Schrodinger's Gat (5 page)

I drive home and unpack a few boxes, thinking that it will make
the apartment feel more like home. It doesn’t. It makes it feel more like a failed imitation of home. I didn’t even particularly like the house that Deb and I lived in, but at least it felt like home. This place feels like a box with a bunch of my shit in it.

I take a break and have a drink. I find myself staring at an unlabeled box, trying to remember what’s in inside. Not a dead cat, I hope.

I remember reading a book about quantum physics a few years back and thinking how much more interesting it was than the physics I learned in high school. In high school you learn almost entirely “classical physics,” which is all about exciting stuff like how fast a rock will fall or what will happen if it hits another rock. It’s more “useful” than quantum physics, I suppose (although why the average person needs to know how fast a rock will fall is beyond me), but quantum physics is so much more fascinating, because it relates to philosophical issues like free will and the underlying nature of reality. Tali got into a little of this yesterday; I figure I’ll spend a few hours doing research online so that I’ll sound reasonably intelligent when we continue our discussion tomorrow night. I start by reading a little about the history of classical physics and how it differs from quantum physics.

Probably the most important thing to know about c
lassical physics is that it’s completely deterministic: every event has to have a cause. Strictly speaking, that means there’s no such thing as free will. You may
feel
like you’re making free choices, but in a deterministic world, every choice you make is necessarily determined by something that has gone before. So it may feel like I chose to go to my mother’s house and be subjected to her canonization of my brother and father, but in fact my actions were predetermined from the beginning of time. I couldn’t decide to refuse to go to my mother’s house any more than a rock could refuse to fall at nine point eight meters per second squared. Looking at life from this perspective, it seems pretty pointless.

Of course it isn’t the job of physicists to find meaning in human existence, but still, it’s a little rough to have to come out and say, “We’ve got this theory that explains everything, and oh, by the way, it means that life is pointless.”
Classical physics got around this problem by essentially ignoring it, taking its cue from Rene Descartes, who divided nature into a mental part and a physical part. The mental part contains our thoughts, ideas and sensations, whereas the physical part is defined as those aspects of nature that can be described by assigning mathematical properties to space-time points. This is the classic Cartesian notion of
dualism
.

Isaac Newton built on Descartes
’ notion and the observations of Galileo, Kepler, and Brahe to create the foundation of classical physics. Later thinkers like LaPlace refined Newton’s ideas, but the framework built on his ideas is still referred to as “Newtonian.” According to the Newtonian framework, the entire physical universe, from the largest objects to the smallest ones, is bound by the principle of physical determinism, which is the notion that a complete description of the values of all physically described variables at any one time fully determines the values of the physically described variables at any later time. In other words, if you knew the location and trajectory of every particle in the universe, you could (theoretically) predict the entire future of the universe and reconstruct the entire past.

But Descartes and Newton were careful to say that these principles applied only to the
physical
part of the universe; not the mental part. Since the workings of the human mind were far beyond the understanding of science at the time of Newton (and still are, for the most part), this was a sensible way to divide things up. As a bonus, leaving mental reality out of classical physics allowed them to preserve the notion of free will: because minds are not part of the physical universe, they don’t necessarily have to follow the laws of physics. I get the impression from my research that physicists have historically been ambivalent about this limitation of their realm: on one hand, they were relieved not to have to deal with nebulous ideas like human freedom, but on the other hand, they resented the fact that there were areas of reality that science couldn’t penetrate. They reacted by marginalizing the mental (and spiritual) parts of reality as much as possible. Religion and spiritualism were derided; there was little tolerance for the idea that there were avenues to truth outside of empirical observation. The Wikipedia entry on Newton notes that the father of classical physics didn’t seem to have a problem with the existence of an unobservable reality: Newton was a mystic who wrote more on biblical hermeneutics and the occult than he did on science or mathematics.

Anyway, the point is that although classical physics seems at first glance to be hostile to the notion of free will, it has a built-in escape hatch: classical physics has little to say about minds, so minds aren
’t constrained by the ironclad process of cause and effect. Still, as the sciences of neurology and psychology advanced, it became clear that a lot of human behavior could be explained in terms of cause and effect: as a matter of brain chemistry or, more broadly, biological determinism or conditioning. The physical sciences were gradually encroaching on the territory of the mind, and although there was little danger of the idea of free will disappearing completely, more and more constraints were being put on it. Darwin rocked traditional morality and ethics with the idea that human beings could best be understood not as creatures created in the image of God but as animals who had – purely by chance – developed traits that allowed them to survive. The idea that all of human behavior was completely explicable in physical terms gave rise to the school of thought known as behaviorism, of which B.F. Skinner was the major proponent.

