Chapter 40: Entanglement by Any Other Name is Still EPR

I spent Christmas break with Mrs. W. She had adopted a dog, a small, high-energy Jack Russell Terrier she named Monty, after her favorite movie actor, “Montgomery Clift. It was cold and snowy so I assumed responsibility for walking him. On our walks he would return to me when whistled and would freeze in his tracks if I said anything in a loud voice, like “stop!” “yo!” or “dammit, Monty!” It didn’t matter what I said, he’d stop and look at me sheepishly. After I yelled, if we needed to cross a street he’d wait until I could catch up and we’d cross together, Monty wagging his tail. If I was ready to go a different direction than he’d taken I’d whistle and clap my hands and he’d come running. A good dog. As soon as we got back to the house, though, he’d look at me and wag his tail as if to say “thanks,” then trot off in search of Mrs. W. He was a good dog, but he wasn’t my dog. On Christmas morning Mrs. W and I exchanged presents and had gotten each other the exact same present. Each of us had gotten the other a black cashmere scarf from Brooks Brothers. I had asked Ginny on the drive down what to get her, and she’d recommended a cashmere scarf. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of cashmere before. I have to admit that, expensive as it was, it was seductively soft. The winter jacket I was wearing at the time was a World War II-era leather pilot’s jacket, and warm as it was when I walked Monty, the cashmere scarf seemed a little posh for the likes of me. A few days after Christmas, Stoney and Michael showed up again. Mrs. W. was glad to see them again, of course, but at first they didn’t intend to stay long. I think they were headed to Sea Island, Georgia, where one family or the other had a vacation home, and they were just intending to spend one night and then head on south in the morning. But it snowed overnight, and when I awoke the light through my bedroom window had that blue look it does when it’s snowed in Tnnessee and the sky’s still overcast. I could smell coffee and bacon and something else warm in the air as soon as I woke up. I brushed my teeth, pulled on my pants, and went downstairs. Stoney in his pajamas and Mrs. W. in her bathrobe were looking at the paper, just like the old days. They both smiled. Stoney pointed at the coffee pot and I poured myself a cup. Lots of bacon was drying on a piece of newspaper next to the stove. I snagged a piece and sipped my coffee. Nobody said anything, but Stoney handed me the front page section of the paper as I sat down at the kitchen table. I noticed there was a Pyrex bowl of batter next to the stove. Home. I’d never felt that so strongly before, and never have since. A few minutes later Stoney and Mrs. W. both lit cigarettes at about the same time, and Stoney topped off all our coffee cups. Nobody had said anything, but we were all at home. We exchanged newspaper sections. After about twenty minutes Michael came down, shaved, combed, dressed, and ready for the day. Before speaking he went to Stoney and kissed his forehead. Stoney smiled. “Bonjour, Henri. Bonjour the Divine Miss W,” said Michael. “I know that’s inverted, but you know what I mean.” Mrs. W. smiled at him with a confused look in her eyes. “Morning, Michael,” she said. “Sleep well?” “Like a baby, yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thanks so much for the hospitality.” She smiled and went back to the sports section. “Sweetie, I’m thinking we’re not going to make it to Brunswick today,” he said. “It’s just snow,” said Stoney. “We don’t deal with snow as well here as they do in Detroit,” said Mrs. W. “They won’t clear the interstate today, and may not clear the local roads tomorrow. We generally wait for it to melt off.” “How civilized,” said Stoney. “Pancakes?” Michael kissed his forehead again and took his seat as Stoney stood to cook. The pancakes were perfect, of course. Afterwards Stoney poured us all another cup of coffee and and he and Mrs. W. fired up cigarettes as Michael and I cleaned up. “He ate breakfast without making a fuss about how he never does,” said Stoney, softly, but not whispering. “I know. I noticed,” she answered. Michael shot a glance at me. I shrugged. “Have you socialized him in some way the rest of us have failed to do?” Stoney asked. “He seems to understand quantum mechanics now. Maybe that’s changed his world-view.” They were kidding, and I’m not sure if they knew I could hear them. “Well, I sure as hell don’t,” said Stoney, still softly. “I’m okay with Newton, but I picked up one of Michael’s EE books the other day and it went into the wavefunction and I had no idea what they were talking about. And when Michael tried to explain I just got deeper into the weeds.” “Why does Michael need to know wavefunction?” she asked. Michael and I looked at each other, kind of taken aback and amused that they were talking about us as though we weren’t there. “He’s an electrical engineer. After we graduate, he’s going to work for Hewlett Packard in San Jose, California.” “They make those expensive little calculators that are so smart,” said Mrs. W. “Right. And right now, according to what they told Michael, their calculators are based on what are called integrated circuits, but what they want to do is move towards something called ‘microchips’ that will be smaller and cheaper and use less current but they’re so small they run into quantum rules.” “Okay,” said Mrs. W. “Like I said, I don’t understand quantum mechanics, but Michael does, and apparently electrons work a lot like photons and engineers at Intel and Hewlett Packard are a few years older and don’t really understand quantum.” “Intel?” she asked. “Transistor manufacturer, I think,” said Stoney. Michael looked at me and shook his head. “So Michael’s been doubling down on his engineering physics.” “So what are you doing post-grad?” she asked. Michael cocked an ear. “I’ve applied to Stanford’s Ph.D. program,” he said. “Robert Osserman is one of my oldest friends,” said Mrs. W. “I’m sorry, who?” asked Stoney. I heard Mrs. W. light another cigarette off of her Zippo. “He’s the chairman of the Mathematics department at Stanford,” she said. “Oh, Dr. W.,” he said. “I would love to get into Stanford.” “With your grades and your smarts I don’t think you need any help,” she said, “but I’ll call tomorrow and see.” It was Sunday. “Oh, Dr. W. It would mean so much to Michael and me.” “You’re family,” she said. Michael and I were through washing up but weren’t sure what to do. They were having what seemed to be a very private conversation, but we’d heard every word. He kind of shrugged and opened his hands and his mouth opened and he shook his head as though to communicate that he wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t sure what to answer. I shook my head. We turned around and made noise so they’d know we were listening again. After breakfast we all took a walk in the snow together, Monty bounding around excitedly. Frankly walks in the snow aren’t as exciting to me as they are to most people who grew up in the south. My toes get cold and go numb really fast. It’s pretty, but that’s what picture windows are for. Stoney made a lentil soup and a sweet kind of cornbread for lunch, not a combination I’ve ever had before but it was good, and we spent most of the afternoon with Mrs. W. and Michael trying to teach Stoney and me how to play bridge. The sun came out for a few minutes, but then it began snowing again, leading to speculation about when Stoney and Michael would be able to leave. That night Stoney cooked beef stroganoff, I think both because there was frozen round steak and sour cream in the refrigerator and because he knew Mrs. W. loved it. After dinner Michael and I cleaned u and Mrs. W. talked to Stoney a bout his educational goals. Stoney loved pure math but wasn’t sure he had the temperament to teach, so he wasn’t sure about a career. We finished cleaning up and they’d reached a lull in their conversation. “What do they usually do now?” he whispered into my ear. “Drink,” I said. His face lit up and he smiled dramatically. He hugged me briefly. “All right, ladies, I am taking drink orders,” he said, turning. “Why thank you Michael,” said Mrs. W. “There’s a bottle of Armagnac in the front pantry, it’s hard to read but—“ “Oh, I can read French,” said Michael. “But thanks. Comin’ right up. Stonewall dearest?” “I think a little B&B,” said Stoney, after a few seconds of reflection. Mrs. W. smiled. “You’re welcome to a little of the Armangac,” she said. “I think I want something sweet,” said Stoney, and placed a long Winston between his lips. “Henri?” he asked me. Mrs. W. and Stoney looked at me expectantly, which was a little surprising. “Thanks, but I don’t drink,” I said to Michael. Everybody was looking at me funny. “What?” I asked, looking at Stoney and Mrs. W., who hadn’t realized they were staring at me. “Well, a few of your attitudes seem to have changed,” said Mrs. W., after a pause. “It was possible you’d taken up drinking.” Michael understood that I did not want a drink and left in search of B&B and Armagnac. I made myself a fresh glass of ice water. “So, Henry, I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Mrs. W. “How’s your checkerboard these days?” Michael returned with two bottles and three glasses. In that brief amount of time, he’d managed to find a blown crystal brandy snifter, two tiny cut crystal liqueur glasses, the B&B, and a bottle of Armangac. Fast work. “What brought that up?” I asked. “You seem … different,” she said. “Has anything else … changed?” She and Stoney looked at me attentively, smoking on their cigarettes as Michael poured drinks. “Like what?” I asked. “A girlfriend, maybe?” she asked. “No,” I said. May I say without overmuch emphasis that since Stoney had changed from a lush who had sex with underaged foreign teenaged girls to a happy gay man who subsisted on thimbles of liqueur it seemed to me that focusing conversation on the changes in me seemed a little out of place, but we were all friends. Stoney looked at me dubiously. “Henry, you’re never in your room Sunday mornings, and Beatriz’s door is always locked,” said Stoney. Mrs. W. gave me a surprised, semi-happy look. “Oh, gosh. No. Beatriz and I are just friends,” I said. Stoney shrugged as if to suggest he wasn’t sure he was buying it. “So where are you every Sunday morning?” asked Mrs. “Cisco’s been making me go to church,” I said. “What?” Mrs. W., Stoney and Michael all said at once. “I have been going to church with Cisco,” I said, slowly. “Cisco’s a born-again Christian?” asked Michael. “With all the girls he f— um, dates?” he asked, glancing at Mrs. W. “No, he’s Catholic. That’s the point.” They all looked at me, mystified. “He says I’m extremely Catholic and just happened to be raised in a Protestant household. I didn’t believe him, so he started making me go to church.” “And?” asked Mrs. W. I thought. “Yeah, I guess I kind of like it,” I said. “The whole faith deal is a little out of my league, but I fit in there.” There was a kind of stunned silence. “Henry, I knew you had it in you but I didn’t know you’d find it,” said Mrs. W. “I don’t think I’ve found anything,” I said. “I’m just tagging along with Cisco. There’s no road to Damascus for me. No scales will be falling from any eyes. I’m just … tagging along with Cisco. Where, by the way, he manages to pick up girls even in the ‘peace be with you’ deal.” “He’s truly amazing as a pickup artist,” said Michael. “I’ve seen him do it.” “So how is your Catholic checkerboard holding up?” Mrs. W. asked. “I’m not a Catholic. I just tag along with Cisco,” I said. “Henry plays checkers?” Michael asked. He topped off the glasses. “No, it’s an analogy,” said Stoney. “Henry sees the rules of the cosmos as following a regular pattern, and his mental image of that pattern is a regular checkerboard with nearly infinitely tiny squares, stretching off in all directions. Only Henry sees that there are occasionally small problems, places where the rules don’t work, where the checkerboard doesn’t match up because two patterns were started on inconsistent squares or in different colors. So the pattern of the universe has some flaws and aberrations, where the laws and principles of the cosmos appear to be violated. There are ripples and flaws and inconsistencies that can be observed if you look closely enough. Is that about it?” he asked, speaking not to me but to Mrs. W. “I think so, but I think Henry can visualize this in three dimensions. I can follow, but I can only see it in two,” she said. Michael nodded. “Three works,” Michael said. “Interesting analogy.” “Whoa,” said Stoney. “So the question was whether your Catholic self sees the checkerboard any differently, but I think the real question is whether your quantum self sees it any differently,” Michael said. Mrs. W and Stoney looked at me speculatively. “Things are so much worse,” I said. “You’re right. I used to see little things that didn’t add up and think they were the result of tiny aberrations in Newtonian mechanics but now I have to think of them as possibly the aggregations of millions of waveform calculations stacking up in a way that is imponderably improbable to create a change in the observable universe. So my checkerboard isn’t really even a checkerboard any more. If you look at any particular square, it may not even be solid, it’s made up of thousands of tiny dots or holes or patterns that are too small to see even with an electron microscope. So it’s all far more complicated than can be imagined.” There was a pause. One of the possible outcomes here was that they’d all think I was stark raving mad. “And you see this in your head in three dimensions?” Stoney asked, lighting another cigarette and taking a tiny little sip of his B&B. