The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (14 page)

“I got to thinking about what else might have been going on in Geneva in 1908 and did some digging. Minkowski had just expounded
the implications of Einstein’s relativity for the first time: the ‘block universe,’ lifelines in four dimensions, and other
concepts that J.W. Dunne would employ later.

“Why, even Lenin was there. He wrote a philosophical treatise touching on what amounted to early quantum notions. In a small
intellectual community, where everyone knew each other, it would have been odd had Seabrook not come across him. More inexplicable
that he wouldn’t have commented on it later.”

“Hey, Willie was a Republican,” she laughed.

Well, what do you know about that? I wondered. But I grinned back. “The Lost Generation rarely let any political litmus test
get in the way of their fun. I’m not sure that Willie even
had
politics that early, but most of his friends would have been socialists of some flavor.”

“If he were all, y’know, about weird sex? Check it out. Weren’t the commies prudes, muchly?”

“Another product of modern education,” I sighed facetiously. “Even ten years later, the Sovnarcom regime, the pre-Stalin government—those
were also the days of Alexandra Kollontai and Isadora Duncan, opium and free love. Why, even Lenin’s lover, Inessa Armand,
was somebody we could have talked to. Maybe played with,” I added, feeling out what all she was up for.

“One of Willie’s partners in crime in the thirties was Walter Duranty, whom Roosevelt credited with bringing about the recognition
of the Soviet Union.” I was knowledgeable about Russia, from an antiestablishment point of view, had even visited the old
U.S.S.R. once, so I hoped I was scoring points with my scholarship.

“Duranty,” she mused. “Hey, academe? Believe me when I say to slack off the attitude. I’m not liking that. It makes you sound,
like—someone I don’t
even
want you to remind me of!”

I was appalled at the trap into which I’d been stepping. The point of my game was to ridicule vacuous elitism. But, it was
not amusing to a kid whose experience, of growing up surrounded by stupid rednecks, was more freshly painful than my own.
But she held a different view.

“Clueless that it sounds wanna-be, with you getting all pedantic on my ass at the same time?” She put down my attempted explanation
and got up, absently wiping her fingers along the seam of her skirt. “Don’t go there.”

While she was in the rest room, I sat and agonized over how much damage control was indicated. Cris freshened our coffee.
“Where is she from?” When I told her San Antonio, as far as I knew, Cris looked skeptical. I asked about the girl’s Spanish.

“
Bueno, míjo,
but different, it’s like she speaks Spanish with a New Orleans accent. And her English is different, too,” decided Cris,
whose profession is people. “Don’t you hear it?” When I admitted that I had not, she maintained that Justine sounded a bit
like some of the “snowbirds,” the part-time residents from the North.

Watching Justine return to the table, as did almost everyone else in the restaurant, I wondered at how careful I needed to
be in handling this charming mystery. She sat down looking thoughtful. I started to apologize, but she waved it off and changed
the subject, with no trace of the bitchy flare.

“You have this expert thing going, on people and histories I need to know about. You’ve been studying all that for months.”
Momentarily, I thought I’d identified what Cris had been hearing. Not so much an accent, as a certain
elegance,
which crept into her speech when she dropped the punker affectations.

“Would you, could you,” she asked shyly, looking at her lap, “come with me to Atlanta and bring your research? Hey, you would
be wanting to see the mural and the other things?” She looked up hopefully, “You were right, I’m way sure this is not an accident.”
Well, I couldn’t believe it. Phase Two in, I looked at my watch, eighteen hours.

It was true that I was set up for sudden out-of-town trips, with a bag always packed. All I had to do was ask Cris to look
in on the dog, and scrape the books and papers together. It was Labor Day morning. No one would even be wondering where I
was for another twenty-four hours. When they did, well, you don’t work long as a rep without being able to bullshit.

What if this really was something more? In my wildest fantasies, I could not have imagined how much more. It was difficult
to trust the ease with which this thing was happening. No promises of correspondence; no major project of getting her back
to San Antonio, or creating excuses to get me to Atlanta? Just the prospect of waking up looking into those eyes, my arms
around that body. Had I ever been the sort of man who would pass on Justine because he was afraid he might lose his job? I
don’t think so!