So it was probably a bit of a relief to religious folks and others concerned about free will when Heisenberg and friends came along and said,
“Hey, you know how we were trying to figure out deterministic principles to explain the entire physical world? Yeah, that’s not going to work.” For one thing, it turns out that at a subatomic level, events can happen without a cause. This is kind of a freaky notion, if you think about it: the whole universe is made up of subatomic particles, and these subatomic particles can apparently do things without any reason. And if the universe is made up of particles that can do things for no reason, what’s to keep the whole universe from suddenly disappearing or, say, turning into a giant purple chicken? An article I find online provides this answer: 

Fortunately there are still a lot of limitations on these particles. They can act randomly within certain strict parameters, but they can’t just do whatever they want. A particle can’t just disappear out of existence, for example, because that would violate the principle of the conservation of matter and energy. What a particle can do, though, is appear first in one spot and then in another, for no apparent reason – and without passing through the space between these two locations. This is known as a “quantum jump” or “quantum leap.” The scale on which a particle can do this is so incredibly small, of course, that you would have no way of knowing that it’s happening without an extremely powerful microscope.

Even weirder is that, as I mentioned earlier, until you observe the particle at one location or another, it actually exists in
multiple places at once
. It has no “definite location”; it can only be said to have a certain probability of being found at one of several locations. Another article explains it by describing what is called a “double slit experiment.” (If you’re willing to trust me that objects can have no definite location, feel free to skip this part.) 

In the experiment, a beam of light illuminates a plate pierced by two parallel slits. Initially, one of the slits is covered, so light can only pass through the top slit. The light passing through the slit is observed on a screen behind the plate.

If light consisted strictly of particles, and these particles were fired in a straight line through a slit and allowed to strike a screen on the other side, we would expect to see a pattern corresponding to the size and shape of the slit. However, when this
“single-slit experiment” is actually performed, the pattern on the screen is a diffraction pattern in which the light is spread out. Despite this fuzzy behavior, however, the light is always found to be absorbed by the screen as though it were composed of discrete particles or photons. So the light appears to act like a wave, spread over an area, and like a particle occupying a specific point in space.

Now the cover is removed, so light can penetrate both slits. If light consisted strictly of particles, the expected pattern on the screen would simply be the sum of the two single-slit patterns. In actuality, however, the pattern changes to one with a series of light and dark bands. We can only explain this by looking at the light as if it were made up of waves: a wave is emitted from each slit, and when the two waves come into contact, they sometimes cancel each other out and sometimes amplify each other, producing what is known as an interference pattern.

Recall, though, that each photon hits the screen as a single, discrete particle, not as a spread-out wave. How is it possible for discrete particles to produce an interference pattern? One explanation is that part of the photon travels through each slit, and afterward the two parts come together as a single particle before hitting the screen. Why they should do this is unclear, but it would explain the disparate observations.

To determine whether this is the case, the experimenter decides to observe the photons as they travel through the plate. To her surprise, the experimenter finds that a photon always
travels through one slit or the other – never both. Not only that, but when the photons are observed, the interference pattern goes away. Simply observing the photons as discrete particles causes them to act like discrete particles. If the experimenter does not observe the photons as they travel through the plate, however, the light reverts to acting like waves.

The critical point here is that the behavior of light is
affected by the way in which the experimenter chooses to observe it
. The observer can decide whether or not to put detectors into the interfering path. That way, by deciding whether or not to determine the path through the two-slit experiment, she can decide which property can become reality. If she chooses not to put the detectors there, then the interference pattern will become reality; if she does put the detectors there, then the beam path will become reality.

The author makes it clear that this strangeness doesn’t arise simply from the detection equipment somehow interfering with the particles, causing them to behave differently. It’s not the detector that causes the light to act weirdly, it’s the observation. If you set out to demonstrate that light is made up of particles, you will find that it is made up of particles (and not waves); if you set out to demonstrate that light is made up of waves, you will find that it is made up of waves (and not particles). The fact is that logically, light can’t be both waves and particles, and it isn’t. It’s one or the other, and which one it turns out to be depends on which experiment you decide to perform. You, as the observer, determine the answer by deciding which question to ask.