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Pull back enough and it’s just shapes and colors. Close in it’s just squares and cubes. The problem is when you close in some more the cubes and squares start to dissolve into something insubstantial.” “So?” Stoney asked. “The world is substantial, not insubstantial. As an analogy that informs all aspects of one’s life, this one now appears to be … lacking, and I have no other to take its place.” “Okay,” said Mrs. W., after a pause. “I’m going to tell you a story. It’s why I gave up Physics and stuck to Math. I met Albert in 1931. He was in and out of Caltech in the thirties, and I was at Berkeley, so whenever he was in Pasadena I would go down for a visit.” “Albert Einstein?” I asked. She nodded. “And you knew him as Albert?” asked Stoney. She nodded again and lit a new cigarette. The last one was still burning in the ashtray, although almost gone. “I’ve heard he had an eye for the ladies,” said Michael, and damned if Mrs. W. didn’t seem to blush. Maybe it was just her mannerisms. Stoney discretely held up a hand as if to say “shush for now, we’ll talk about this later,” and Michael good-naturedly poured another splash of brandy into Mrs. W.’s glass. “The journal we all read in those days, about Physics, anyway, was called Physical Review. I was up at Berkeley and in October of 1935 Albert published an article with these children I didn’t know named Podolsky and Rosen—I presume they were research assistants at Princeton, called “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?” Michael looked at me intently, and I nodded. We’d heard of this. “It took a few days for it to be my turn to read it—there was no Internet in those days and no Xerox machines, but when I did I was amazed. Albert, or whoever wrote it, because there were words in that article that I’d bet my left ventricle Albert didn’t know, pointed out that the quantum rules allowed for … well, it’s hard to describe, but we called it non-locality.” “Don’t follow,” Stoney said. “Okay. So you remember Heisenberg,” she said. “You can’t observe something without changing it,” Stoney said. “More simply, you can never know both the velocity and the location of a quantum particle at the same time. But you’re right. The practical effect of this is that whatever energy is added to a system to measure either the the location or velocity of a particle always changes one or both,” she answered. “Okay.” “So say you create a bunch of photons all at once. A light beam,” she said. “Like a laser?” Stoney asked. “Yes, but no,” she said. “We didn’t have lasers back then. No. Say you excite a bunch of phosphorus or sodium atoms to the point where they emit light and then focus that light through a lens.” “Okay,” said Stoney. “So you’ve got a beam of light created by the same chemical reaction. They’re all identical photons.” “Okay,” said Stoney, again. “And then you pass the beam through a half-silvered mirror, so that half of them fly off in one direction and half of them fly off in another.” “Ahem,” said Michael. We all looked at him as though he were interrupting something important. “Yes?” she said, quizzically. “We may have left something out of the story,” said Michael. “What?” Mrs. W. asked. “Do you know about wave/particle duality?” Michael asked Stoney. “Oh, shit, you’re right!” said Mrs. W. “I know that light sometimes appears to be particles and sometimes seems to be a wave,” said Stoney. “It started with Heisenberg—you know Heisenberg? We just mentioned him a minute ago,” she said. “You can know the location or the velocity of a particle but not both,,” Stony recited. “I did go to high school.” “Just so. But Schrödinger took Heisenberg further on and developed what we call the wavefunction. In quantum, light appears to be a wave almost all the time. You can do experiments where two beams of light getting to the same place from different windows cancel each other out just like ripples on a pond or sound waves. They make very wave-like interference patterns. But the instant you look at it—observe it or measure it in any way, it immediately becomes a particle,” Michael said. “Is that how they teach it now?” Mrs. W. asked. “Sure,” said Michael. She looked at me. I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Why?” I asked. “It’s just the terminology. I would have said that light appears to be a wave before observation and appears to be a particle after observation,” she said. “Interesting,” I said. “We’re taught that that’s a distinction without a difference,” Michael said. She looked at me. I kind of shrugged. “The verbiage they teach us wouldn’t be much different,” I said. Actually a physicist wouldn’t be able to grasp the idea that a distinction didn’t result in a difference but I didn’t want to get into the whole physics/engineering deal with Michael. He’s a nice guy, and they always think we’re looking down at them. “But there is a difference. And that’s what Albert was talking about,” she said. “In what?” Stoney asked. “Physical Review. May of 1935. The journal for physics. We looked forward to every edition. The Department had one subscription and the library had another. The professors would all hand the departmental copy back and forth, so the grad students would go read the one in the library. A lot of times you’d get there and see a friend in the reference area and you’d just turn around and leave because you knew what he was reading. But in May of 1935 an article came out by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen called ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?’” “The EPR?” asked Michael. “EPR?” Mrs. W. frowned and lit andother Benson & Hedges. “Sorry for interrupting, please tell the story,” said Michael, as soon as he could see she didn’t follow his question. “Go back to the example,” she said. “You’ve got all these photons created by the same reaction, all identical, some of them going one way and some of them going another because of the half-silvered mirror. What Albert realized—and honestly, Albert didn’t write this. They were his graduate assistants or something, but Albert couldn’t carry on a complicated conversation about anything other than Physics in English. My bet is that Podolsky wrote it and Rosen spiffed up his English, although ‘eigenfunction’ made it into the final draft,” she said. “Even I know eigenfunction,” said Stoney. “Really? But you know German, too,” she said, doubtfully. “Ja, aber ich erfuhr von Eigenfunktionen in einem “standard˝-Math-Klasse. Es ist ein linearer Operator-Funktion. Ich denke an ihn als einen Weg, um Vibrationen zu suchen,” Stoney said. Michael and I looked at each other and shrugged. “In Ordung,” she said, and shrugged. “Okay, so what did the paper say?” Stoney asked. “Albert pointed out that if you had two photons, two systems, he called them, with a common origin, like I’ve described, that the two particles could violate the rules of physics. Under Heisenberg, you can never know both the velocity and location of a particle. And under Schrödinger, as soon as you measure a wave, it turns into a particle. What Albert, or Podolsky, or whoever, noticed, was that if you have these entertwined particles that were created by the same reaction and split apart by whatever means, if you measured one and then observed it as a particle you would have the exact same information about the intertwined particle. So, what? Whatever you knew about one you would know about the other. Would measuring one of the two waves cause the other of the two to turn into a particle, too? And if it did, what if the two particles were miles apart? Wouldn’t the instantaneous change in the second particle violate Relativity? If the change is instantaneous no matter how far apart the particles are, the adage about the speed of light being an absolute doesn’t look so good. It was just crazy.” She took a drag from her cigarette and took a sip of her brandy, then propped her chin on her hand forlornly. “The only time I got to speak about this stuff with Albert it was just for a few minutes, when we had … other things on our minds. But he called the problem ‘spooky action at a distance.’” She smiled and stubbed out her cigarette. “Why’s that?” Stoney asked. He reached for the B&B bottle, then noticed that Mrs. W.’s snifter was empty, and poured her another drink. I’m not sure I’d ever seen her drink this much before. “We now call this issue ‘non-locality,’ said Michael. “At the time, people thought that all of physics was local—that there was no way to influence events in one place from another without some direct link—a presence, a string, a wire, a radio wave. If measuring a wave in one place caused a wave in another place to immediately collapse into a particle, this is called a non-local event, and scientists at the time considered it implausible.” “Not just implausible, impossible!” said Mrs. W. “Our science was physics, for Christ’s sake, which means the study of physical reality. An action taken in one place can’t cause a result in another place without any communication. It’s absurd. If I slam my fist down on the table here,” and she did, “it doesn’t cause somebody’s table to shake in Shanghai.” Michael looked at me with a worried expression. I gave him a surreptitious sign like a first base umpire might give waving off an appeal of a ‘no swing’ call from a catcher. Michael nodded. She continued, still agitated: “Everybody knew—Albert, Dr. Bohr, Schrodinger, all those Copenhagen boys—everybody knew that non-locality was simply impossible, and if the mechanics allowed for it, something was wrong. There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind.” Michael filled his tiny glass to the brim with B&B and drained it back in a gulp, then looked at the carpet with a speculative, worried look. “If nothing else, it would violate the speed of light,” she said. “True, it does,” said Michael. Mrs. W. didn’t notice his phrasing. “How did everyone react to the article?” Michael asked. Stoney stood. “Be right back,” he said. I assumed he was going to the restroom but he returned shortly with a brandy snifter like Mrs. W.’s. “At first, it was fun,” she said. “The problem with quantum mechanics is that ever since Heisinger and Schrodinger, it works so well. Even if you don’t understand why it works, all those little probabilities describe the way particles work and interact and stick together very well. Even those of us who think it’s incomplete or lacking agree on that.” Stoney had poured himself a generous glass of Armagnac. “Why is it incomplete if it works?” Michael asked. “Well, just because something works doesn’t mean it’s right. Archimedes knew when the sun was gonna come up. He knew where the planets and stars would be and could predict eclipses of the sun and moon. Aristotle’s system, as it got elaborated over the years, was remarkably good at predicting astronomical events.” “So?” “Well, Hell, Michael, they all thought the Earth was the center of the Solar System. Physics needs to be about reality. I love math and like it that it’s not rooted in reality—” “Ich grüße dich für diesen Gedanken,” said Stoney, raising his glass. “Toast.” Mrs. W. clinked her glass to his and they both took a swallow. “I guess I’m too much of an engineer,” said Michael. “To me, if the equations and the tables in the books keep the bridges from collapsing and the generators working, I’m good. I kind of just want to know that it works. If somebody I trust tells me it works, or if I know industry’s been relying on it for dozens, or hundreds, of years, I don’t necessarily need to look behind that.” “Mrs. W. likes to understand why the calculations work,” said Stoney. “Somebody wise once said that there was no more common error than to assume that because accurate and prolonged mathematical calculations have been made that the application of the result to some fact of nature is completely certain,” said Stoney. Michael nodded with an equivocal expression. “Stoney, that was Whitehead, and he was a moron,” said Mrs. W. “Really?” Stoney asked, swallowing some brandy and reaching for his Winstons. “Well, he was smart, but he was an idiot. Complete ankle-biter. Read him if you want, but everything he got famous for was philosophical speculations on Albert’s theories, and he really couldn’t do the math. You and Henry and I’m sure Michael too all know more math than Alfred Whitehead. You and Henry can sure as shit calculate better than Whitehead.” She thought for a minute and gazed into the distance, taking a couple of drags from her cigarette. “Bertrand Russell wrote Principia Mathematica and why he wanted to share credit with doddering old Whitehead is beyond me. He can’t have added anything to it. ” “Okay. Should I read him?” Stoney asked. “Whitehead? Yes, but quickly. He tries to make philosophical deductions from math he doesn’t understand. Have your critical antennae up.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Yes ma’am. You were saying?” said Stoney. “What was I saying?” se asked. “Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen had published an article about entangled particles in Physical Review in March of 1995. It got everyone’s attention because it pointed out that quantum mechanics allow for non-local interactions that would violate Relativity because they would be instantaneous at distances impossible if the speed of light is an absolute limit,” said Michael. She sat up a bit and lit a new cigarette. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Entangled, you say.” “The two photons generated at the same time that passed through a half-mirrored glass. If you measure one, you automatically know about the other, non?” asked Michael. “Oui,” said Mrs. W. “Entangled. I guess that’s a good word for it.” She looked at Stoney. “So ist er ziemlich schlau, diese?” Stoney smiled. “Ja, ma’am.” “So it was fun for a few months,” Mrs. W. said. “We all started talking about what we knew and what we didn’t know about quantum mechanics, and it almost seemed to open up the debate again about whether just basing our calculations on probabilities that we didn’t understand was a …sensible way for a bunch of scientists to proceed.” “Why?” Michael asked. Mrs. W. frowned. She seemed puzzled by the question. “Well, most of physics has been, throughout history, making observations and then trying to figure out how to express them on paper. Schrodinger and most of the quantum guys were sure that the way to get ahead was to focus on the calculations. Don’t worry about why it works. Just shut up and calculate. And those of us who had an experimental, observational bias liked the fact that we were thinking about quantum and its relation to reality again. It was fun.” “So what happened?” Michael asked. “Niels Bohr happened. In the next issue of Physical Review. It was awful. Poor Alfred.” “We haven’t seen the article. What happened?” I asked. “Oh, Dr. Bohr got all shirty. He said, more or less, that if our equations don’t answer all the questions you’re asking, then it’s not because our equations are ‘incomplete,’ it’s because you’re asking the wrong questions.” “Excuse me?” said Michael. “It really was just that rude,” said Mrs. W. “Dr. Bohr’s idea was that the quantum equations explained things so thoroughly that there just was no room for argument, so if the equations disagreed with Albert’s notion of ‘reality,’ that it was our notion of reality that was lacking, not the equations. The equations were perfect.” “And the Physics community didn’t rally behind Einstein?” I asked. “No not at all,” she said, lighting another Benson & Hedges and raising her glass as if to drink, then noticing her glass was empty. There wasn’t much of the Armagnac left. Michael looked up at Stoney, who nodded and got up to look for a replacement. “There’s another bottle of it,” said Mrs. W. Stoney smiled. “I’ll find it,” he said, and Michael poured the last splash from the current bottle into Mrs. W.’s glass. She smiled. “You boys sure are good hosts,” she said. “You’re the hostess,” said Michael. “This is your house, too,” she said. “Stoney’s family, so you are too.” “You are the sweetest mathematician of all time,” he said, as she smiled and took a sip. “Tell me more