I looked at her evenly, “If I blow off everything to come be with you, do not imagine that your interesting family background
is the reason.”
Certainty like this comes but once…

She blushed, I swear she did. “It’s all that,” she whispered, and tentatively held out her hand. When I responded, she seized
mine with an unexpected painful grip. “Check it out,” she said earnestly. “We’ll go hear Dr. Cramer. Then I gotta say good-bye
to my mother, so you come home and pack, and I’ll pick you up after two o’clock. Not to come off butch, but I wanna be outta
here soon. All kinds of traffic tonight, yea?” I agreed, and she squirmed like a happy child getting out of the booth. I marveled
at yet another face of Justine.

————————

“Q
UANTUM
W
EIRDNESS,
T
HE
B
EST
G
AME IN
T
OWN,
” Cramer’s panel discussion, was held to a packed room. There were only two panelists, one being a mechanical engineer who
wrote short stories with some interesting observations concerning the use of quantum mechanical principles in fiction. But
the crowd had come to hear Dr. John Cramer, the physics professor from the University of Washington, who had published a couple
of best-selling science fiction novels and wrote a column for
Analog.

More importantly, Cramer had originated the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It was being ballyhooed as
the “third interpretation,” opposed to both the traditional view of wave function collapse on the one hand, and the many-worlds
on the other. While Cramer laid the groundwork, enumerating Einstein’s bill of particulars against the spookiness of quantum
mechanics, I offered Justine my thoughts on the politics of the scientific establishment.

“When it began to seem that the results of quantum computing experiments could be explained only by the many-worlds, a virtual
cottage industry appeared in the physical community. There was a purely ideological mandate to supply an alternative interpretation,
any interpretation to let them escape the branching worlds as a model of reality.”

“Are we thinking that Cramer plays to that?” I was impressed that her degree in psychology did not prohibit a sound comprehension
of the politics of actual life.

“Not really.” I clarified that I had the highest respect for Cramer’s work. “But when popularizers choose to believe that
promoting his interpretation as one of the majors will serve their ideological imperatives, he’d be a fool not to go along
with the process.” Cramer educated the audience as to how Steven Weinberg, the discoverer of the electroweak force, had explored
a loophole of adding a small “nonlinear” term to the quantum equations. He mentioned that a colleague of Weinberg’s, at the
University of Texas, had found that cobbling nonlinearity onto the many-worlds interpretation would allow for a communication
between various branch universes.

“That’s Joseph Polchinski’s ‘weak connection’ between alternate worlds,” I whispered to Justine. In my research, I would turn
to the deeper journals such as
Physical Review
or
Annals of Physics
only when necessary and always with perturbation. Doing so would require that I impose on someone with a hard-science background
to translate most of the content. But I had read of this modified interpretation.

————————

T
HE BRANCHES MIGHT RETAIN A “WEAK CONNECTION.”
The introductory line of Polchinski’s paper had stated flatly, “I show that Weinberg’s nonlinear quantum mechanics leads
either to communication via EPR correlations or to communication between branches of the wave function.” My mathematically
minded friends assured me that he lived up to his claim, which presented the physical establishment with a hellish choice:

… thought experiments described herein would seem to be simple enough to carry out in practice, thereby determining which
of EPR communication (across time) and Everett communication (between worlds) is actually realized.
⁵³

It appeared that Weinberg had hoped to wed quantum mechanics to relativity, but feared that the nonlinear mathematics would
violate Einstein’s laws. Polchinski had carried the contradiction further. He demonstrated that the only way to preclude communication
across time, with its consequent violation of special relativity, would be to allow for the possibility of an “Everett phone”
amongst the branches.

There the matter seemed to have languished for the remainder of the decade. As I had learned with the writers, so it was with
the scientists. Whether we are in an “ignore it” phase or an “explain it away” phase, the mandate to the chroniclers is always
the same—obscure the fact that a mystery or a contradiction even exists.
Or,
raise the fact of its existence to hallowed heights of almost religious inscrutability, like a form of faith.