While pondering this, I fall asleep on my air mattress.

I feel a little better the next morning. The school has finally stopped calling; maybe they’ve gotten the hint. I do some more brushing up on quantum jumps and Planck’s Constant and then force myself to write a few more pages of my novel. It’s mostly crap, but I tell myself I’ll fix it on the rewrite. At five o’clock I quit for the day, shower, shave, and put on the least wrinkled clothes I have. Time to meet Tali. I feel giddy, like a high school kid picking up his date for the prom. It’s been a long time since I’ve met a pretty girl for dinner.

There
’s only one Garibaldi’s in Fremont. I’ve checked three times now. It’s six forty p.m. and Tali’s not here. I’ve been stood up.

That
’s my first thought, anyway. And my third, fifth, seventh, etc. In between bouts of self-pity, I consider the possibility that something has happened to her. Like what? Murder, rape, kidnapping. Or the more prosaic possibilities: she got in a car wreck, she came down with the flu. She couldn’t call me because she doesn’t have my number. Or even my last name. Nor do I have hers. Still, she knew where I’d be; she could have called the restaurant. She hasn’t.

I describe her to the waiter on the off-chance he might remember her. Presumably she
’s been to this place before, and she’s a pretty girl; hell, I’d remember her. No luck, though. Having filled up on Heineken and bread, I leave a twenty on the table and walk out.

I sit in my car in the parking lot and feel like crying. Self-pity is like an old pair of slippers to me these days. But as comfortable as it is, something doesn
’t feel right. She had been worried about me not showing up, worried that I’d re-enact my performance at the BART station.
I’m looking forward to seeing you
, she’d said. You’d have to be one cold bitch to say something like that to someone who had tried to off himself two hours earlier and then flake. I don’t think she’s that person.

On the other hand, I barely know her. It
’s not lost on me that Tali’s sudden entrance into my life and subsequent mysterious disappearance are like something out of a mystery novel. As I mentioned, on days that I’m not occupied with scribbling in red ink over incoherent high school composition essays, I fancy myself a thriller writer, and the
femme fatale
is an archetype of the genre. Really, the archetype predates the genre: the
femme fatale
goes back to Delilah, Salome, and the Sirens who tried to lure Odysseus to his doom. Tali is a textbook case: beautiful, clever, mysterious, and involved in a legally and morally dubious enterprise over which she seems to have little control. All she lacked – before she met me – was a struggling and disillusioned man whom she can lure into committing some crime of passion. Jesus, did she see me coming or what?

But Tali
is a person, not an archetype. Yes, she was somehow involved in the shooting at the pier, but her involvement was benign, wasn’t it? That’s what she led me to believe, anyway. She could have been lying. Or this whole quantum coin-flipping thing could be some sort of paranoid delusion. I’d have fallen for anything she told me, even if it was … actually, I can’t think of anything more absurd than what she actually
did
tell me. If she was nuts, she was also a genius to come up with something like that. And she did somehow know about the shooting in advance, unless that was just an amazing coincidence – or she knew the shooter. But I just couldn’t make myself believe it. She had saved my life, and I owed her the benefit of the doubt, at least. On the other hand, if she was to be believed, my life wasn’t actually in danger until she came along. OK, so I may be a complete sucker, but for now I’m going to take her story at face value. She’s not a homicidal maniac, and she didn’t deliberately stand me up.

Back to the other possibilities: murder, kidnapping, rape, accident, severe illness. I have no reason to suspect any of them in particular, but if half of what she told me is true, then there
’s some reason to believe she has enemies. Could she really know about tragedies before they happen and stop them? I have to admit, as crazy as she sounded, it sure looked like it yesterday. Lots of people would like to get their hands on that sort of technology. The FBI and plenty of foreign governments, for starters. I have no idea who Tali works for, or if she works for anybody. I’d been so dazzled by her talk of quantum indeterminacy – OK, and her adorable nose – that I’d failed to get any concrete information from her. Who the hell is she? I have no idea. Dumbshit.