about what people said in response to Dr. Einstein’s article.” “Oh, well, everybody sided with Dr. Bohr,” she said. “It was awful.” “But why?” asked Michael. “He was Albert fucking Einstein, for Christ’s sake,” said Michael. “Excuse his French,” I said. “Excuse me. In French: Il était Albert Einstein putain, pour l'amour du Christ,” said Michael. Mrs. W. Smiled and took a drag from her cigarette. “But by that point all of Albert’s triumphs were in the past,” she said. “They’d all come in the teens and twenties, and we were twenty years past that by 1935. Physics moves fast. Plus, Albert never liked teaching. He liked thinking about things and talking to people. He didn’t even particularly like writing papers. And Dr. Bohr always had dozens of students. And they went on to get jobs at every important university in the world. Albert had figured out all kinds of things he never wrote about. But Bohr was a much bigger deal academically. Sometimes Albert would have one or two graduate assistants around, but over in Copenhagen, Dr. Bohr had this entire school of young men, and all of them worshipped him. All any of them thought about was quantum. Relativity was something established It was old. Twenty-five years old. And Albert’s paper re-focusing attention from quantum Relativity was a little … embarrassing to them. Like he couldn’t move on. That’s the way the Bohr people saw it. Because that was the point of the paper. If …what did you call it?” she asked Michael. “Entanglement?” “Entanglement. Good word. Because if entanglement was possible, it looked like the rules of Relativity, the absolute limit of the speed of light, would be violated,” she said. “But he was right,” said Michael. “Which he?” she asked. “Einstein was right,” he answered. “Well, it sure looked like it. Assuming the whole non-local thing could be worked out. And everybody just knew that non-locality was some kind of anomaly. A quirk. But for Einstein to find a problem with their elegant equations because they disagreed with his old-fashioned Relativity was just seen as quaint and kind of pitiful. He had already started looking for the unified field theory, and he was out there working for pacifist and Zionist causes, and people just thought he’d lost it. So the next edition of Physical Review had this piece from Bohr in which he’d obviously been helped by that weasel Pauli and probably by Rosenfeld, too, because Bohr’s English wasn’t much better than Albert’s. The whole tenor of the piece was that old men like Albert—he was 56—didn’t understand how to ask relevant questions any more. That the focus on physical reality was misplaced. That at the molecular level, the interactions between particles were so divorced from human perception that to try to analogize to the perceptible physical world was silly. I mean, it didn’t say that, but that’s what it meant.” “So what did it say?” asked Michael. “It said that Albert’s concerns were misplaced, that he fundamentally misunderstood quantum reality, that there was no such thing as an observation which did not affect the thing observed, so, in essence, Albert’s question and all of the assumptions underlying it were fundamentally misplaced. Albert was flummoxed at this. He wrote he doesn’t look at it?’ I always loved that.” “All right, I’ve heard this exchange discussed in the past,” said Michael, “and what I don’t understand is why, if such a well-regarded scientist had posed such a fundamental challenge to the basic premises of their doctrine, why the Copenhagen school was so cocksure of themselves in blowing him off.” “Oh. Well there was this book,” she said. “I can’t remember the name. It was by a man named John von Neumann. He claimed to prove that what are called ‘hidden variables,’ things that might give an underlying reality to the quantum equations, was impossible. He said that because the expected value of the position and momentum of a particle both measured at the same time is equal to the sum of the expected value for a measurement of the position and the expected value of the momentum.” “=

+,” said Michael. Damn. He was good. “Damn. You’re good,” said Mrs. W. “But von Neumann offered no proof whatsoever of this. Heisenberg and all the Danes just glossed over it and let him get away with an utterly unfounded assumption. But because the book was otherwise so elegantly reasoned, Heisenberg and Bohr and all the Copenhagen boys thought that it had been proven that no ‘hidden variables’ were going to be later discovered that would give a physical reality to quantum mechanics. And when Albert’s paper came out, they all saw it as an attempt to re-introduce the hidden variables question into quantum mechanics. So they knew from von Newmann’s bookthat this nonsense had been disproved, they just didn’t know what to say.” “But nobody knew that =

+ was just an assumption?” “Well, that’s a more complicated question. Heisenberg did. He had a graduate student named Greta … Greta something,” said Mrs. W. “Dr. Grete Hermann?” asked Michael. “Yes! Damn! How did you know that?” she asked. “This is more of a hot topic the last year or so than you seem to be aware,” said Michael. “Well, I met her at a … meeting kind of thing during the War, and she said that she’d managed to convince Heisenberg that it was just an assumption, and that without it the idea that quantum mechanics had been proven to be free from ‘hidden variables’ was completely false. She said she’d published her conclusions in Germany, but it wasn’t in a physics journal, it was in some philosophy deal, and so nobody really saw it. And then Heisenberg left for England because of what was going on in Germany and nobody seems to have told Dr. Bohr and then Hitler invaded Poland and all Hell broke loose. People tried to keep up academic correspondence during the war but it just wasn’t possible with Germans, and the Germans who had left Germany, like Albert and Dr. Heisenberg, were preoccupied with other things. But most of the Copenhagen people went to their graves thinking that von Neumann had proved that the quantum mechanics had to be complete.” “Did Dr. Einstein know it was not complete?” I asked. “Well, he wouldn’t have believed it even if somebody told him it was. He wasn’t just smart, he was the most God-awful stubborn man you ever met. But I met Rosen years later, and he said one day Albert took out von Neumann’s book and pointed at the =

+ equation and asked ‘now why in the world should we believe that?’ So he knew von Neumann was wrong, and why.” “But still, he’s Albert Einstein,” said Michael. “Everybody should shut up and listen.” “That’s not how life at a university works,” she said, lighting another cigarette and looking at her empty brandy snifter. Michael doled her out another shot, but it was smaller than the last one. “At a university you’re encouraged to think, but what you’re encouraged to think is what everybody else already thinks. If the professors and grad students are all really, really focused on quantum calculations then you should follow their lead and do that, if you want to get ahead. If some strange old man who was really important twenty years ago seems to make an important point, well, however interesting that may be, it’s not going to help you get your Ph.D. Keep your eyes on the prize, what the dissertation committee is interested in.” She shook her head and took a small sip of brandy. Her cigarette seemed to me to be burning towards her fingers. “So what was the unified field theory?” asked Stoney. “I’ve heard people talk about it, but only in generalities. And remember I’m your math guy, not a science guy.” He took a sip of his brandy. He kind of smiled at his snifter. Mrs. W., head propped on her hand, looking down at the table and her brandy glass, thought for a few seconds. ”Albert was looking for a group of equations that would apply to all the forces in the universe: gravity, the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. Everything. A unified field theory that explained all the forces of nature in terms of one field that could be explained by a simple set of equations, like Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations.” Stoney shot me a look. Having worked through Maxwell to get to Heavyside’s simplifications, it was hard to see how they could be reduced much further, much less replaced. Stoney took a prim sip of his Armagnac and shrugged. “Seems sensible,” said Michael. Stoney looked at me and shrugged again. What we now know as Maxwell’s equations don’t explain anything, they just allow us to make calculations. Michael’s an engineer. As long as the math allows him to build something, he’s good. Ask physicist who is proficient in this area ‘what is a force?’ and you’ll get a befuddled response. We know everything in the world about Physics, except what magnetism and gravity are. This doesn’t bother engineers. “Ambitious, I would say,” I said. She shot me a look. “I don’t know, it might have been possible. For somebody like Albert, anyway. But everybody thought it was a waste of time. Bohr, Pauli, Feynman. We were supposed to be looking at small things that happened inside particles, not large things that governed galaxies. Relativity was okay, it worked, it predicted lots of things, but there was no career in studying it. The excitement was in quantum. So everybody in the university system had more or less dismissed Albert as a crank. A guy who once had great ideas, but who had petered out twenty years before and was now embarrassing himself by publishing articles out of step with the mainstream. Unified field theory? Give me a break.” She swallowed the last of her drink and stubbed out her cigarette. She had her head propped on her hand with her arm crooked pretty close to the table. She had a somber expression. “Sometimes I worry that when I left Physics to concentrate on Math I abandoned Albert, too,” she said. “I never meant to do it. I was upset that science turned into camps, into sides. The Bohr people said ‘we’re right, you’re wrong, if you don’t agree with us you’re an idiot.’ So ever since I left Physics, I’ve worried that I should have stuck around and helped Alfred.” “What did you do instead?” asked Michael. “Got married and had children,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun. Especially if you like your husband.” There was a silence. Mrs. W. stubbed out her cigarette and drained her glass. “Lordy. I’m tired. Bed time.” “I’m with you, Dr. W.,” said Stoney. “I’m tired. Fun day though. Have you noticed it’s snowing again?” “No. Lordy. You boys are never going to get to Sea Island.” I looked, and it did indeed look like a blizzard outside. “Do you by any chance have copies of the articles from Physical Review?” I asked. She looked at me as though surprised by the question. “I’ve never seen them, I said. I’ve read about them, but never seen them.” “Why would you be reading about a forty year-old magazine article?” she said. “The story got picked up a few years ago by this Irish guy,” I said. “John Bell,” said Michael. “It’s late now, but maybe if you could let us look at the articles, tomorrow Henry and I could catch you up on recent developments.” Mrs. W shrugged and stood. She seemed a little unsteady. Stoney stood to accompany her. They walked into the den where the TV was, where she stored a lot of my books. I could see her try to reach for something on a high shelf, then saw Stoney reach it for her. They returned. May I say that finding within minutes something she hadn’t looked at for four decades revealed a startlingly well-ordered mind. “Here you go,” she said, laying two bound reprints on the table. “What I want you boys to remember when you read Dr. Bohr’s response is that when you tell somebody that if your solution doesn’t answer his question then he’s asking the wrong question you’re talking religion, or maybe politics. But you’re sure as Hell not talking science. And if you tell someone his notion of reality is quaint and outmoded you’re talking philosophy, not observation or deduction.” “Or maybe drugs,” said Stoney. She laughed. “Good night, boys,” she said. “I’ll walk you up,” said Stoney. “I’m beat, too, and I’m betting these two are going to read the articles before they can go to sleep.” “Toodles,” said Michael, and blew Stoney a kiss. Stoney smiled, and they left. She asked him something about the Detroit Lions, and they talked as they went up the stairs. Michael moved his chair closer to mine and we opened “Can Quantum Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?” “Any serious consideration of a physical theory must take into account the distinction between the objective reality, which is independent of any theory, and the physical concepts with which the theory operates. These concepts are intended to correspond with the objective reality, and by means of these concepts we picture this reality to ourselves.” Seemed sensible enough. The introduction went on to say that for any theory to be deemed complete, every element of physical reality must be explained by the theory. Well, I’d never heard it expressed that way, but okay. Then it went on to explain, in what seemed to me to be a roundabout way, what all Physics students who’d taken elementary quantum mechanics call the entanglement problem: lights acts like a wave until you measure it, then it acts like an incredibly large number of discrete particles. Look at it, you have particles, don’t, and you’ve got waves, both experimentally and mathematically. As we’d discussed earlier in the evening, entanglement arises when you have two identical photons that share a lot of properties that get separated somehow. As we’ve said over and over, theoretically, if you measure one of them, you have in effect measured the other one, too, and, theoretically, if you collapsed one wave into discrete particles, you’d have collapsed the other as well. Einstein considered this to be a mathematical anomaly, a figment of the calculations, “spooky action at a distance.” Since it was so obviously impossible, it had to reveal a flaw in the quantum. What Einstein, Bohr, and Mrs. W. didn’t know, but both Michael and I did, was that not only was “spooky action at a distance” an acceptable part of quantum mechanics, it was a required part of quantum mechanics, and that it had recently been verified by lab experiments. What Mrs. W., Bohr and Einstein all considered impossible, in other words, was common. It was essential. Even though it appeared to violate the speed of light. The odd thing about reading the piece was that it totally assumed that entanglement was impossible. This impossibility was so obvious to the authors that they didn’t even bother explaining why they thought it was impossible. Michael and I read through it in silence. At one point he pointed to a mathematical notation that’s not used any more and looked at me with a quizzical expression. Quantum math was much more advanced in the 1970’s than it had been in 1935, but I had been taught by Mrs. W. in her thirties-era notation and