Cramer credited Heisenberg and Schrödinger with the creation of quantum mathematical formalism, “completed” about 1927. He
expounded the orthodox view that quantum mechanics were unique as a scientific theory, not having arisen, like most, from
a preconceived notion of how the cosmos operates.

Quantum mechanics was supposedly an exclusive product of the math created to accommodate observed experimental results. Regarding
the manyworlds interpretation, at least, I believed there was proof that this was partly a fiction. Far from springing full-blown
from the head of Zeus, just such a preconception had propagated upward. It had come from strata of our human brother- and sisterhood
that the scientific establishment will not credit for anything, beyond being potential guinea pigs for experimentation.

Justine began to exhibit intense interest as Dr. Cramer described how Eugene Wigner had shown how to make a quantum system
run backward. By complex-conjugating it, the waves were shown running from the future to the past. As he proposed his transactional
view of nonlocality, I saw her note down a quotation, “Backward in time to the source,” and underline it.

Cramer then bitched for a while about National Security Administration monies funding IBM’s quantum computing research. I’d
already suspected that security interests in quantum cryptography were responsible for the dearth of information as to what
was being brought on-line at Los Alamos and other sites. I wondered what research agendas Cramer thought were being shorted.

He was taking a purely utilitarian argument, emphasizing the relative value of the admitted probability of factoring large
prime numbers without touching the question of where the gargantuan computing power comes from. Much less recognizing that
the algorithms necessary to solve the problems implied that the results were achieved by collating information from computing
resources in many universes working in tandem.

He offered comic relief with a story of how his second novel,
Einstein’s Bridge,
had been based on the assumption that the Superconducting Supercollider would be brought on-line in Waxahachie, Texas. When
the project had been canceled, he hadn’t been able to look at the manuscript for a year and a half. Then he had a bright idea
in the shower in Munich to embroider the story with a voyage in time to change history, so as to have the SSC really built.

To the charge of science fiction promulgating “junk science,” he penetratingly responded that, in his view, an “unholy graft”
between science and Eastern religion was the
real
junk science. On that, Justine turned to me, “What are we thinking?”

“I tend to agree.” I shook my head. “I just don’t understand why Cramer and others can’t see manyworlds as the rational resolution
of the quantum interpretation problem.”

Cramer was bragging that he troubled to attach appendices to his books distinguishing the real scientific roots from the literary
fictions and speculations grafted on top. Justine smiled, “Like what was the branching paths grafted on top of?”

She began waving her hand as Cramer was responding to a query on micro-reversibility. He was explaining that the real practitioners
of the manyworlds extend the formalism so that two universes that become physically identical may converge as well. He then
touched on the notion that nonlinear effects might be experimentally sought at the highest energies and energy densities,
and that the SSC would certainly have been helpful, before getting to her.

“Can you use these interpretations jointly, or any two of them together?” she cut to the chase. I rather glowed as the room
turned to look at this extraordinary little being beside me.
⁵⁴

“I think they’re mutually exclusive, actually.” Then he looked at her, and added, “Conceivably, you could have Everett-Wheeler
joined at the hip to one of the other ones, but I don’t think anybody likes to do that because it violates Occam’s Razor…”
He went on to talk of the metaphysical baggage that burdened each of the theories and how one wouldn’t look to acquire two
such sets of baggage.

She looked to me again, and I felt enormously flattered at being allowed to annotate Dr. Cramer. I hoped that the life of
the mind always got her this excited. It might stand in for irregular or lackluster sexual performance. As the panel wound
up, I explained how a fourteenth-century
ecclesiastical doctrine,
purportedly the search for the least complicated solution, had come to amount to an article of faith. “It was invoked against
Galileo because the mere implications of a starry night sky were too ‘uneconomical’ to be believable to the medieval mind.
Many processes in nature violate Occam’s Razor. Besides, why should metaphysical simplicity be a consideration of science,
anyway? As our friend Willie said, ‘To simplify that which is not simple, is simply to falsify.’”