All right, back to what I do know: I
’d seen her get into her Lexus, and she’d said she was going home. Where is home? Somewhere near Palo Alto, she’d said. Not particularly helpful. I pull out my phone and search the traffic sites for information about a recent accident in the area involving a Lexus. Nothing.

What if someone had been waiting near her car?
Or
in
her car? I realize that I’d never actually seen her pull out. For all I knew, her car might still be parked at the San Leandro BART station. I drive there. It’s almost seven now, and I’m going against the traffic, so it only takes me about half an hour. Her car isn’t there. I go home to my depressing box of an apartment.

Had she told me anything else useful?
Something that would give me a clue regarding her identity or where she lived? I don’t think so. Our whole conversation had been abstract, except for her mention of the San Mateo gas explosion. She said she lived “near Palo Alto,” but then so do half a million other people. And she hadn’t mentioned anyone by name, unless you count what’s-her-name, Ananke. Despite having read hundreds of mystery and detective stories, I find myself completely devoid of any investigative inklings on the matter.

Eventually I resort to the primary investigative tool of any modern day Mike Hammer: the Internet. I Google
“Ananke” and come up with nothing particularly helpful: A Wikipedia entry, a software company by that name and several mythology websites. I browse a few of the sites but nothing catches my eye. I try “Ananke Tali” and come up with nothing. Same for “Tali Palo Alto.” Next I try “Ananke Schrodinger’s Cat.” The first result is an Amazon page for a book called
Fate and Consciousness
by a Dr. Arlin Heller, PhD. Interesting. I buy the book, download it and start reading. Within a minute, I’m convinced that Tali either read this book or helped write it. A lot of it I don’t follow, but her description of Ananke is there in black and white: 

Some readers will bristle at my choice to personify this deterministic force. I’m afraid, though, there’s simply no better solution. Any description of the force is necessarily going to be metaphorical, because it is something of which we have no direct experience. Even the word force is a metaphor rife with unfortunate connotations. Ananke isn’t a force like gravity or electromagnetism any more than she’s a Greek maiden looking down on us from Mount Olympus. I used to think of her as such a force myself and I found that doing so caused me to constantly underestimate her.

There are elements of Ananke that can be described with axioms and equations, but she
’s far too complex to be completely described in this manner. In some ways, studying Ananke is more like studying psychology, sociology or economics than studying physics. Ananke lives in a world of tendencies and probabilities. She lives in the world of physics and mathematics too, but then so do all of us, and I doubt any purely physical or mathematical description would suffice to describe you, dear reader, any more than it would me.

In any case, personification shouldn
’t frighten us. Just this morning, a colleague was telling me her car “didn’t want to start,” and I chose not to take it upon myself to explain to her that her car was an inanimate object and had no “wants” to speak of. Similarly, I’ve heard people talking about information “wanting to be free,” or of rain “trying to get in” to someone’s apartment. In none of these cases did I suspect the speaker’s grasp on reality was failing, and I would ask that you allow me the same benefit of the doubt. I realize that Ananke is not a person, but I assure you that she is much more than a “force” or a “medium” or a “tendency.”

With that out of the way: Ananke wants to control the universe, and her desire to do so is a trillion times more potent than your car
’s desire not to start or the rain’s desire to get into your apartment. Ananke is, above all, the sheer brute force of determinism, but it’s a mistake to think of her as naïve or uncalculating. Ananke knows exactly what’s going to happen before it happens, and she has already anticipated any attempt you might make to keep it from happening. Ananke can be fooled neither by unfathomably complex plans nor by spur-of-the-moment decisions. She can be taken in neither by supercomputers that can calculate every possible outcome of a situation nor by the toss of a coin. She has already stymied any possible tactic you can dream up to trick her. Ananke is, for all practical purposes, unstoppable.

 That last part gives me chills. Is that what Tali meant when she said she couldn’t stop the shooter at the pier? That it would do no good to call the police because fate had already accounted for the possibility that she would try? I make myself a drink and Google the author. Turns out Dr. Arlin Heller was a theoretical physics professor at Stanford up until about a year ago. His Wikipedia entry says that he’s fifty-eight, which seems young to retire. Don’t those guys usually hang around forever once they have tenure? Heller’s got several books in print and has had dozens of papers published. There are YouTube videos of a lot of his lectures, some of them with tens of thousands of views. He seems like the kind of guy the university would want to keep around if they could.
Fate and Consciousness
is his last book, and the reviews I find of it range from tepid to scalding. One calls it “a regrettable departure into pseudoscience by one of the great minds of our day.” Ouch.