could re-express it 1970’s notation that Michael caught immediately. He turned the pages, and we were reading at about the same pace, so we ended at about the same time. He looked at me. “The holy EPR, ” said Michael. “Indeed.” “What do you think?” he asked. “Well-reasoned but long-winded,” I said. “It’s only four pages,” said Michael. “Entanglement violates Relativity,” I said, summarizing. “Yes, you’re clever, but you’d still have to demonstrate it, sweetie. Let’s look at Bohr,” he said. He picked up the reprint of Niels Bohr’s response. “Shall we?” I looked at the title page. I looked again at the title page of the original EPR article. “Okay,” I said. “So the original EPR article came out on March 25, 1935. Then Niels Bohr’s immediate, harsh, unthinkingly rude response to Einstein came out in October of 1935.” “Yes indeed. Although it does say that Dr. Bohr’s response was received in July.” “All right. And it’s the next issue of the journal.” We started reading. Let me say for the record that, as a budding physicist that night, and then again when I re-read the article as I wrote these memoirs down, Bohr’s comments were gibberish that would not have been published had they been written by anyone other than Niels Bohr. “”Such an argumentation, however, would hardly seem suited to affect the soundness of quantum-mechanical description, which is based on a coherent mathematical formalism covering automatically any procedure of measurement like that indicated.” said Bohr. Michael scowled. “Covering automatically any procedure of measurement?” asked Michael. I scowled back. “Cocky bastard,” said Michael. We looked back at the reprint. Bohr didn’t even think Einstein knew what reality was: “In fact, as we shall see, a criterion of reality like that proposed by the named authors contains—however cautious its formulation may appear—an essential ambiguity when it is applied to the actual problems with which we are here concerned.” “Asshole,” said Michael, without looking up. Bohr went through the two-slit experiments, in which beams of light (or radio waves, or x-rays, or anything else) shot through two tiny slits would behave just like waves all day long, but as soon as you measured them, or even looked at them, they’d immediately act like particles. He distinguished between classical physics and quantum physics and said what is knowable in classical physics is not knowable in quantum because of the interaction between the measuring instruments and the objects being measured. So the questions Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen raised were irrelevant: “Just in this last respect any comparison between quantum mechanics and ordinary statistical mechanics,—(sic) however useful they may be for the formal presentation of the theory,—(sic) is essentially irrelevant. Indeed we have in each experimental arrangement suited for the study of proper quantum phenomena not merely to do with an ignorance of the value of certain physical quantities, but with the impossibility of defining these quantities in an unambiguous way.” “What an arrogant asshole,” said Michael. He poured himself another tiny glass of B&B. “Well, remember he’d read von Neumann’s book, and didn’t catch the mistake. He thought that the entire ‘hidden variable’ question had been proved to be an impossible solution,” I said. “He thought Einstein was barking up not just the wrong tree, but a tree that von Neumann had proved didn’t even exist.” “What an idiot,” he said. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “They figured out an awful lot in Copenhagen.” “I know, you’re right, and everybody knew Einstein was stubborn, but he’d revolutionized physics several times before. If they’d paid attention to him people would have understood entanglement before World War II. It’s 1975, forty years after EPR, and we have no clue why it works. Dr. W. is right. When you point out a problem and somebody responds ‘there is no problem, you’re just asking the wrong question,’ that’s religion, that’s not science.” “I don’t know. The math department seems to give me that response a lot,” I said. “Funny,” he said, taking a sip. “You’re religious?” I asked. “Was. Cradle Catholic. Altar boy. Angelic altar boy, if I do say so myself. Wanted to be a nun in the worst possible way. Now lapsed.” “What happened?” I asked. “I like swallowing dicks,” he shrugged. “They tell me this is a sin. I think they must be wrong and until they come around I’m staying away.” “Gotcha,” I said. “Back to this asshole Bohr,” he said, and we looked back at the paper. Bohr next said that our conception of time is faulty. Trust me, it makes no more sense to someone with a Ph.D in physics than it does to you: “It is true that we have freely made use of such words as ‘before’ and ‘after’ implying time-relationships; but in each case allowance must be made for a certain inaccuracy., which is of no importance, however, as long as the time intervals concerned are sufficiently large compared with the proper periods entering in the closer analysis of the phenomenon under investigation. Ads soon as we attempt a more accurate time description of quantum phenomena, we meet with well-known new paradoxes, for the elucidation of which further features of the interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments must be taken into account.” I looked at Michael with what I’m sure registered as a quizzical expression. “Gibberish,” he said. Bohr went on to say that clocks were unreliable indicators of time, if I followed him, because reading the clock changed the way it recorded time. In moving towards a close, he said more or less that classical physics was essentially meaningless in quantum mechanics: “In accordance with this situation there can be no question of any ambiguous interpretation of the symbols of quantum mechanics other than that embodied in the well-known rules which allow to (sic) predict the results to be obtained by a given experimental arrangement described in a totally classical way, and which have found their general expression through the transformation theorems, (sic) already referred to. By securing its proper correspondence with the classical theory, the theorems exclude in particular any imaginable inconsistency in the quantum-mechanical description, connected with a change of the place where the discrimination is made between object and measuring procedure we have only a free choice of this place within a region where the quantum-mechanical description of the process is concerned is effectively equivalent with the classical description.” “Exclude any imaginable inconsistency,” said Michael. “Pretty sweeping,” I agreed. “Gack, what an asshole,” he said. “Okay, so you don’t think Dr. W. knows about Bell’s inequality or the entanglement experiments?” “Doesn’t sound like it,” I said. “Do you think we should tell her?” “Yeah, although I think she’ll be surprised. She stopped quantum in 1935. Even her vocabulary is old-fashioned. ‘Non-local.’ When she first learned Physics from her father, who was educated in Germany—“ I started. “So that’s where that came from,” Michael said. “What?” I asked. “She and handsome Stone-o are always talking German to each other,” he said finishing his drink with a final tiny sip. “I think I want to taste this Armagnac,” he said. He reached across the table for Stoney’s empty glass and poured himself a small portion. “Wait,” I said, as he did so. “Where did you pick up ‘handsome Stone-o?” “Oh, you called him that once when you were teasing him and I picked up on it. The only time I’ve seem him blush was when he said he wouldn’t explain. I expect a girl is involved. He apparently had terrible taste in girls, although you have to admit his taste in boys is impeccable.” “Indeed,” I said, smiling. “And note that I am not asking you to tell me the story. If he doesn’t want me to know, I won’t ask his best friend.” “Best friend?” I said, puzzled. “Yes, Henri, you’re his best friend. Actually, I am, but I’m his lover so that puts me in a different category.” I was surprised, and my expression must have showed it. “He loves you, Henry. So do lots of people.” “Why?” I asked. “Because you accept people for what they are without judging them. Since you seem to be unaware of your effect on the cosmos, let me tell you that I’m willing to bet, on extremely long odds, and I am not a betting man although I have heard stories told about you that demonstrate that you are, that both Beatriz and Cisco regard you as their best friends, too.” “Really,” I said. This was all mystifying to me. “And Mrs. W. loves you as the son she never had.” “She has a son,” I said. “They’re just not close.” “Well there you go,” he said. “Why are you resisting this, Henry? People like you.” “I don’t mean to resist, but I guess I spent so long alone that I think of myself as a loner,” I said. “That’s as may be but you’re a good friend to lots of people. People like telling stories about you, but what the members of your fan club always talk about is that you never violate confidences, never judge people, and always accept them for who they are.” “I don’t see Cisco describing me that way,” I said. “He stresses the ‘trustworthy with secrets’ aspect of your personality,” said Michael. “I guess I find all this a little perplexing. I like all these people and now that I think about it I value their friendships, as well. I just don’t think about that kind of thing too much.” I thought for a minute. “I also value my friendship with you, Michael,” I said. “I didn’t mean to leave you out.” “Henri!” he said. “How extravagant to be named in such company.” “Not really. I like you. I just don’t think about that kind of thing too much. And I regard Beatriz, Stoney, and Cisco as interesting people to know and be around. You, too. It’s just odd to hear you speculate that they might think of me as best friends. I just don’t think about that kind of thing a lot.” “Is it okay?” he asked. “Yeah, I kind of like it,” I said. “And that Beatriz is drop-dead gorgeous,” Michael said, slyly. I shrugged. “Yeah, she’s pretty,” I said. “She’s not Melissa pretty, but she’s pretty.” “I’ve heard Cisco say that,” Michael said. “She’s not Melissa pretty. What does that mean?” “I honestly don’t know why I said that,” I said. “It means really, really pretty. In a way that particularly appeals to the viewer. I must have picked it up from Cisco.” “No, he says he picked it up from you. All the boys use it now, and it’s making its way into the Nashville gay scene, as well. I am pleased to report that a film reviewer I know tried to pick me up last weekend at The Other Side by telling me I was Melissa pretty.” “Did it work?” “No. Stoney was there.” He took a sip of his Armagnac. “You know Stoney thinks you’re gay?” he asked. “He started saying that because I didn’t respond the way he thought I ought to with Ginny, who is Mr.s W’s favorite niece. I can tell I’m not as libidinal as some, but really, the last person I would hit on is Mrs. W.’s favorite neice.” “Stoney also notes that both Beatriz and Toni have beautiful faces and perfect bodies and flirt with you constantly and that you do not appear to have fucked either one, although everyone says you could have done both and kept it a secret,” he said. “Three minutes ago you he was telling Mrs. W. that I was fucking Beatriz Michael took a speculative sip of his drink. “Stoney, like many gay men, started his sexual life with women. The fact that he thinks you’re gay is not inconsistent, in Stoney’s eyes, with the fact that most men would have had sex with both Beatriz and Toni by now,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “And you?” I asked. “Moi?” he asked. “Oui, vous ” I answered. “You know, I’ve heard a lot of men talk about how they were confused as children and found women attractive but I knew the first time I saw a Tarzan movie on TV that I thought Johnny Weismuller was lots more attractive than Maureen O’Sulivan.” “Maureen was Jane?” I asked. “Oui. Very good iconic recall for a straight man,” he said. “Not really. I think I’ve heard this story from other people,” I answered. “The Tarzan thing was a very powerful discriminator for people who grew up in the sixties,” he said. “The movies were on TV all the time. If you realized you were looking at Tarzan and your friends were all excited about Jane, it told you you were different. That’s where learning to keep a secret starts.” “Interesting,” I said. “Heavens, how off-topic we are,” he said, waving his hand briefly as though to clear the air. “So you claim that you’re not gay and that you’ve never fucked either Toni or Beatriz?” “Yes, of course. I’m surprised there are questions.” “Even I can tell they’re both really attractive, and I don’t pay much attention to girls. Large hooters, tiny waists…” “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I couldnn’t have sex with Beatriz,” I said. “The reason she likes me is that I don’t hit on her. She trusts me.” “And you like being trusted?” he asked. “Yes, of course,” I said. “More than you like getting laid?” he asked. “Apparently so. If Beatriz is interested in taking me as a lover, and I don’t think she is.” “What an interesting young man you are, Henri,” he said. Toni?” he asked, brightly. “She’s stark raving mad,” I said. “True. Still, this does not prove to be an impediment to most straights. Or most gays, for that matter.” “She actually quizzed me on why I never hit on her one time. She said she didn’t want to have sex with me but seemed miffed that I didn’t act like I wanted to have sex with her,” I said. “What did you tell her?” he asked. “That she was stark raving mad and it was bad luck to have sex with crazy ladies, or something like that,” I said. “Another great Henry story,” he said. “So back to the original topic,” he said, before I could respond. “We need to tell Dr. W. about Bell’s inequality and the entanglement experiments tomorrow?” “Yes. Sure. She’ll be interested. It may get her thinking about physics again. You should talk, though. I’m not sure I’m good at explaining things. I tend to listen and think and figure things out.” “No trouble,” he said. “I find all of this fascinating.” “Which part?” I asked. “All of it. You, your circle of friends, the amazing and semi-mystical Dr. W., entanglement, the EPR paper, all of it. You live in an interesting world, mon cher.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “Toodles,” he said, smiling, and stood to go. I moved the glasses to the kitchen, emptied the ashtrays, put the bottles away, and turned out the lights. After I turned out the lights I could see that the moon was out and it was snowing again. Somehow Monty sensed that I was about to go to bed and showed up wagging his tail, so I bundled up and took him for a short walk, although he wasn’t interested in being out for long. The snow was deep and he was short. “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of mid-day to objects below,” I said to Monty as we returned to the house. Where did I learn that line?

