At the Rialto

I finally got my room at five, after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

“What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institute Henri Poincare people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”

“Speaking of St. Louis,” Dr. Takumi said, “have you seen David yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Last year at the annual meeting you two were practically inseparable. Moonlight river boat rides and all.”

“What’s on the programming tonight?” I said to Abey.

“David was just here,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going out to look at the stars in the sidewalk.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Abey said. “Riverboat rides and movie stars. What do those things have to do with quantum theory? Racine would have been an appropriate setting for a group of physicists. Not like this… this… do you realize we’re practically across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? And Hollywood Boulevard’s where all those gangs hang out. If they catch you wearing red or blue, they’ll—”

He stopped. “Is that Dr. Gedanken?” he asked, staring at the front desk.

I turned and looked. A short roundish man with a mustache was trying to check in. “No,” I said. “That’s Dr. Onofrio.”

“Oh, yes,” Abey said, consulting his program book. “He’s speaking tonight at the opening ceremonies. On the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Are you going?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, which was supposed to be a joke, but Abey didn’t laugh.

“I must meet Dr. Gedanken. He’s just gotten funding for a new project.”

I wondered what Dr. Gedanken’s new project was—I would have loved to work with him.

“I’m hoping he’ll come to my workshop on the wonderful world of quantum physics,” Abey said, still watching the desk. Amazingly enough, Dr. Onofrio seemed to have gotten a key and was heading for the elevators. “I think his project has something to do with understanding quantum theory.”

Well, that let me out. I didn’t understand quantum theory at all. I sometimes had a sneaking suspicion nobody else did either, including Abey Fields, and that they just weren’t willing to admit it.

I mean, an electron is a particle except it acts like a wave. In fact, a neutron acts like two waves and interferes with itself (or each other), and you can’t really measure any of this stuff properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that isn’t the worst of it. When you set up a Josephson junction to figure out what rules the electrons obey, they sneak past the barrier to the other side, and they don’t seem to care much about the limits of the speed of light either, and Schrodinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead till you open the box, and it all makes about as much sense as Tiffany’s calling me Dr. Gedanken.

Which reminded me, I had promised to call Darlene and give her our room number. I didn’t have a room number, but if I waited much longer, she’d have left. She was flying to Denver to speak at CU and then coming on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the middle of his telling me how beautiful Cleveland was in the winter and went to call her.

“I don’t have a room yet,” I said when she answered. “Should I leave a message on your answering machine or do you want to give me your number in Denver?”

“Never mind all that,” Darlene said. “Have you seen David yet?”