As far as I can tell, Stanford was the end of the line for Heller, professionally. There
’s no indication he’s dead, but after his tenure at Stanford he just disappeared. No more books, lectures, papers or YouTube videos. Did he retire in disgrace after
Fate and Consciousness
? You’d think a man of his stature would be allowed a regrettable departure or two.

The bio in the back of
Fate and Consciousness
says that he lives – or lived – in the Palo Alto foothills. I find an address for A. Heller in Portola Valley, which would seem to qualify. No phone number though. I wonder what his connection to Tali is. Is she his daughter? One of his students? I decide to pay Heller a visit in the morning. I stay up late drinking and reading Heller’s book. It’s a long, rambling book with digressions into mythology, theology, philosophy, history, mathematics and of course physics. I get the feeling that he’s circumambulating something, like he’s on the verge of making some definitive point and then he retreats back into the abstract. I have to skip most of the math and a lot of the physics, because it’s (sometimes literally) Greek to me. The thesis of the book seems to be that the universe is deterministic – that we are trapped in an inescapable cycle of cause and effect. Free will is possible for sentient beings, but it’s by no means assured. It’s something that we have to fight for, against the almost irresistible pull of fate (You can probably skip this excerpt if abstract philosophical discussions bore you):

The idea of inexorable fate is a very old one, cropping up in cultures all over the world. The classic example is Oedipus, who was cursed to marry his own mother. As is typical in such stories, foreknowledge is not an effective prophylactic; Oedipus travels to the ends of the earth to avoid his fate, and in so doing brings about the very prophecy he has been attempting to thwart. In Greek mythology, inevitability is represented by the three Moirai (also known as the Fates), who have their analog in the Germanic Norns. In Islam, fate is represented by the force of kismet and in Hinduism and Buddhism as karma. The Calvinist tenet of predestination is another manifestation of this idea.

In many of these traditions there is a counterpoising force of chance or luck, such as the Greek goddess Tyche and her Roman counterpart Fortuna. Most of the major religions, however, allow little room for chance. Islam denies the possibility of randomness, asserting that there is only the will of Allah. Calvinist theology has no place for free will, let alone random action. And karma, at least of the Hindu or Buddhist variety, depends on a deterministic universe, where everything that happens does so because of something else that has already happened.

The Jainist idea of karma is completely different from the idea of karma as it is used in Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as the colloquial use of the term in western society. Jainism sees karma as an invisible, material substance which adheres to the soul (jiva), weighing it down and determining the conditions of the next reincarnation. Karma is the link which ties the soul to the body, and the cause of bondage and sorrow. Every action that a person performs, good or evil, opens up channels of the senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell), through which karma filters in and adheres to the jiva.

In Jainism, karma is not a benign (or even morally neutral) force that rewards the good and punishes the wicked, but rather a sort of sticky, nasty muck that we are forced to wade through and which constantly weighs us down. As in Hinduism, karma is deterministic, as it comprises the whole realm of cause and effect. But Jainist karma isn
’t part of some grand scheme put in place by the gods to keep the universe on track; it’s all the garbage that we run into that keeps us from realizing our potential. Jainism doesn’t posit the goal of human existence as somehow submitting to one’s place in the deterministic schema but rather struggling against the schema itself. The first step in this struggle is, of course, to see that one is mired in the muck.

I find the Jainist notion of karma compelling because it comports with my own intuitions regarding the material world (informed by a thirty year study of both classical and quantum mechanics). It seems to me that we live in an almost completely deterministic universe. I don
’t see how one can come to any other conclusion. We understand the laws by which the physical universe works (and one mustn’t take the qualifier
physical
as a hedge; by physical I mean the entire universe of which we can have any knowledge; if there is some other non-physical universe out there somewhere that we can know nothing about, it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, immaterial), and we can predict the outcome of actions (above a subatomic level) with near-certainty, assuming we have access to all the relevant variables beforehand. This knowledge extends to the workings of the human brain, which is largely (if not entirely) a deterministic machine.