The Hollow Man

EYES

Gail and Jeremy take the train home from Boston on Sunday, not talking about the experience of the weekend with Jacob Goldmann, but communicating about it almost all the way home.

Did you mindtouch the part about his family dying in the Holocaust?

Holocaust? Jeremy had felt the power of Jacob Goldmann’s intellect, and had occasionally lowered his mindshield to glimpse a concept or experimental protocol for clarification during their long talks, but mostly he had respected the older man’s privacy. No.

Ahhh, Jerry … Gail’s sadness is like a maroon shadow stealing over a sunny landscape. She looks out the window at the urban wasteland flickering by. I didn’t mean to pry, but every time I tried to understand what you two were saying by peeking, I’d get more images, more memories.

What images, kiddo?

The gray sky, gray buildings, gray earth, gray watchtowers … the black barbed wire against the gray sky. The striped uniforms, shaved heads, skeletal figures lost in rough and baggy wool. The morning lineup in the milky light of dawn, the breaths of the prisoners rising like a fog above them all. German SS guards in their thick, wool overcoats, leather belts, and leather boots looking rich and oily in the wan light. Shouts. Cries. The marching bare feet of the forest work detail.

His wife and son died there, Jerry.

Is it Auschwitz?

No, a place called Ravensbruck. A small camp. They survived five winters there. Separated, but in touch by notes sent through an underground mail network. His wife and son were shot two weeks before the camp was liberated.

Bremen blinks. The clacking of metal wheels on metal rails is vaguely hypnotic. He closes his eyes. I didn’t know. But what about his daughter … Rebecca?… The one who was in London this weekend?

Jacob remarried in 1954. His second wife was British … she had been in the medical unit that liberated the camps.

Where is she now?

She died of cancer in 1963.

Jesus.

Jerry, he is so sad! Didn’t you feel it? There is a sadness there deeper than anything I’ve ever felt.

Bremen opens his eyes and rubs his cheeks. He had not shaved that morning and the stubble is beginning to itch. Yeah … I mean I got a sort of sense of general sadness. But his excitement is real, too, Gail. He’s really excited about the research.

As are you.

Well, yeah … He sent an image of Jacob and himself in Stockholm, accepting their shared Nobel Prizes. The humor did not quite click.

Jerry, I didn’t understand all of the stuff about quantum physics. I mean, I understood how some of the relativity stuff related to your dissertation … a lot of that was probability and uncertainty theory, too … but what does it have to do with Jacob’s work with charting the brain?

Bremen turns to look at her. I could take you through the simpler math again.

I’d prefer you to take me through the words.

Bremen sighs and closes his eyes. Okay … you understand about how Jacob’s work translates through my math? How the neurological wave actions he’s recording end up as sort of superholograms? Complex, interacting fields?

Yeah.

Well, there’s another step. And I’m not quite sure where it’s going to take us. To even work with the data properly I’m going to have to learn a lot about the new nonlinear math they call chaos mathematics. That and fractal geometry. I don’t know why fractals are important in this, but the data suggests they are.…

Stick to the point, Jerry.

Okay. The point is that Jacob’s snapshots of the human mind … the human personality … in action bring up the classic “two-slit experiment” in quantum mechanics. Do you remember that from college? It led to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.

Tell me again.

Well, quantum mechanics says that energy and matter—in their smallest chunks—sometimes behave like waves, sometimes like particles. It depends on how you observe them. But the scary part of quantum mechanics … the voodoo part that Einstein never really accepted … is that the very act of observation is what makes the observed object one thing or the other.

Where do the two slits come in?

For the last half a century experimenters have been replicating an experiment where particles … electrons, maybe … are shot at a barrier with two parallel slits in it. On a screen beyond the barrier you can see where the electrons or photons or whatever get through.…

Gail sits up and frowns at Jerry. He sees his face, eyes closed, frowning slightly, through her gaze. Jerry, are you sure this is going to have something to do with Jacob Goldmann’s MRIs or whatever of people’s heads?

Bremen opens his eyes. Yep. Bear with me. He opens two bottles of orange juice that they had packed that morning and hands one to Gail. The two-slit experiment is sort of the ultimate test of the secrecy if not downright perversity of the universe.

Go ahead. The orange juice is warm. Gail makes a face and sets it back in the bag.

Okay. You’ve got two slits … one is closed, electrons or particles are zapping through the other one. What would you get on the screen behind the barrier?

With only one slit open?

Right.

Well … Gail hates puzzles. She always has. She considers puzzles as an invention of people who like to embarrass other people. If she senses the slightest hint of condescension in Jeremy’s mental tone, she’s going to punch him in the solar plexus. Well, I guess you get one line of electrons. A stripe of light or whatever.

Correct. Jeremy’s thought stream has taken on the slightly pedantic tone that he uses with his math students, but there is no condescension there. Only an eagerness to share an exciting concept. Gail does not hit him in the solar plexus.

Okay, continues Jeremy, now, what would you get with both slits open?

Two stripes of light … or electrons.

