Schrodinger's Gat (3 page)

She grimaces.
Adorable. “No, not exactly. I was actually trying to get you to kill yourself.”

I
’m suddenly stone cold sober. “What?” I ask.

“
I mean, that’s not why I went there,” she says hurriedly. “I was trying to stop this.” She’s waving her hand behind her, vaguely indicating Pier 39.

“
What does me jumping in front of the train have to do with some nutjob shooting people on the pier?”

She shrugs.
“Maybe the shooter was on the train. Maybe jumping in front of it would have stopped him.”

“
He’d just come back another day.”

“
Not necessarily. Maybe he gets caught with a shotgun on the train. Maybe he loses his nerve.”

Yeah, maybe he does, I think. Maybe it was hard enough to get up the nerve the first time. But I say,
“Maybe he goes to Jack London Square next time.”

“
Could be,” she says. “I just don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t even on the train. You’re familiar with the butterfly effect?”

“
Small random events have huge, unexpected consequences. A butterfly flaps his wings in Moscow and there’s a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“
More or less. The point is that in a chaotic system, the end results of an alteration to the system can be difficult to predict. Maybe there’s no easily identifiable link between the train and the shooter. But somehow jumping in front of the train stops him, through some unforeseeable chain of events.”

“
OK,” I say. “So you make the coin toss come up tails so that I’ll jump in front of the train, but then you have second thoughts and try to stop me. But that means you’ve failed to stop the shooter at the BART station, so you have to come here. Right?” She’s crazy, I think, but it’s a sort of crazy that she’s obviously put a lot of effort into.

“
Right.”

“
I still don’t understand why you didn’t just call the police and warn them. Or just call in an anonymous bomb threat and clear out the pier. That would have stopped him, wouldn’t it?”

She shakes her head tiredly.
“No. I mean, yes, it would have, if it had worked. But it wouldn’t have worked. It’s a deterministic system. Ananke has accounted for all the variables. Except for true randomness. She can’t deal with true randomness.” OK, now she’s not even making sense anymore.

“
Who’s Ananke? Your boss?”

She laughs and finishes her drink.
“Yeah, something like that. Look, I don’t think I have time to explain the rest. I’ve got to get home.”

“
Boyfriend?”

She doesn
’t answer, but the way she purses her lips, I get the feeling there’s no boyfriend.

“
Where’s home?”

“
Near Palo Alto. But my car’s still at the San Leandro BART station.”

I laugh.
“Mine too. I guess neither of us was planning on coming to Pier 39. You want to share a cab?”

She agrees. We pay the bill (OK, she pays it but I do offer) and get a cab.

“So who’s Ananke?” I ask, once she’s instructed the driver to take us back to the BART station. This guy’s a sleepy Eastern European type who’s in no hurry. Good.

“
She’s an ancient Greek goddess, the personification of necessity or compulsion. In a sense, she’s the boss of all of us.”

“
You talked about her like she’s a real person.”

“
Yeah, that’s how personification works. Use another word if you like. Call it God or the Universe. Or Destiny or Karma. I prefer to use Ananke, because it has fewer built-in connotations. Also, I like to think of her as a she, because she’s a real crafty bitch sometimes. Ananke basically runs the show.”

“
The show,” I repeat dimly.

“
The universe. The space-time continuum. Pretty much everything.”

“
So Ananke is God.”

She grimaces at the word.
“Not in the sense you’re thinking. She has no grand plan, she doesn’t create, and she doesn’t care about ethics or morality. She just makes things happen. She’s necessity, compulsion, destiny. The laws of nature. Everything that must happen happens because of Ananke.”

“
This sounds a little like Deism. God sets the universe in motion, and then it just runs based on its own internal logic, like a watch.” My liberal arts education at work, ladies and gentlemen.

She nods.
“Sort of,” she says. “But the Deists believed in a distant, uninvolved God. Ananke isn’t distant at all. In fact, she’ll get right in your face if she has to, to make sure that she gets her way. Like I said, she’s a bitch. But she has a weakness, a blind spot.”

“
True randomness,” I say, remembering her words.

“
Exactly.”

“
Like a coin toss.”

She sighs and looks out the window. We
’re getting back on the bridge. “See, this is where it gets really complicated. Do you know anything about quantum physics?”

“
Does Schrödinger’s Cat count?”

“
Yes,” she says. “Actually, Schrödinger’s Cat is a good starting place. You know the scenario?”

“
There’s a cat in a box. You don’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open it. So as far as you know, it’s both. Or neither.”

“
Sort of,” she says. “But it’s not ‘as far as you know.’ The cat really is objectively both alive and dead at the same time. It’s called quantum indeterminacy.”

“
OK, maybe I need a refresher on Schrödinger’s Cat.” (Look, I’m pretty sure I did understand this stuff at one point, but I’m a high school English teacher and aspiring crime writer. I don’t have a lot of time to keep my knowledge of quantum physics fresh. If you’re some kind of physics buff, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs. Come to think of it, if you’re one of those people who hears “quantum indeterminacy” and your brain starts to hurt, you may want to skip this part too. It’s not absolutely vital that you understand this stuff.)

SKIP THIS PART

I’m doing my best to reconstruct Tali’s explanation, with the help of Wikipedia. I’ve had some time to think about this since the conversation occurred, and I think I have a pretty good handle on it, but again, I’m no expert, so don’t come bitching to me if I get this slightly wrong and you end up with a dead cat in a box.