Chapter 40: Entanglement by Any Other Name is Still EPR

I spent Christmas break with Mrs. W. She had adopted a dog, a small, high-energy Jack Russell Terrier she named Monty, after her favorite movie actor, “Montgomery Clift. It was cold and snowy so I assumed responsibility for walking him. On our walks he would return to me when whistled and would freeze in his tracks if I said anything in a loud voice, like “stop!” “yo!” or “dammit, Monty!” It didn’t matter what I said, he’d stop and look at me sheepishly. After I yelled, if we needed to cross a street he’d wait until I could catch up and we’d cross together, Monty wagging his tail. If I was ready to go a different direction than he’d taken I’d whistle and clap my hands and he’d come running. A good dog. As soon as we got back to the house, though, he’d look at me and wag his tail as if to say “thanks,” then trot off in search of Mrs. W. He was a good dog, but he wasn’t my dog. On Christmas morning Mrs. W and I exchanged presents and had gotten each other the exact same present. Each of us had gotten the other a black cashmere scarf from Brooks Brothers. I had asked Ginny on the drive down what to get her, and she’d recommended a cashmere scarf. I’m not sure I’d ever heard of cashmere before. I have to admit that, expensive as it was, it was seductively soft. The winter jacket I was wearing at the time was a World War II-era leather pilot’s jacket, and warm as it was when I walked Monty, the cashmere scarf seemed a little posh for the likes of me. A few days after Christmas, Stoney and Michael showed up again. Mrs. W. was glad to see them again, of course, but at first they didn’t intend to stay long. I think they were headed to Sea Island, Georgia, where one family or the other had a vacation home, and they were just intending to spend one night and then head on south in the morning. But it snowed overnight, and when I awoke the light through my bedroom window had that blue look it does when it’s snowed in Tnnessee and the sky’s still overcast. I could smell coffee and bacon and something else warm in the air as soon as I woke up. I brushed my teeth, pulled on my pants, and went downstairs. Stoney in his pajamas and Mrs. W. in her bathrobe were looking at the paper, just like the old days. They both smiled. Stoney pointed at the coffee pot and I poured myself a cup. Lots of bacon was drying on a piece of newspaper next to the stove. I snagged a piece and sipped my coffee. Nobody said anything, but Stoney handed me the front page section of the paper as I sat down at the kitchen table. I noticed there was a Pyrex bowl of batter next to the stove. Home. I’d never felt that so strongly before, and never have since. A few minutes later Stoney and Mrs. W. both lit cigarettes at about the same time, and Stoney topped off all our coffee cups. Nobody had said anything, but we were all at home. We exchanged newspaper sections. After about twenty minutes Michael came down, shaved, combed, dressed, and ready for the day. Before speaking he went to Stoney and kissed his forehead. Stoney smiled. “Bonjour, Henri. Bonjour the Divine Miss W,” said Michael. “I know that’s inverted, but you know what I mean.” Mrs. W. smiled at him with a confused look in her eyes. “Morning, Michael,” she said. “Sleep well?” “Like a baby, yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thanks so much for the hospitality.” She smiled and went back to the sports section. “Sweetie, I’m thinking we’re not going to make it to Brunswick today,” he said. “It’s just snow,” said Stoney. “We don’t deal with snow as well here as they do in Detroit,” said Mrs. W. “They won’t clear the interstate today, and may not clear the local roads tomorrow. We generally wait for it to melt off.” “How civilized,” said Stoney. “Pancakes?” Michael kissed his forehead again and took his seat as Stoney stood to cook. The pancakes were perfect, of course. Afterwards Stoney poured us all another cup of coffee and and he and Mrs. W. fired up cigarettes as Michael and I cleaned up. “He ate breakfast without making a fuss about how he never does,” said Stoney, softly, but not whispering. “I know. I noticed,” she answered. Michael shot a glance at me. I shrugged. “Have you socialized him in some way the rest of us have failed to do?” Stoney asked. “He seems to understand quantum mechanics now. Maybe that’s changed his world-view.” They were kidding, and I’m not sure if they knew I could hear them. “Well, I sure as hell don’t,” said Stoney, still softly. “I’m okay with Newton, but I picked up one of Michael’s EE books the other day and it went into the wavefunction and I had no idea what they were talking about. And when Michael tried to explain I just got deeper into the weeds.” “Why does Michael need to know wavefunction?” she asked. Michael and I looked at each other, kind of taken aback and amused that they were talking about us as though we weren’t there. “He’s an electrical engineer. After we graduate, he’s going to work for Hewlett Packard in San Jose, California.” “They make those expensive little calculators that are so smart,” said Mrs. W. “Right. And right now, according to what they told Michael, their calculators are based on what are called integrated circuits, but what they want to do is move towards something called ‘microchips’ that will be smaller and cheaper and use less current but they’re so small they run into quantum rules.” “Okay,” said Mrs. W. “Like I said, I don’t understand quantum mechanics, but Michael does, and apparently electrons work a lot like photons and engineers at Intel and Hewlett Packard are a few years older and don’t really understand quantum.” “Intel?” she asked. “Transistor manufacturer, I think,” said Stoney. Michael looked at me and shook his head. “So Michael’s been doubling down on his engineering physics.” “So what are you doing post-grad?” she asked. Michael cocked an ear. “I’ve applied to Stanford’s Ph.D. program,” he said. “Robert Osserman is one of my oldest friends,” said Mrs. W. “I’m sorry, who?” asked Stoney. I heard Mrs. W. light another cigarette off of her Zippo. “He’s the chairman of the Mathematics department at Stanford,” she said. “Oh, Dr. W.,” he said. “I would love to get into Stanford.” “With your grades and your smarts I don’t think you need any help,” she said, “but I’ll call tomorrow and see.” It was Sunday. “Oh, Dr. W. It would mean so much to Michael and me.” “You’re family,” she said. Michael and I were through washing up but weren’t sure what to do. They were having what seemed to be a very private conversation, but we’d heard every word. He kind of shrugged and opened his hands and his mouth opened and he shook his head as though to communicate that he wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t sure what to answer. I shook my head. We turned around and made noise so they’d know we were listening again. After breakfast we all took a walk in the snow together, Monty bounding around excitedly. Frankly walks in the snow aren’t as exciting to me as they are to most people who grew up in the south. My toes get cold and go numb really fast. It’s pretty, but that’s what picture windows are for. Stoney made a lentil soup and a sweet kind of cornbread for lunch, not a combination I’ve ever had before but it was good, and we spent most of the afternoon with Mrs. W. and Michael trying to teach Stoney and me how to play bridge. The sun came out for a few minutes, but then it began snowing again, leading to speculation about when Stoney and Michael would be able to leave. That night Stoney cooked beef stroganoff, I think both because there was frozen round steak and sour cream in the refrigerator and because he knew Mrs. W. loved it. After dinner Michael and I cleaned u and Mrs. W. talked to Stoney a bout his educational goals. Stoney loved pure math but wasn’t sure he had the temperament to teach, so he wasn’t sure about a career. We finished cleaning up and they’d reached a lull in their conversation. “What do they usually do now?” he whispered into my ear. “Drink,” I said. His face lit up and he smiled dramatically. He hugged me briefly. “All right, ladies, I am taking drink orders,” he said, turning. “Why thank you Michael,” said Mrs. W. “There’s a bottle of Armagnac in the front pantry, it’s hard to read but—“ “Oh, I can read French,” said Michael. “But thanks. Comin’ right up. Stonewall dearest?” “I think a little B&B,” said Stoney, after a few seconds of reflection. Mrs. W. smiled. “You’re welcome to a little of the Armangac,” she said. “I think I want something sweet,” said Stoney, and placed a long Winston between his lips. “Henri?” he asked me. Mrs. W. and Stoney looked at me expectantly, which was a little surprising. “Thanks, but I don’t drink,” I said to Michael. Everybody was looking at me funny. “What?” I asked, looking at Stoney and Mrs. W., who hadn’t realized they were staring at me. “Well, a few of your attitudes seem to have changed,” said Mrs. W., after a pause. “It was possible you’d taken up drinking.” Michael understood that I did not want a drink and left in search of B&B and Armagnac. I made myself a fresh glass of ice water. “So, Henry, I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Mrs. W. “How’s your checkerboard these days?” Michael returned with two bottles and three glasses. In that brief amount of time, he’d managed to find a blown crystal brandy snifter, two tiny cut crystal liqueur glasses, the B&B, and a bottle of Armangac. Fast work. “What brought that up?” I asked. “You seem … different,” she said. “Has anything else … changed?” She and Stoney looked at me attentively, smoking on their cigarettes as Michael poured drinks. “Like what?” I asked. “A girlfriend, maybe?” she asked. “No,” I said. May I say without overmuch emphasis that since Stoney had changed from a lush who had sex with underaged foreign teenaged girls to a happy gay man who subsisted on thimbles of liqueur it seemed to me that focusing conversation on the changes in me seemed a little out of place, but we were all friends. Stoney looked at me dubiously. “Henry, you’re never in your room Sunday mornings, and Beatriz’s door is always locked,” said Stoney. Mrs. W. gave me a surprised, semi-happy look. “Oh, gosh. No. Beatriz and I are just friends,” I said. Stoney shrugged as if to suggest he wasn’t sure he was buying it. “So where are you every Sunday morning?” asked Mrs. “Cisco’s been making me go to church,” I said. “What?” Mrs. W., Stoney and Michael all said at once. “I have been going to church with Cisco,” I said, slowly. “Cisco’s a born-again Christian?” asked Michael. “With all the girls he f— um, dates?” he asked, glancing at Mrs. W. “No, he’s Catholic. That’s the point.” They all looked at me, mystified. “He says I’m extremely Catholic and just happened to be raised in a Protestant household. I didn’t believe him, so he started making me go to church.” “And?” asked Mrs. W. I thought. “Yeah, I guess I kind of like it,” I said. “The whole faith deal is a little out of my league, but I fit in there.” There was a kind of stunned silence. “Henry, I knew you had it in you but I didn’t know you’d find it,” said Mrs. W. “I don’t think I’ve found anything,” I said. “I’m just tagging along with Cisco. There’s no road to Damascus for me. No scales will be falling from any eyes. I’m just … tagging along with Cisco. Where, by the way, he manages to pick up girls even in the ‘peace be with you’ deal.” “He’s truly amazing as a pickup artist,” said Michael. “I’ve seen him do it.” “So how is your Catholic checkerboard holding up?” Mrs. W. asked. “I’m not a Catholic. I just tag along with Cisco,” I said. “Henry plays checkers?” Michael asked. He topped off the glasses. “No, it’s an analogy,” said Stoney. “Henry sees the rules of the cosmos as following a regular pattern, and his mental image of that pattern is a regular checkerboard with nearly infinitely tiny squares, stretching off in all directions. Only Henry sees that there are occasionally small problems, places where the rules don’t work, where the checkerboard doesn’t match up because two patterns were started on inconsistent squares or in different colors. So the pattern of the universe has some flaws and aberrations, where the laws and principles of the cosmos appear to be violated. There are ripples and flaws and inconsistencies that can be observed if you look closely enough. Is that about it?” he asked, speaking not to me but to Mrs. W. “I think so, but I think Henry can visualize this in three dimensions. I can follow, but I can only see it in two,” she said. Michael nodded. “Three works,” Michael said. “Interesting analogy.” “Whoa,” said Stoney. “So the question was whether your Catholic self sees the checkerboard any differently, but I think the real question is whether your quantum self sees it any differently,” Michael said. Mrs. W and Stoney looked at me speculatively. “Things are so much worse,” I said. “You’re right. I used to see little things that didn’t add up and think they were the result of tiny aberrations in Newtonian mechanics but now I have to think of them as possibly the aggregations of millions of waveform calculations stacking up in a way that is imponderably improbable to create a change in the observable universe. So my checkerboard isn’t really even a checkerboard any more. If you look at any particular square, it may not even be solid, it’s made up of thousands of tiny dots or holes or patterns that are too small to see even with an electron microscope. So it’s all far more complicated than can be imagined.” There was a pause. One of the possible outcomes here was that they’d all think I was stark raving mad. “And you see this in your head in three dimensions?” Stoney asked, lighting another cigarette and taking a tiny little sip of his B&B. