The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

“And these lines?”

“This is the wave part,” I said, pointing at the diagram. “Fire a photon stream through two adjacent slits, and the waves create an image on the phosphorescent screen behind the slits. The frequencies of the waves zero- sum each other at certain intervals, and a characteristic interference pattern is captured on the screen. Do you see?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But if you put a detector at the two slits…” I began drawing another picture under the first. “Then it changes everything. When the detectors are in place, light stops behaving like a wave and starts acting like a particle series.”

I continued. “So instead of an interference pattern, you get two distinct clusters of phosphorescence where the particles pass through the slits and contact the screen.”

“Yes, I remember now,” Satish said. “This is familiar. I believe there was a chapter on this in grad school.”

“In grad school, I taught this. And I watched the students’ faces. The ones who understood what it meant — who truly understood — always looked troubled by it. I could see it in their expressions, the pain of believing something which can’t be true.”

“This is a famous experiment. You are planning to replicate?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? It has already been replicated many times; no journal will publish.”

“I know. I’ve read papers on the phenomena; I’ve given class lectures on the details; I understand it mathematically. Hell, most of my earlier research is based on the assumptions that came out of this experiment. But I’ve never actually seen it with my eyes. That’s why.”

“It is science.” Satish shrugged. “You don’t need to see it.”

“I think I do,” I said. “Need to. Just once.”

The next few weeks passed in a blur. Satish helped me with my project, and I helped him with his. We worked mornings in his lab. Evenings we spent in Room 271, setting up. The phosphorescent plate was a problem — then the alignment of the thermionic gun. In a way, it felt like we were partners, almost, Satish and I. And it was a good feeling. After working so long by myself, it was good to be able to talk to someone.

We traded stories to pass the time. Satish talked of his problems. They were the problems good men sometimes have when they’ve lived good lives. He talked about helping his daughter with her homework, and worrying about paying for her college. He talked of his family backhome — saying it fast that way, backhome, so you heard the proper noun; and he talked of the fields, and the bugs, and the monsoon, and the ruined crops. “It is going to be a bad year for sugar cane,” he told me, as if we were farmers instead of researchers. He talked about his mother’s advancing years. He talked of his brothers, and his sisters, and his nieces and nephews; and I came to understand the weight of responsibility he felt.

Bending over the gate arrays, soldering tool in hand, he told me, “I talk too much, you must be sick of my voice.”

“Not at all.”

“You have been a big help me with my work. How can I ever repay you, my friend?”

“Money is fine,” I told him. “I prefer large bills.”

I wanted to tell him of my life. I wanted to tell him of my work at QSR, and that some things you learn, you wish you could unlearn. I wanted to tell him that memory has gravity, and madness a color; that all guns have names, and it is the same name. I wanted to tell him I understood about his tobacco; that I’d been married once, and it hadn’t worked out; that I used to talk softly to my father’s grave; that it was a long time since I’d really been okay.

Instead of telling him these things, I talked about the experiment. That I could do. Always could do.

“It started a half-century ago as a thought experiment,” I told him. “To prove the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Physicists felt quantum mechanics couldn’t be the whole story, because the math takes too many liberties with reality. There was still that impossible contradiction: the photoelectric effect required light be particulate; Young’s results showed it to be a wave. Only later, of course, when the technology finally caught up to the theory, it turned out the experimental results followed the math. The math says you can either know the position of an electron, or the momentum, but never both. The math, it turned out, wasn’t metaphor at all. The math was dead serious. The math wasn’t screwing around.”

Satish nodded like he understood.

Later, working on his gate arrays, he traded his story for mine.

“There once was a guru who brought four princes into the forest,” he told me. “They were hunting birds.”

“Birds,” I said.

“Yes, and up in the trees, they see one, a beautiful bird with bright feathers. The first prince said, ‘I will shoot the bird,’ and he pulled back on his arrow and shot into the trees. But the arrow missed. Then the second prince tried to shoot, and he, too, missed. Then the third prince. Finally the fourth prince shot high into the trees, and this time the arrow struck and the beautiful bird fell dead. The guru looked at the first three princes and said, ‘Where were you aiming?’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘At the bird.’

“‘The guru looked at the fourth prince, ‘And you?’

“‘At the bird’s eye.’”

Once the equipment was set up, the alignment was the last hurdle to be cleared. The electron gun had to be aimed so the electron was just as likely to go through either slit. The equipment filled most of the room — an assortment of electronics and screens and wires.

In the mornings, in the hotel room, I talked to the mirror, made promises to gunmetal eyes. And by some miracle did not drink.

One day became two. Two became three. Three became five. Then I hadn’t had a drink in a week.

At the lab, the work continued. When the last piece of equipment was positioned, I stood back and surveyed the whole setup, heart beating in my chest, standing at the edge of some great universal truth. I was about to be witness to something few people in the history of the world had ever seen.

When the first satellite was launched toward the deep space in 1977, it carried a special golden record of coded messages. The record held diagrams and mathematical formulas. It carried the image of a fetus, the calibration of a circle, and a single page from Newton’s System of the World. It carried the units of our mathematical system, because mathematics, we’re told, is the universal language. I’ve always felt that golden record should have carried a diagram of this experiment, the Feynman double-slit.

Because this experiment is more fundamental than math. It is what lives under the math. It tells of reality itself.

Richard Feynman said this about the slit experiment: “It has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In truth, it contains only mystery.”

Room 271 held two chairs, a marker board, a long lab bench, and several large tables. I’d hung dark canvas over the windows to block out the light. The setup sprawled across the length of the room.

Slits had been cut into sheets of steel that served to divide the areas of the setup. The phosphorescent screen was loaded into a small rectangular box behind the second set of slits.

James came by a little after 5:00, just before going home for the evening.

“They told me you signed up for lab space,” he said.

“Yeah.”

He stepped inside the room. “What is this?” he said, gesturing to the equipment.

“Just old equipment from Docent. No one was using it, so I thought I’d see if I could get it to work.”