Jeremy sends the image of the Cheshire cat grinning. Uh-uh. Wrong. That’s what ordinary macro-universe common sense would dictate, but that proves not to be the case when you do the experiment. When you actually do it, with both slits open, you always get alternating bright and dark stripes on the screen.

Gail chews a thumbnail. Alternating bright and dark stripes … oh, I get it. She does, with only the briefest glimpse at the sentences and images Jeremy is framing for her. With both slits open, the electrons act like waves, not particles. The dark stripes are where the waves overlap and cancel each other out.

Got it, kiddo. A classic interference pattern.

But what’s the problem? You say that quantum mechanics predicts that little bits of matter and energy will act like both waves and particles. So they’re doing what’s predicted. Science is safe … right?

Bremen sends an image of a jack-in-the-box bobbing and nodding. Yeah … science is safe, but sanity is in real danger. The trick is … after all these years … that the very act of observing makes those particle/wave thingees collapse into one state or the other. We’ve tried incredibly complex experiments to “peek” at the electron during its transit … shutting one of the slits while the electron’s passing through the other one … we’ve tried everything. The electron … or photon, or whatever we use in the experiment … always seems to “know” whether the second slit is open or not. In a real sense the electrons behave precisely as if they not only know how many slits are open, but as if we’re watching them! Other experiments … Bell’s Inequality experiment, for instance … get the same reaction from separated particles flying apart from one another at the speed of light. One particle “knows” the state of its twin.

Gail sends the image of a row of question marks. Communication faster than the speed of light? she sends. That’s impossible. The particles couldn’t exchange any information if they’re flying apart at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light … right?

Kee-rect, kiddo. Jeremy transmits the throbbing of his very real headache. And it’s been a headache for physicists for decades. Not only do these buggery little particles do the impossible … like know what their twin’s doing in the two-slit experiment and Bell’s experiment and others … but we still can’t get a peek at the real substance of the universe. The particle behind the curtain with its clothes off.

Gail tries to picture that. Cannot. The particle with its clothes off?

There’s no way we’ve devised, with all our hypertechnology and Nobel Prize winners, to sneak a peek at the real stuff of the universe when it’s wearing both aspects.

Both aspects? Gail’s mental tone is almost querulous. You mean both wave and particle?

Yeah.

But why is all this quantum junk important to understanding how the human mind … the personality … is like a superhologram?

Bremen nods. Part of him is thinking about Jacob Goldmann’s family in the death camps. Gail, the stuff Jacob is getting … the wave patterns that I’ve been translating through Fourier transforms and all the rest … they’re like reflections of the universe.

Gail takes a breath. Mirrors. You were talking about mirrors on Friday night. Mirrors of the … universe?

Yeah. The minds that Jacob’s been charting … those incredibly complex holographic structures, just graduate students’ minds … what they really shake down to is a sort of peek at the fractal structure of the universe. I mean, it’s like a two-slit experiment … no matter how cleverly we peek behind the curtain, there’s the same magic.

Gail nods. Waves or particles. Never both.

Right, kiddo. But we’re way beyond waves and particles here. The human mind seems to be collapsing probability structures in the macro as well as the micro.…

Which means what?

Bremen tries to find a way to limit the power of the concept to words. He can’t. It means … it means that people … us … you and I, everybody … we’re not only reflecting the universe, translating it from probability sets to reality sets, so to speak … we’re … my God, Gail, we’re creating it on a moment-to-moment, second-to-second basis.

Gail stares at him.

Bremen grabs her by the forearms, trying to get the terrible size and importance of the concept across to her through sheer pressure and force of will. We’re the observers, Gail. All of us. And without us … according to the math on my chalkboard at home … without us, the universe would be pure duality, infinite probability sets, infinite modalities.…

Chaos, sends Gail.

Yes. Right. Chaos. He collapses back in his seat. His shirt is plastered to his back and sides with sweat.

Gail sits in silence for a moment, digesting what Jeremy has said. The train clacks southward. For a moment there is darkness as they enter some short tunnel, then they are in the gray light again. Solipsism, she sends.

Hmmm? Jeremy has been lost in equations.

You and Jacob talked about solipsism. Why? Because this research suggests that man is, after all, the measure of all things? Gail never hesitates to use “man” to stand for “people” or “humankind.” She always says that she values clarity more than the feminist imperative.

Partially … Jeremy is thinking of Fourier transforms again, but more in an effort to hide something from Gail than to solve any problem in mathematics.

Why are you … who is this Everett person you’re thinking about? What does he have to do with that tree you’re trying to hide?

Jeremy sighs. You remember that Jacob and I were talking about some theoretical work that a guy named Hugh Everett did some thirty-five years ago?

Gail nods, sees Jeremy’s closed eyes, and sends an image of herself nodding.

Anyway, says Jeremy, Everett’s work … and the stuff done by Bryce DeWitt and others in more recent years … it’s weird stuff. It solves most of the apparent paradoxes of quantum mechanics, but it does it by getting into real deep water as far as theories go. And …

Impatient, Gail goes behind the words and the shifting math images to look at the heart of what Jeremy is trying to explain. “Parallel worlds!” She realizes that she has said this aloud, almost shouting it. A man in the seat across the aisle glances over, then returns to his newspaper. Parallel worlds, she sends again in a telepathic whisper.