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Pull back enough and it’s just shapes and colors. Close in it’s just squares and cubes. The problem is when you close in some more the cubes and squares start to dissolve into something insubstantial.” “So?” Stoney asked. “The world is substantial, not insubstantial. As an analogy that informs all aspects of one’s life, this one now appears to be … lacking, and I have no other to take its place.” “Okay,” said Mrs. W., after a pause. “I’m going to tell you a story. It’s why I gave up Physics and stuck to Math. I met Albert in 1931. He was in and out of Caltech in the thirties, and I was at Berkeley, so whenever he was in Pasadena I would go down for a visit.” “Albert Einstein?” I asked. She nodded. “And you knew him as Albert?” asked Stoney. She nodded again and lit a new cigarette. The last one was still burning in the ashtray, although almost gone. “I’ve heard he had an eye for the ladies,” said Michael, and damned if Mrs. W. didn’t seem to blush. Maybe it was just her mannerisms. Stoney discretely held up a hand as if to say “shush for now, we’ll talk about this later,” and Michael good-naturedly poured another splash of brandy into Mrs. W.’s glass. “The journal we all read in those days, about Physics, anyway, was called Physical Review. I was up at Berkeley and in October of 1935 Albert published an article with these children I didn’t know named Podolsky and Rosen—I presume they were research assistants at Princeton, called “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?” Michael looked at me intently, and I nodded. We’d heard of this. “It took a few days for it to be my turn to read it—there was no Internet in those days and no Xerox machines, but when I did I was amazed. Albert, or whoever wrote it, because there were words in that article that I’d bet my left ventricle Albert didn’t know, pointed out that the quantum rules allowed for … well, it’s hard to describe, but we called it non-locality.” “Don’t follow,” Stoney said. “Okay. So you remember Heisenberg,” she said. “You can’t observe something without changing it,” Stoney said. “More simply, you can never know both the velocity and the location of a quantum particle at the same time. But you’re right. The practical effect of this is that whatever energy is added to a system to measure either the the location or velocity of a particle always changes one or both,” she answered. “Okay.” “So say you create a bunch of photons all at once. A light beam,” she said. “Like a laser?” Stoney asked. “Yes, but no,” she said. “We didn’t have lasers back then. No. Say you excite a bunch of phosphorus or sodium atoms to the point where they emit light and then focus that light through a lens.” “Okay,” said Stoney. “So you’ve got a beam of light created by the same chemical reaction. They’re all identical photons.” “Okay,” said Stoney, again. “And then you pass the beam through a half-silvered mirror, so that half of them fly off in one direction and half of them fly off in another.” “Ahem,” said Michael. We all looked at him as though he were interrupting something important. “Yes?” she said, quizzically. “We may have left something out of the story,” said Michael. “What?” Mrs. W. asked. “Do you know about wave/particle duality?” Michael asked Stoney. “Oh, shit, you’re right!” said Mrs. W. “I know that light sometimes appears to be particles and sometimes seems to be a wave,” said Stoney. “It started with Heisenberg—you know Heisenberg? We just mentioned him a minute ago,” she said. “You can know the location or the velocity of a particle but not both,,” Stony recited. “I did go to high school.” “Just so. But Schrödinger took Heisenberg further on and developed what we call the wavefunction. In quantum, light appears to be a wave almost all the time. You can do experiments where two beams of light getting to the same place from different windows cancel each other out just like ripples on a pond or sound waves. They make very wave-like interference patterns. But the instant you look at it—observe it or measure it in any way, it immediately becomes a particle,” Michael said. “Is that how they teach it now?” Mrs. W. asked. “Sure,” said Michael. She looked at me. I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Why?” I asked. “It’s just the terminology. I would have said that light appears to be a wave before observation and appears to be a particle after observation,” she said. “Interesting,” I said. “We’re taught that that’s a distinction without a difference,” Michael said. She looked at me. I kind of shrugged. “The verbiage they teach us wouldn’t be much different,” I said. Actually a physicist wouldn’t be able to grasp the idea that a distinction didn’t result in a difference but I didn’t want to get into the whole physics/engineering deal with Michael. He’s a nice guy, and they always think we’re looking down at them. “But there is a difference. And that’s what Albert was talking about,” she said. “In what?” Stoney asked. “Physical Review. May of 1935. The journal for physics. We looked forward to every edition. The Department had one subscription and the library had another. The professors would all hand the departmental copy back and forth, so the grad students would go read the one in the library. A lot of times you’d get there and see a friend in the reference area and you’d just turn around and leave because you knew what he was reading. But in May of 1935 an article came out by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen called ‘Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?’” “The EPR?” asked Michael. “EPR?” Mrs. W. frowned and lit andother Benson & Hedges. “Sorry for interrupting, please tell the story,” said Michael, as soon as he could see she didn’t follow his question. “Go back to the example,” she said. “You’ve got all these photons created by the same reaction, all identical, some of them going one way and some of them going another because of the half-silvered mirror. What Albert realized—and honestly, Albert didn’t write this. They were his graduate assistants or something, but Albert couldn’t carry on a complicated conversation about anything other than Physics in English. My bet is that Podolsky wrote it and Rosen spiffed up his English, although ‘eigenfunction’ made it into the final draft,” she said. “Even I know eigenfunction,” said Stoney. “Really? But you know German, too,” she said, doubtfully. “Ja, aber ich erfuhr von Eigenfunktionen in einem “standard˝-Math-Klasse. Es ist ein linearer Operator-Funktion. Ich denke an ihn als einen Weg, um Vibrationen zu suchen,” Stoney said. Michael and I looked at each other and shrugged. “In Ordung,” she said, and shrugged. “Okay, so what did the paper say?” Stoney asked. “Albert pointed out that if you had two photons, two systems, he called them, with a common origin, like I’ve described, that the two particles could violate the rules of physics. Under Heisenberg, you can never know both the velocity and location of a particle. And under Schrödinger, as soon as you measure a wave, it turns into a particle. What Albert, or Podolsky, or whoever, noticed, was that if you have these entertwined particles that were created by the same reaction and split apart by whatever means, if you measured one and then observed it as a particle you would have the exact same information about the intertwined particle. So, what? Whatever you knew about one you would know about the other. Would measuring one of the two waves cause the other of the two to turn into a particle, too? And if it did, what if the two particles were miles apart? Wouldn’t the instantaneous change in the second particle violate Relativity? If the change is instantaneous no matter how far apart the particles are, the adage about the speed of light being an absolute doesn’t look so good. It was just crazy.” She took a drag from her cigarette and took a sip of her brandy, then propped her chin on her hand forlornly. “The only time I got to speak about this stuff with Albert it was just for a few minutes, when we had … other things on our minds. But he called the problem ‘spooky action at a distance.’” She smiled and stubbed out her cigarette. “Why’s that?” Stoney asked. He reached for the B&B bottle, then noticed that Mrs. W.’s snifter was empty, and poured her another drink. I’m not sure I’d ever seen her drink this much before. “We now call this issue ‘non-locality,’ said Michael. “At the time, people thought that all of physics was local—that there was no way to influence events in one place from another without some direct link—a presence, a string, a wire, a radio wave. If measuring a wave in one place caused a wave in another place to immediately collapse into a particle, this is called a non-local event, and scientists at the time considered it implausible.” “Not just implausible, impossible!” said Mrs. W. “Our science was physics, for Christ’s sake, which means the study of physical reality. An action taken in one place can’t cause a result in another place without any communication. It’s absurd. If I slam my fist down on the table here,” and she did, “it doesn’t cause somebody’s table to shake in Shanghai.” Michael looked at me with a worried expression. I gave him a surreptitious sign like a first base umpire might give waving off an appeal of a ‘no swing’ call from a catcher. Michael nodded. She continued, still agitated: “Everybody knew—Albert, Dr. Bohr, Schrodinger, all those Copenhagen boys—everybody knew that non-locality was simply impossible, and if the mechanics allowed for it, something was wrong. There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind.” Michael filled his tiny glass to the brim with B&B and drained it back in a gulp, then looked at the carpet with a speculative, worried look. “If nothing else, it would violate the speed of light,” she said. “True, it does,” said Michael. Mrs. W. didn’t notice his phrasing. “How did everyone react to the article?” Michael asked. Stoney stood. “Be right back,” he said. I assumed he was going to the restroom but he returned shortly with a brandy snifter like Mrs. W.’s. “At first, it was fun,” she said. “The problem with quantum mechanics is that ever since Heisinger and Schrodinger, it works so well. Even if you don’t understand why it works, all those little probabilities describe the way particles work and interact and stick together very well. Even those of us who think it’s incomplete or lacking agree on that.” Stoney had poured himself a generous glass of Armagnac. “Why is it incomplete if it works?” Michael asked. “Well, just because something works doesn’t mean it’s right. Archimedes knew when the sun was gonna come up. He knew where the planets and stars would be and could predict eclipses of the sun and moon. Aristotle’s system, as it got elaborated over the years, was remarkably good at predicting astronomical events.” “So?” “Well, Hell, Michael, they all thought the Earth was the center of the Solar System. Physics needs to be about reality. I love math and like it that it’s not rooted in reality—” “Ich grüße dich für diesen Gedanken,” said Stoney, raising his glass. “Toast.” Mrs. W. clinked her glass to his and they both took a swallow. “I guess I’m too much of an engineer,” said Michael. “To me, if the equations and the tables in the books keep the bridges from collapsing and the generators working, I’m good. I kind of just want to know that it works. If somebody I trust tells me it works, or if I know industry’s been relying on it for dozens, or hundreds, of years, I don’t necessarily need to look behind that.” “Mrs. W. likes to understand why the calculations work,” said Stoney. “Somebody wise once said that there was no more common error than to assume that because accurate and prolonged mathematical calculations have been made that the application of the result to some fact of nature is completely certain,” said Stoney. Michael nodded with an equivocal expression. “Stoney, that was Whitehead, and he was a moron,” said Mrs. W. “Really?” Stoney asked, swallowing some brandy and reaching for his Winstons. “Well, he was smart, but he was an idiot. Complete ankle-biter. Read him if you want, but everything he got famous for was philosophical speculations on Albert’s theories, and he really couldn’t do the math. You and Henry and I’m sure Michael too all know more math than Alfred Whitehead. You and Henry can sure as shit calculate better than Whitehead.” She thought for a minute and gazed into the distance, taking a couple of drags from her cigarette. “Bertrand Russell wrote Principia Mathematica and why he wanted to share credit with doddering old Whitehead is beyond me. He can’t have added anything to it. ” “Okay. Should I read him?” Stoney asked. “Whitehead? Yes, but quickly. He tries to make philosophical deductions from math he doesn’t understand. Have your critical antennae up.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Yes ma’am. You were saying?” said Stoney. “What was I saying?” se asked. “Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen had published an article about entangled particles in Physical Review in March of 1995. It got everyone’s attention because it pointed out that quantum mechanics allow for non-local interactions that would violate Relativity because they would be instantaneous at distances impossible if the speed of light is an absolute limit,” said Michael. She sat up a bit and lit a new cigarette. “Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “Entangled, you say.” “The two photons generated at the same time that passed through a half-mirrored glass. If you measure one, you automatically know about the other, non?” asked Michael. “Oui,” said Mrs. W. “Entangled. I guess that’s a good word for it.” She looked at Stoney. “So ist er ziemlich schlau, diese?” Stoney smiled. “Ja, ma’am.” “So it was fun for a few months,” Mrs. W. said. “We all started talking about what we knew and what we didn’t know about quantum mechanics, and it almost seemed to open up the debate again about whether just basing our calculations on probabilities that we didn’t understand was a …sensible way for a bunch of scientists to proceed.” “Why?” Michael asked. Mrs. W. frowned. She seemed puzzled by the question. “Well, most of physics has been, throughout history, making observations and then trying to figure out how to express them on paper. Schrodinger and most of the quantum guys were sure that the way to get ahead was to focus on the calculations. Don’t worry about why it works. Just shut up and calculate. And those of us who had an experimental, observational bias liked the fact that we were thinking about quantum and its relation to reality again. It was fun.” “So what happened?” Michael asked. “Niels Bohr happened. In the next issue of Physical Review. It was awful. Poor Alfred.” “We haven’t seen the article. What happened?” I asked. “Oh, Dr. Bohr got all shirty. He said, more or less, that if our equations don’t answer all the questions you’re asking, then it’s not because our equations are ‘incomplete,’ it’s because you’re asking the wrong questions.” “Excuse me?” said Michael. “It really was just that rude,” said Mrs. W. “Dr. Bohr’s idea was that the quantum equations explained things so