Earlier I mentioned Deism. Thomas Jefferson and some of the other Founders were Deists; it was big in the Eighteenth century. Deism is the belief that God created the universe with the laws of physics embedded into it and then basically checked out. Nobody really knows what the Deist God does with His time; maybe he
plays Parcheesi with Vishnu. What He
doesn’t
do is involve himself in the day-to-day operations of the universe. That’s because the universe He created runs of its own accord, like clockwork. The Deist God is basically a watchmaker. Maybe eventually the watch runs down and the universe ends. Who knows?

Deism isn
’t very popular these days, and I’ve got a couple of semi-educated guesses why. First, why bother to believe in God at all if He isn’t going to
do
anything? The Deist God is what a scientist might call “an unnecessary hypothesis.” Why shove God in there at the beginning of the universe when you could just as easily say “And then the universe started, nobody knows how or why”? Throwing God in there doesn’t really do anything but complicate matters unnecessarily.

But I think the main reason Deism fell out of favor is that it doesn
’t offer a very compelling model of the universe. When Isaac Newton was tossing out universal laws governing all of reality left and right, it really must have seemed like people were finally getting a handle on how all the gears of the watch worked. It was like he had described the winding mechanism and how different sized gears caused the hands to turn at different speeds, and how potential energy was stored in the spring, and all that was necessary was to figure out how all these parts worked together. Except he couldn’t. And neither could anybody else, for the next 200 years. The watch worked just fine, and Newton and others had done a bang-up job describing the workings of the watch’s various parts, but
no one could figure out how the parts worked together to actually make the watch function
. Eventually the whole idea of the universe as a ticking watch fell by the wayside, and with it the idea of the uninvolved Watchmaker.

And it wasn
’t just that they couldn’t figure out how the parts worked together; it was starting to seem like the different parts of the watch actually followed completely different sets of rules. One set of rules is what is known as “classical physics.” This is basically the physics that you learn in high school. F =
ma
and all that. If you’re designing cars for General Motors, classical physics is probably the only kind of physics you’ll ever need.

Then Einstein came along and introduced the theory of special relativity, which overturned the concept of motion from Newton
’s day by positing that all motion is relative. Einstein showed that space and time were not two separate things but rather two aspects of a single thing called spacetime. The rate at which time passed was shown to be dependent on velocity: time slowed down as one’s velocity increased.

Finally, folks like Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck and Neils Bohr came up with the idea of quantum mechanics, which says that at a subatomic level the universe operates on a completely different set of rules from classical physics. The rules are so different down there, in fact, that they are almost inconceivable. You may be familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which I learned in high school as
“It’s impossible to know both the speed and location of a particle at the same time, because by observing the particle you change at least one of those properties.” That’s weird enough, but it’s nowhere near as weird as what quantum mechanics actually says, which is that
until the location of the particle is observed, it has no definite location
. The particle (say an electron whizzing around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom) can only be thought of as having a
range of probable locations
. And I don’t just mean that you don’t know where the electron is, like it’s the Ace of Spades in a deck of cards. I mean that the electron
has no location until you observe it
. It simply isn’t anywhere. Or it’s everywhere within the range of probable locations at the same time. Or both, depending on how you think about it.

Even Einstein, who was pretty open-minded about such things (and no slouch at physics), balked at some of the implications of quantum mechanics.
Einstein seems to have been wrong, though. Quantum theory flawlessly describes the operations of the universe at a subatomic level. The problem is that although quantum theory is theoretically universal, when you try to apply the rules of quantum theory at scales significantly above the subatomic, seemingly impossible things start to happen. The most famous example is Schrödinger’s Cat. In Erwin Schrödinger’s legendary thought experiment, a cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with a Geiger counter and a small amount of radioactive substance. Over the course of an hour, there is a fifty percent chance of an atom decaying, causing the Geiger counter to click. If the Geiger counter clicks, a mechanism connected to it releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid, killing the cat. If an atom decays, the cat dies. If it doesn’t, the cat lives. There is a fifty/fifty chance of either happening in an hour. So is the cat alive or dead at the end of the hour? Both, says quantum theory. At least until you look in the box. As soon as you observe the cat’s state, the probability function collapses into one possibility or the other. But before you observe it, it’s both alive and dead the same time. That’s quantum indeterminacy. As Schrödinger states, “[A]n indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can be then resolved by direct observation.” In other words, the experiment amplifies the scope of the quantum weirdness so that we can experience it on a macro level.

The funny thing is that Schrödinger
’s cat has become sort of the poster boy for the weirdness of quantum theory, but that isn’t how Schrödinger intended it at all. He was trying to point out that quantum theory, if taken literally, is absurd. He was trying to show that quantum theory couldn’t possibly be right (or at least it couldn’t be the whole story), because the idea of having a cat that’s both dead and alive is ridiculous. But quantum theory has proven so reliable that physicists have basically just accepted that a cat can be both dead and alive simultaneously. I get the impression from Tali that most physicists these days try not to think about it too much.

OK, START READING AGAIN HERE

“So what does any of that have to do with coin tosses?” I ask. “Are you saying that when the coin is in the air, it’s both heads and tails until it lands and you observe it as one or the other? Just like Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until you open the box?”