “Do you know about Yiman Wang’s yellow yellowface?”
“No.”
“How about Edward Said’s Orientalism?”
“No.”
“Of course not. Well, you should read them. They talk about how Westerners, when they look at Asians, they see a stranger, a big other. Some kind of blank that isn’t at all like them, and then they fill that blank in with a story they make up. Exotic inscrutable dragon lady! That’s me all right!” She laughed again.
Fred nodded, stifling a smile despite her laughter. He kept his eyes on the wave tank. He was pretty sure she didn’t really think it was funny.
“Everyone has to guess about everyone else,” he ventured at last. That was definitely true for him.
She bunched her lips into a little knot. “Maybe so,” she conceded. She thought about that and then dripped a drop of oil into their water tank. “The chink and the geek! Riding the pilot wave! Finding the dao together! Solving crimes and saving the world! Binge view the whole series!”
“I don’t like shows like that,” Fred said primly.
She laughed at him yet again, a real laugh.
They sat in the room sweating. He in the armchair, she stretched out on the couch. Breathing and sweating. The refrigerator grumbled a little less than half the time, in a tone about an octave lower than the whooshing hum of the window-box air conditioner, which was on a little more than half the time. The two were out of synch with each other. Fred was irritated by these noises more often than he would have liked. When either kicked on, he noticed both for a while. When the AC was on, it was a little too cold; when it went off, it quickly became too hot.
Qi shifted around the couch from one splayed posture to the next, groaning as she tried to get comfortable. She napped with her mouth open, looking like a little girl. She cooked spicy food. She marveled he could live on only rice, told him he would get sick, or terminally bored. That his capacity to withstand boredom was itself boring. She poked around in the various paperbacks on their shelf, trying one after another before tossing them aside. She stared at the ceiling. They were visited by a clan of small geckos that could hang upside down, and did. Fred wondered if word had gotten to his folks that he was alive. He wondered if his employers were trying to find him and help him. He wondered if Shor’s algorithm, which took advantage of quantum superposition to factor large numbers, could be used to define the temporal length of a moment of being. It had to be longer—it felt much longer—than the minimum temporal interval, the Planck interval, which was the time it took a photon moving at the speed of light to move across the Pauli exclusion zone within which two particles could not coexist: that minimal interval of time was 10-44 of a second. A moment of being was more like a second, he felt, maybe three seconds. Meaning each moment of being was, when compared to the minimal interval of time, a near eternity. Much longer in proportion to the minimal interval than the lifetime of the universe was relative to a second. Although it could be argued that the universe’s lifetime had so far been fairly brief. He wondered what the largest prime number he could recite aloud might be.
Qi went to the bathroom about once an hour. When she came out she was always a little flushed and restless.
“What are you reading?” she would demand of Fred, if he was reading.
“This one is called Six Scenes from a Floating Life, by a Shen Fu.”
She groaned. “A classic.”
“It seems interesting.”
“What does it say to you right now? What sentence were you reading?”
“‘The Sage taught us, Do not use nets with too fine a mesh.’”
“Please, no Confucius! Something else.”
Fred flipped the page. “‘Now the clouds are flying past me; who will play the jade flutes over May plums by city and stream?’”
She sighed. “We need a different book.” She picked up a tattered oversized paperback called Eight Dime Novels. “I hope this book cost eighty cents.” She read from a page:
“‘It was the tightest fix in which he had ever been caught, and his mind, fertile as it was in expedients at such crises, could see no way of meeting the danger.’ Oh dear how will they escape!”
“Read on,” Fred suggested.
“‘When all the wood was thrown in that the stove could contain, and portions of the iron sheeting could be seen becoming red-hot, he ceased to heap in wood. They were ready to run at any moment; the gold was always secured about their persons. “When it blows up, run!” was the admonition of the boy.’ Wait—first it blows up and then they run? How are they going to avoid getting killed when it blows up?”
“Read on,” Fred said again.
And after that they spent part of every day reading aloud to each other. They read all eight of the dime novels, each taking up about twenty pages of the skinny oversized Dover paperback. Lots of laughs there, although the frequent blatant racism also made Qi shout “See? See?” But she shouted just as much, and also laughed a lot, at a Chinese book of quotations from Chairman Mao, which she translated extempore for Fred’s benefit. For a day or two they alternated passages, her from Mao, him from the Dover, and then from a fat little bird guide, which he picked up after seeing a brilliant red bird out the kitchen window.
“‘People of the world, be courageous, dare to fight, defy all difficulties, and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed.’”
“That’s his pilot wave interpretation,” Fred observed.
“Aha! So the pilot wave theory is Leninist?”
“I don’t know, what does that mean?”
“You don’t know—come on. Leninism is what I was doing in that basement in Shekou.”
“I see,” Fred said, though he didn’t. He read from the bird guide: “‘Rufous-sided towhee. Note the rufous sides,’ thank you for that! ‘Smaller and more slender than robin; rummages noisily among dead leaves. Voice: note, chwee or shrenk. Song, a buzzy chweeee; sometimes chup chup chup zeeeeee.’” He enjoyed making the sounds.
Qi then read, “‘All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful. Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again, and so on till victory; this is the logic of the people.’”
“From a long-term point of view,” Fred repeated. “But how long?”
“Don’t make fun,” Qi commanded. “I like Mao. Listen to this: ‘Not to have a correct political view is like having no soul.’ You hear that?”
“I do,” Fred said. “But what’s correct?”
“Maybe you can learn that here, it’s the very next quote. ‘Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice: the struggle to make things, the class struggle, and scientific experiment.’”
“Interesting,” Fred said.
Qi nodded and read on: “‘The history of humanity is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.’ That’s Marx, as I hope you know, but of course you don’t.”
“Groucho or Harpo?”
“Ha ha. Listen to Mao here, this is important: ‘This proces
s is never ending. In any society in which classes exist, class struggle will never end. In a classless society, the struggle between new and old and between truth and falsehood will never end. In the fields of the struggle for production and scientific experiment, humanity makes constant progress and nature undergoes constant change, they never remain at the same level. Therefore people have to go on discovering, inventing, creating and advancing. Ideas of stagnation, pessimism, and complacency are all wrong. They are wrong because they agree neither with the historical facts of social development, nor with the facts of nature so far known to us, as revealed in the history of celestial bodies, the earth, life, and other natural phenomena,’ no doubt he is referring to your quantum world there.”
“No doubt,” Fred said. “That’s actually a pretty good summary of the situation.”
“Yes it is.”
“‘Skylark,’” he interjected. “‘Slightly larger than a sparrow, brown, strongly streaked; underparts buff white. Voice; note, a clear, liquid chirr-up. Song, in hovering flight, a high-pitched, tireless torrent of runs and trills, very long sustained.’”
She nodded, distracted by Mao, who had clearly caught her attention. “‘Youth, the world is yours as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, so full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.’”
“So full of vigor and vitality,” Fred said, and Qi smiled; they were both sprawled listlessly over the furniture. “I like that ‘eight or nine in the morning.’ He has a specific angle in mind.”
“A specific moment.”
“An angle.”
“But morning light. At sunset it’s not the same.”
“True. Anyway, Mao is more interesting than I would have thought.”
“I know, me too.”
“I thought you knew all about him.”
“Everybody gets told the story at school, but no one reads him. Maybe his poetry. Mostly he’s just a face, or an idea. And I’m only reading you the good stuff. The amount of crap is unbelievable.”
Red Moon Page 17