thoroughly that there just was no room for argument, so if the equations disagreed with Albert’s notion of ‘reality,’ that it was our notion of reality that was lacking, not the equations. The equations were perfect.” “And the Physics community didn’t rally behind Einstein?” I asked. “No not at all,” she said, lighting another Benson & Hedges and raising her glass as if to drink, then noticing her glass was empty. There wasn’t much of the Armagnac left. Michael looked up at Stoney, who nodded and got up to look for a replacement. “There’s another bottle of it,” said Mrs. W. Stoney smiled. “I’ll find it,” he said, and Michael poured the last splash from the current bottle into Mrs. W.’s glass. She smiled. “You boys sure are good hosts,” she said. “You’re the hostess,” said Michael. “This is your house, too,” she said. “Stoney’s family, so you are too.” “You are the sweetest mathematician of all time,” he said, as she smiled and took a sip. “Tell me more about what people said in response to Dr. Einstein’s article.” “Oh, well, everybody sided with Dr. Bohr,” she said. “It was awful.” “But why?” asked Michael. “He was Albert fucking Einstein, for Christ’s sake,” said Michael. “Excuse his French,” I said. “Excuse me. In French: Il était Albert Einstein putain, pour l'amour du Christ,” said Michael. Mrs. W. Smiled and took a drag from her cigarette. “But by that point all of Albert’s triumphs were in the past,” she said. “They’d all come in the teens and twenties, and we were twenty years past that by 1935. Physics moves fast. Plus, Albert never liked teaching. He liked thinking about things and talking to people. He didn’t even particularly like writing papers. And Dr. Bohr always had dozens of students. And they went on to get jobs at every important university in the world. Albert had figured out all kinds of things he never wrote about. But Bohr was a much bigger deal academically. Sometimes Albert would have one or two graduate assistants around, but over in Copenhagen, Dr. Bohr had this entire school of young men, and all of them worshipped him. All any of them thought about was quantum. Relativity was something established It was old. Twenty-five years old. And Albert’s paper re-focusing attention from quantum Relativity was a little … embarrassing to them. Like he couldn’t move on. That’s the way the Bohr people saw it. Because that was the point of the paper. If …what did you call it?” she asked Michael. “Entanglement?” “Entanglement. Good word. Because if entanglement was possible, it looked like the rules of Relativity, the absolute limit of the speed of light, would be violated,” she said. “But he was right,” said Michael. “Which he?” she asked. “Einstein was right,” he answered. “Well, it sure looked like it. Assuming the whole non-local thing could be worked out. And everybody just knew that non-locality was some kind of anomaly. A quirk. But for Einstein to find a problem with their elegant equations because they disagreed with his old-fashioned Relativity was just seen as quaint and kind of pitiful. He had already started looking for the unified field theory, and he was out there working for pacifist and Zionist causes, and people just thought he’d lost it. So the next edition of Physical Review had this piece from Bohr in which he’d obviously been helped by that weasel Pauli and probably by Rosenfeld, too, because Bohr’s English wasn’t much better than Albert’s. The whole tenor of the piece was that old men like Albert—he was 56—didn’t understand how to ask relevant questions any more. That the focus on physical reality was misplaced. That at the molecular level, the interactions between particles were so divorced from human perception that to try to analogize to the perceptible physical world was silly. I mean, it didn’t say that, but that’s what it meant.” “So what did it say?” asked Michael. “It said that Albert’s concerns were misplaced, that he fundamentally misunderstood quantum reality, that there was no such thing as an observation which did not affect the thing observed, so, in essence, Albert’s question and all of the assumptions underlying it were fundamentally misplaced. Albert was flummoxed at this. He wrote he doesn’t look at it?’ I always loved that.” “All right, I’ve heard this exchange discussed in the past,” said Michael, “and what I don’t understand is why, if such a well-regarded scientist had posed such a fundamental challenge to the basic premises of their doctrine, why the Copenhagen school was so cocksure of themselves in blowing him off.” “Oh. Well there was this book,” she said. “I can’t remember the name. It was by a man named John von Neumann. He claimed to prove that what are called ‘hidden variables,’ things that might give an underlying reality to the quantum equations, was impossible. He said that because the expected value of the position and momentum of a particle both measured at the same time is equal to the sum of the expected value for a measurement of the position and the expected value of the momentum.” “=

+,” said Michael. Damn. He was good. “Damn. You’re good,” said Mrs. W. “But von Neumann offered no proof whatsoever of this. Heisenberg and all the Danes just glossed over it and let him get away with an utterly unfounded assumption. But because the book was otherwise so elegantly reasoned, Heisenberg and Bohr and all the Copenhagen boys thought that it had been proven that no ‘hidden variables’ were going to be later discovered that would give a physical reality to quantum mechanics. And when Albert’s paper came out, they all saw it as an attempt to re-introduce the hidden variables question into quantum mechanics. So they knew from von Newmann’s bookthat this nonsense had been disproved, they just didn’t know what to say.” “But nobody knew that =

+ was just an assumption?” “Well, that’s a more complicated question. Heisenberg did. He had a graduate student named Greta … Greta something,” said Mrs. W. “Dr. Grete Hermann?” asked Michael. “Yes! Damn! How did you know that?” she asked. “This is more of a hot topic the last year or so than you seem to be aware,” said Michael. “Well, I met her at a … meeting kind of thing during the War, and she said that she’d managed to convince Heisenberg that it was just an assumption, and that without it the idea that quantum mechanics had been proven to be free from ‘hidden variables’ was completely false. She said she’d published her conclusions in Germany, but it wasn’t in a physics journal, it was in some philosophy deal, and so nobody really saw it. And then Heisenberg left for England because of what was going on in Germany and nobody seems to have told Dr. Bohr and then Hitler invaded Poland and all Hell broke loose. People tried to keep up academic correspondence during the war but it just wasn’t possible with Germans, and the Germans who had left Germany, like Albert and Dr. Heisenberg, were preoccupied with other things. But most of the Copenhagen people went to their graves thinking that von Neumann had proved that the quantum mechanics had to be complete.” “Did Dr. Einstein know it was not complete?” I asked. “Well, he wouldn’t have believed it even if somebody told him it was. He wasn’t just smart, he was the most God-awful stubborn man you ever met. But I met Rosen years later, and he said one day Albert took out von Neumann’s book and pointed at the =

+ equation and asked ‘now why in the world should we believe that?’ So he knew von Neumann was wrong, and why.” “But still, he’s Albert Einstein,” said Michael. “Everybody should shut up and listen.” “That’s not how life at a university works,” she said, lighting another cigarette and looking at her empty brandy snifter. Michael doled her out another shot, but it was smaller than the last one. “At a university you’re encouraged to think, but what you’re encouraged to think is what everybody else already thinks. If the professors and grad students are all really, really focused on quantum calculations then you should follow their lead and do that, if you want to get ahead. If some strange old man who was really important twenty years ago seems to make an important point, well, however interesting that may be, it’s not going to help you get your Ph.D. Keep your eyes on the prize, what the dissertation committee is interested in.” She shook her head and took a small sip of brandy. Her cigarette seemed to me to be burning towards her fingers. “So what was the unified field theory?” asked Stoney. “I’ve heard people talk about it, but only in generalities. And remember I’m your math guy, not a science guy.” He took a sip of his brandy. He kind of smiled at his snifter. Mrs. W., head propped on her hand, looking down at the table and her brandy glass, thought for a few seconds. ”Albert was looking for a group of equations that would apply to all the forces in the universe: gravity, the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics. Everything. A unified field theory that explained all the forces of nature in terms of one field that could be explained by a simple set of equations, like Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations.” Stoney shot me a look. Having worked through Maxwell to get to Heavyside’s simplifications, it was hard to see how they could be reduced much further, much less replaced. Stoney took a prim sip of his Armagnac and shrugged. “Seems sensible,” said Michael. Stoney looked at me and shrugged again. What we now know as Maxwell’s equations don’t explain anything, they just allow us to make calculations. Michael’s an engineer. As long as the math allows him to build something, he’s good. Ask physicist who is proficient in this area ‘what is a force?’ and you’ll get a befuddled response. We know everything in the world about Physics, except what magnetism and gravity are. This doesn’t bother engineers. “Ambitious, I would say,” I said. She shot me a look. “I don’t know, it might have been possible. For somebody like Albert, anyway. But everybody thought it was a waste of time. Bohr, Pauli, Feynman. We were supposed to be looking at small things that happened inside particles, not large things that governed galaxies. Relativity was okay, it worked, it predicted lots of things, but there was no career in studying it. The excitement was in quantum. So everybody in the university system had more or less dismissed Albert as a crank. A guy who once had great ideas, but who had petered out twenty years before and was now embarrassing himself by publishing articles out of step with the mainstream. Unified field theory? Give me a break.” She swallowed the last of her drink and stubbed out her cigarette. She had her head propped on her hand with her arm crooked pretty close to the table. She had a somber expression. “Sometimes I worry that when I left Physics to concentrate on Math I abandoned Albert, too,” she said. “I never meant to do it. I was upset that science turned into camps, into sides. The Bohr people said ‘we’re right, you’re wrong, if you don’t agree with us you’re an idiot.’ So ever since I left Physics, I’ve worried that I should have stuck around and helped Alfred.” “What did you do instead?” asked Michael. “Got married and had children,” she said. “It’s a lot of fun. Especially if you like your husband.” There was a silence. Mrs. W. stubbed out her cigarette and drained her glass. “Lordy. I’m tired. Bed time.” “I’m with you, Dr. W.,” said Stoney. “I’m tired. Fun day though. Have you noticed it’s snowing again?” “No. Lordy. You boys are never going to get to Sea Island.” I looked, and it did indeed look like a blizzard outside. “Do you by any chance have copies of the articles from Physical Review?” I asked. She looked at me as though surprised by the question. “I’ve never seen them, I said. I’ve read about them, but never seen them.” “Why would you be reading about a forty year-old magazine article?” she said. “The story got picked up a few years ago by this Irish guy,” I said. “John Bell,” said Michael. “It’s late now, but maybe if you could let us look at the articles, tomorrow Henry and I could catch you up on recent developments.” Mrs. W shrugged and stood. She seemed a little unsteady. Stoney stood to accompany her. They walked into the den where the TV was, where she stored a lot of my books. I could see her try to reach for something on a high shelf, then saw Stoney reach it for her. They returned. May I say that finding within minutes something she hadn’t looked at for four decades revealed a startlingly well-ordered mind. “Here you go,” she said, laying two bound reprints on the table. “What I want you boys to remember when you read Dr. Bohr’s response is that when you tell somebody that if your solution doesn’t answer his question then he’s asking the wrong question you’re talking religion, or maybe politics. But you’re sure as Hell not talking science. And if you tell someone his notion of reality is quaint and outmoded you’re talking philosophy, not observation or deduction.” “Or maybe drugs,” said Stoney. She laughed. “Good night, boys,” she said. “I’ll walk you up,” said Stoney. “I’m beat, too, and I’m betting these two are going to read the articles before they can go to sleep.” “Toodles,” said Michael, and blew Stoney a kiss. Stoney smiled, and they left. She asked him something about the Detroit Lions, and they talked as they went up the stairs. Michael moved his chair closer to mine and we opened “Can Quantum Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?” “Any serious consideration of a physical theory must take into account the distinction between the objective reality, which is independent of any theory, and the physical concepts with which the theory operates. These concepts are intended to correspond with the objective reality, and by means of these concepts we picture this reality to ourselves.” Seemed sensible enough. The introduction went on to say that for any theory to be deemed complete, every element of physical reality must be explained by the theory. Well, I’d never heard it expressed that way, but okay. Then it went on to explain, in what seemed to me to be a roundabout way, what all Physics students who’d taken elementary quantum mechanics call the entanglement problem: lights acts like a wave until you measure it, then it acts like an incredibly large number of discrete particles. Look at it, you have particles, don’t, and you’ve got waves, both experimentally and mathematically. As we’d discussed earlier in the evening, entanglement arises when you have two identical photons that