Jeremy winces a bit. That’s the sci-fi term.…

Science fiction, corrects Gail. But this Hugh Everett, he postulated a splitting of reality into equal and separate parallel worlds … or parallel universes … right?

Jeremy still frowns at the language but glimpses her understanding of the concept. Sort of. Uh … take the two-slit experiment for instance. When we try to observe the spread-out electron wave, the particle knows we’re watching and collapses into a definite particle. When we don’t watch, the electron keeps its options open … particle and wave. And the interesting part is, when it acts like a wave … remember the interference pattern?

Yeah.

Well, it’s a wave-form interference pattern, all right, but according to Born’s terms, it’s not electrons passing through the slits that produces wave-pattern interference, but the probability of waves passing through. What’s interfering are probability waves!

Gail blinks. You lost me, Kemo Sabe.

Jeremy tries to draw an example, but ends up sending primitive equations:

I = (H + J)²

I = H² + J² + 2HJ

not

I = I₁ + I₂

He sees her frown, sends Shit!, and mentally erases the mental blackboard.

Kiddo, it means that the particles are particles, but that the act of us observing them makes them choose a course of action … this hole? that hole? so many choices!… and since the probability of going through one hole is the same as going through the other, we’re recording probability waves creating the diffraction pattern on the screen behind the slits.

Gail nods, beginning to understand.

You got it, kiddo, urges Jeremy. We’re watching probability structures collapse. Alternatives fizzle. We’re watching the bloody universe sort itself out from a finite range of probabilities into an even more finite set of realities.

Gail remembers the tree that Jeremy had been thinking about. And this Hugh Everett’s theory …

Right! Jeremy is ecstatic. He has been wanting to share some of this with Gail for years, but has been afraid of appearing pedantic. Everett’s theory says that when we force that electron to choose, it doesn’t really choose which slit or which probability, it just splits another entire reality in which we … the observer … watch it go through one slit while its equal and separate probability partner goes through the other hole.

Gail is physically dizzy from the successful effort to understand the concept. While the “second universe” observers watch it go through the other hole!

“Right!” shouts Jeremy. He looks around, aware that he has shouted. No one seems to have paid any attention. He closes his eyes again to better visualize the images. Right! Everett neatly solves the quantum paradoxes by arguing that every time a bit of quantum energy or matter is forced to make such a choice—that is, whenever we try to observe it choosing—then a new branch grows on the reality tree. Two equal and separate realities come into existence!

Gail concentrates on remembering the blue-and-white covers of her old Ace Double Novels. Parallel worlds! Just like I said.

Not really parallel, sends Jeremy. Words and images just don’t do it, but imagine a constantly growing and branching tree:

Gail is exhausted. Okay … and what you and Jacob were excited and upset about was that your analysis of these holograms … these standing-wave thingees that you think represent human consciousness … they’re like Everett’s theory somehow?

Jeremy thinks of his hundreds of equations at home, filling the chalkboard and enough sheets of paper to create a second dissertation. Jacob’s mapping of the holographic mind shows it breaking down reality probability functions … “choosing” … the same way the electrons do.

Gail is irritated by the simplemindedness of his explanation. Don’t patronize me, Jerry. People don’t have to choose which slit they’re going to pop through. People don’t end up smearing their probability waves as interference patterns on a wall!

Jeremy sends a wordless apology, but his message is insistent and unapologetic. They do! We do! Not just in the millions of choices we make every day … shall we stand? shall we sit? do we take this train or the next one? what color tie should I wear?… but in the more important choices of actually interpreting the data that the universe sends us through our senses every second. That’s where the choices are made, Gail … that’s where the math tells Jacob and me that the probability structures are collapsing and recombining every few seconds … interpreting reality! Jeremy makes a mental note to himself to send for the most recent papers on chaos math and fractal analysis as soon as he gets home.

Gail sees the flaw in this theory. But, Jerry, your reality and my reality aren’t separate things. We know that thanks to our mindtouch ability. We see the same things … smell the same things … touch the same things.

Jeremy takes her hand. That’s what Jacob and I have to investigate, kiddo. The probability structures are collapsing constantly … from almost infinite sets to very finite sets … in all of the observed standing wavefronts … the MR-imaged minds … but there seems to be some governing factor in deciding, for everyone, what that observed reality must be from second to second.

Gail bites her lip. ???????????????????

Jeremy tries again. It’s as if some traffic manager is telling all the electrons which slit to jump through, kiddo. Some … force … some less-than-random probability delineator telling the entire human race … or at least the few hundred representatives of it that Jacob’s tested so far … just how to perceive a reality that should be wildly permeable. Chaotic.

Neither sends anything for a long moment. Then Gail offers—God?

Jeremy starts to smile, then does not. He senses how deadly serious she is. Maybe not God, he sends, but at least His dice.

Gail turns her face to the window. The gray brick buildings they are passing remind her of the long rows of barracks at Ravensbruck.

Neither of them attempts mindtouch again until they are home. In bed.