share a lot of properties that get separated somehow. As we’ve said over and over, theoretically, if you measure one of them, you have in effect measured the other one, too, and, theoretically, if you collapsed one wave into discrete particles, you’d have collapsed the other as well. Einstein considered this to be a mathematical anomaly, a figment of the calculations, “spooky action at a distance.” Since it was so obviously impossible, it had to reveal a flaw in the quantum. What Einstein, Bohr, and Mrs. W. didn’t know, but both Michael and I did, was that not only was “spooky action at a distance” an acceptable part of quantum mechanics, it was a required part of quantum mechanics, and that it had recently been verified by lab experiments. What Mrs. W., Bohr and Einstein all considered impossible, in other words, was common. It was essential. Even though it appeared to violate the speed of light. The odd thing about reading the piece was that it totally assumed that entanglement was impossible. This impossibility was so obvious to the authors that they didn’t even bother explaining why they thought it was impossible. Michael and I read through it in silence. At one point he pointed to a mathematical notation that’s not used any more and looked at me with a quizzical expression. Quantum math was much more advanced in the 1970’s than it had been in 1935, but I had been taught by Mrs. W. in her thirties-era notation and could re-express it 1970’s notation that Michael caught immediately. He turned the pages, and we were reading at about the same pace, so we ended at about the same time. He looked at me. “The holy EPR, ” said Michael. “Indeed.” “What do you think?” he asked. “Well-reasoned but long-winded,” I said. “It’s only four pages,” said Michael. “Entanglement violates Relativity,” I said, summarizing. “Yes, you’re clever, but you’d still have to demonstrate it, sweetie. Let’s look at Bohr,” he said. He picked up the reprint of Niels Bohr’s response. “Shall we?” I looked at the title page. I looked again at the title page of the original EPR article. “Okay,” I said. “So the original EPR article came out on March 25, 1935. Then Niels Bohr’s immediate, harsh, unthinkingly rude response to Einstein came out in October of 1935.” “Yes indeed. Although it does say that Dr. Bohr’s response was received in July.” “All right. And it’s the next issue of the journal.” We started reading. Let me say for the record that, as a budding physicist that night, and then again when I re-read the article as I wrote these memoirs down, Bohr’s comments were gibberish that would not have been published had they been written by anyone other than Niels Bohr. “”Such an argumentation, however, would hardly seem suited to affect the soundness of quantum-mechanical description, which is based on a coherent mathematical formalism covering automatically any procedure of measurement like that indicated.” said Bohr. Michael scowled. “Covering automatically any procedure of measurement?” asked Michael. I scowled back. “Cocky bastard,” said Michael. We looked back at the reprint. Bohr didn’t even think Einstein knew what reality was: “In fact, as we shall see, a criterion of reality like that proposed by the named authors contains—however cautious its formulation may appear—an essential ambiguity when it is applied to the actual problems with which we are here concerned.” “Asshole,” said Michael, without looking up. Bohr went through the two-slit experiments, in which beams of light (or radio waves, or x-rays, or anything else) shot through two tiny slits would behave just like waves all day long, but as soon as you measured them, or even looked at them, they’d immediately act like particles. He distinguished between classical physics and quantum physics and said what is knowable in classical physics is not knowable in quantum because of the interaction between the measuring instruments and the objects being measured. So the questions Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen raised were irrelevant: “Just in this last respect any comparison between quantum mechanics and ordinary statistical mechanics,—(sic) however useful they may be for the formal presentation of the theory,—(sic) is essentially irrelevant. Indeed we have in each experimental arrangement suited for the study of proper quantum phenomena not merely to do with an ignorance of the value of certain physical quantities, but with the impossibility of defining these quantities in an unambiguous way.” “What an arrogant asshole,” said Michael. He poured himself another tiny glass of B&B. “Well, remember he’d read von Neumann’s book, and didn’t catch the mistake. He thought that the entire ‘hidden variable’ question had been proved to be an impossible solution,” I said. “He thought Einstein was barking up not just the wrong tree, but a tree that von Neumann had proved didn’t even exist.” “What an idiot,” he said. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “They figured out an awful lot in Copenhagen.” “I know, you’re right, and everybody knew Einstein was stubborn, but he’d revolutionized physics several times before. If they’d paid attention to him people would have understood entanglement before World War II. It’s 1975, forty years after EPR, and we have no clue why it works. Dr. W. is right. When you point out a problem and somebody responds ‘there is no problem, you’re just asking the wrong question,’ that’s religion, that’s not science.” “I don’t know. The math department seems to give me that response a lot,” I said. “Funny,” he said, taking a sip. “You’re religious?” I asked. “Was. Cradle Catholic. Altar boy. Angelic altar boy, if I do say so myself. Wanted to be a nun in the worst possible way. Now lapsed.” “What happened?” I asked. “I like swallowing dicks,” he shrugged. “They tell me this is a sin. I think they must be wrong and until they come around I’m staying away.” “Gotcha,” I said. “Back to this asshole Bohr,” he said, and we looked back at the paper. Bohr next said that our conception of time is faulty. Trust me, it makes no more sense to someone with a Ph.D in physics than it does to you: “It is true that we have freely made use of such words as ‘before’ and ‘after’ implying time-relationships; but in each case allowance must be made for a certain inaccuracy., which is of no importance, however, as long as the time intervals concerned are sufficiently large compared with the proper periods entering in the closer analysis of the phenomenon under investigation. Ads soon as we attempt a more accurate time description of quantum phenomena, we meet with well-known new paradoxes, for the elucidation of which further features of the interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments must be taken into account.” I looked at Michael with what I’m sure registered as a quizzical expression. “Gibberish,” he said. Bohr went on to say that clocks were unreliable indicators of time, if I followed him, because reading the clock changed the way it recorded time. In moving towards a close, he said more or less that classical physics was essentially meaningless in quantum mechanics: “In accordance with this situation there can be no question of any ambiguous interpretation of the symbols of quantum mechanics other than that embodied in the well-known rules which allow to (sic) predict the results to be obtained by a given experimental arrangement described in a totally classical way, and which have found their general expression through the transformation theorems, (sic) already referred to. By securing its proper correspondence with the classical theory, the theorems exclude in particular any imaginable inconsistency in the quantum-mechanical description, connected with a change of the place where the discrimination is made between object and measuring procedure we have only a free choice of this place within a region where the quantum-mechanical description of the process is concerned is effectively equivalent with the classical description.” “Exclude any imaginable inconsistency,” said Michael. “Pretty sweeping,” I agreed. “Gack, what an asshole,” he said. “Okay, so you don’t think Dr. W. knows about Bell’s inequality or the entanglement experiments?” “Doesn’t sound like it,” I said. “Do you think we should tell her?” “Yeah, although I think she’ll be surprised. She stopped quantum in 1935. Even her vocabulary is old-fashioned. ‘Non-local.’ When she first learned Physics from her father, who was educated in Germany—“ I started. “So that’s where that came from,” Michael said. “What?” I asked. “She and handsome Stone-o are always talking German to each other,” he said finishing his drink with a final tiny sip. “I think I want to taste this Armagnac,” he said. He reached across the table for Stoney’s empty glass and poured himself a small portion. “Wait,” I said, as he did so. “Where did you pick up ‘handsome Stone-o?” “Oh, you called him that once when you were teasing him and I picked up on it. The only time I’ve seem him blush was when he said he wouldn’t explain. I expect a girl is involved. He apparently had terrible taste in girls, although you have to admit his taste in boys is impeccable.” “Indeed,” I said, smiling. “And note that I am not asking you to tell me the story. If he doesn’t want me to know, I won’t ask his best friend.” “Best friend?” I said, puzzled. “Yes, Henri, you’re his best friend. Actually, I am, but I’m his lover so that puts me in a different category.” I was surprised, and my expression must have showed it. “He loves you, Henry. So do lots of people.” “Why?” I asked. “Because you accept people for what they are without judging them. Since you seem to be unaware of your effect on the cosmos, let me tell you that I’m willing to bet, on extremely long odds, and I am not a betting man although I have heard stories told about you that demonstrate that you are, that both Beatriz and Cisco regard you as their best friends, too.” “Really,” I said. This was all mystifying to me. “And Mrs. W. loves you as the son she never had.” “She has a son,” I said. “They’re just not close.” “Well there you go,” he said. “Why are you resisting this, Henry? People like you.” “I don’t mean to resist, but I guess I spent so long alone that I think of myself as a loner,” I said. “That’s as may be but you’re a good friend to lots of people. People like telling stories about you, but what the members of your fan club always talk about is that you never violate confidences, never judge people, and always accept them for who they are.” “I don’t see Cisco describing me that way,” I said. “He stresses the ‘trustworthy with secrets’ aspect of your personality,” said Michael. “I guess I find all this a little perplexing. I like all these people and now that I think about it I value their friendships, as well. I just don’t think about that kind of thing too much.” I thought for a minute. “I also value my friendship with you, Michael,” I said. “I didn’t mean to leave you out.” “Henri!” he said. “How extravagant to be named in such company.” “Not really. I like you. I just don’t think about that kind of thing too much. And I regard Beatriz, Stoney, and Cisco as interesting people to know and be around. You, too. It’s just odd to hear you speculate that they might think of me as best friends. I just don’t think about that kind of thing a lot.” “Is it okay?” he asked. “Yeah, I kind of like it,” I said. “And that Beatriz is drop-dead gorgeous,” Michael said, slyly. I shrugged. “Yeah, she’s pretty,” I said. “She’s not Melissa pretty, but she’s pretty.” “I’ve heard Cisco say that,” Michael said. “She’s not Melissa pretty. What does that mean?” “I honestly don’t know why I said that,” I said. “It means really, really pretty. In a way that particularly appeals to the viewer. I must have picked it up from Cisco.” “No, he says he picked it up from you. All the boys use it now, and it’s making its way into the Nashville gay scene, as well. I am pleased to report that a film reviewer I know tried to pick me up last weekend at The Other Side by telling me I was Melissa pretty.” “Did it work?” “No. Stoney was there.” He took a sip of his Armagnac. “You know Stoney thinks you’re gay?” he asked. “He started saying that because I didn’t respond the way he thought I ought to with Ginny, who is Mr.s W’s favorite niece. I can tell I’m not as libidinal as some, but really, the last person I would hit on is Mrs. W.’s favorite neice.” “Stoney also notes that both Beatriz and Toni have beautiful faces and perfect bodies and flirt with you constantly and that you do not appear to have fucked either one, although everyone says you could have done both and kept it a secret,” he said. “I can’t have sex with Beatriz,” I said. “The reason she likes me is that I don’t hit on her. She trusts me.” “Toni?” he asked. “She’s stark raving mad,” I said. “True. Still, this does not prove to be an impediment to most straights.” “She actually quizzed me on why I never hit on her one time. She said she didn’t want to have sex with me but seemed miffed that I didn’t act like I wanted to have sex with her,” I said. “What did you tell her?” he asked. “That she was stark raving mad and it was bad luck to fuck crazy ladies, or something like that,” I said. “Another great Henry story,” he said. “So back to topic,” he said, before I could respond. “We need to tell Dr. W. about Bell’s inequality and the entanglement experiments tomorrow?” “Yes. Sure. She’ll be interested. It may get her thinking about physics again. You should talk, though. I’m not sure I’m good at explaining things. I tend to listen and think and figure things out.” “No trouble,” he said. “I find all of this fascinating.” “Which part?” I asked. “All of it. You, your circle of friends, the amazing and semi-mystical Dr. W., entanglement, the EPR paper, all of it. You live in an interesting world, mon cher.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “Toodles,” he said, smiling, and stood to go. I moved the glasses to the kitchen, emptied the ashtrays, put the bottles away, and turned out the lights. After I turned out the lights I could see that the moon was out and it was snowing again. Somehow Monty sensed that I was about to go to bed and showed up wagging his tail, so I bundled up and took him for a short walk, although he wasn’t interested in being out for long. “The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow gave the luster of mid-day to objects below,” I said to Monty as we returned to the house. Where did I learn that line?