by Ulf Wolf
He nodded in agreement and scrambled inside.
“They have a thing called umbrellas,” Melissa informed him. “It’s supposed to keep you dry in weather like this.”
“This is not England,” said Julian. “Or Boston.”
“Boston’s into umbrellas?” said Melissa.
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re an east-coast thing.”
“Here,” said Melissa. “Give me that jacket.”
Julian obliged, and Melissa hung it up, away from the other coats and jackets to give it space to dry.
“Ruth?” said Julian.
“Yes,” said Melissa. “She’s waiting for you. She and Ananda. They’re in Ananda’s room. Do you want anything? Coffee? Have you had breakfast?”
“Coffee would be great.”
“You go on,” said Melissa, “I’ll bring it.”
“Thanks.”
Julian had visited the Marten household at least once a month over the last few years, and knew where to go. The door to Ananda’s room stood open, but he still announced his arrival with a soft knock.
They both looked up from a diagram that Ruth was drawing.
“Julian,” said Ananda. “Good to see you.”
“Do you remember EPROMs?” asked Ruth.
“EPROMs?”
“Erasable, programmable, read-only memory.”
“Yes, I know the acronym.”
“Do we still use them?”
“I’m sure we do. In some fashion or another.”
Julian looked around for somewhere to sit down. Something Ananda would notice, and did. “Oh, I’m sorry, Julian—here.” He stood up and fetched a chair for him. He placed it by his desk, next to Ruth’s. Julian eased into it, and eyed the diagram Ruth was still sketching.
“Why do you ask?” he asked.
“Remember we talked about sequences of agreements?”
“You talked about.”
“Well, yes.”
“Yes, I do.”
“By that sequence, some things can, by agreement, be undone. Others can’t. Yesterday, we didn’t know whether the Borneo twin was positive or not until we looked, until, even after sixteen relays, we looked. Even had the data up to that point shown a negative Borneo particle, when we looked it was instantly positive, for that is what life has agreed will happen. We’ve certainly proven that there’s no way around that.”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Julian agreed.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only way to erase the data stored on a nonvolatile EPROM is to douse it with a healthy helping of ultra-violet light? Strong ultra-violet light.”
“That’s correct,” said Julian. Ananda nodded in agreement, he must have researched this as well—he was pretty handy with his Mortimer.
“RAM, random access memory, on the other hand, is easily erased, or changed.”
“Of course. It’s volatile. Just turn off the power, or write something else to it. That’s how RAM works.”
Ruth smiled, apparently pleased with herself. “What if,” she said, and pointed to her diagram. “What if we have the Borneo laser report dually, both to a RAM receptacle and an EPROM receptacle.”
Julian’s internal geyser rumbled again, and then he shivered. Then grew very still, very vacuum: He saw, yes, he saw.
“If we see a polarity change because we look, even if there had been no change until we did, such a change is easily made and displayed by RAM, but perhaps not by EPROM. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I believe that the agreements that make the EPROM work, run deeper than detecting a looking life. I don’t think there is a way for the data recorded on the EPROM to be changed once the particles realized they’re being viewed as to behavior. And, just to be sure, we’ll keep any source of ultra-violet light well away from the EPROM.”
“My god,” said Julian. Then, after a few racing heartbeats, and a better look at the diagram, “I believe that will work.”
Ananda smiled.
“Coffee for Julian,” announced Melissa.
Ananda made some room for it, and fetched a coaster out of a drawer.
“What will work?” said Melissa, putting the mug of steaming coffee down on the bamboo coaster.
Julian looked up at her. “I think Ruth has come up with a way to outwit the twin particles.”
“Agreement,” said Ruth.
Melissa, interested, went to get another chair, brought it, sat down. “I’m a big ear,” she said.
“We can’t prove that life is what facilitates the non-local communication for whenever we look, the particles know we’re looking and behaves as expected,” said Julian.
“As agreed,” said Ruth.
“Yes,” said Melissa. “Ananda told me.”
“Ah,” said Julian, looking over at Ananda. Then, looking over Ruth’s diagram, asked for a clean sheet of paper and a pen, which the ever-efficient Ananda supplied.
“If I understand Ruth correctly,” said Julian, while sketching out the Colombia-Borneo experiment again, “even though the particles will detect that they are being viewed by life, and so will conform accordingly, their actual state, or pre-viewed state, will already have been recorded on the EPROM, which cannot be reversed or altered when we finally look. The RAM data will be changed—we know that they can manage that, because they have done so in earlier experiments—but the EPROM data will not.”
Ruth nodded. As did Ananda.
“So what do you hope to see?” asked Melissa.
Ruth looked at Ananda and then at Julian. “I’m not sure,” she said.
“We hope to see the state of the particles when no one is looking,” said Ananda.
“Yes,” said Julian. “The state of the particles when no one is looking.”
“Will that prove that life is the medium that facilitates non-local communication?” Melissa wanted to know.
“It will show what effect life looking will have on them,” said Ruth.
“And what effect is that?” said Melissa.
“Well,” said Ruth. “Basically, without life there would be no particles.”
“So, if life is not looking, there will be nothing there,” said Melissa.
Ruth looked at her, then at Ananda, then at Julian, then back at Melissa. Then said to all of them, with a smile, “See, that’s why I chose her as my mother.”
“I think you’re right,” Ananda told her.
Julian was still catching up. “What exactly do you mean?” to all of them.
“If life takes absolutely no interest in the twin particles, there will most likely not be any particles there at all,” said Ruth.
“And no data will be recorded on the EPROM,” said Julian.
“Not until we look,” said Ruth.
“We’re going to need a large EPROM,” said Julian.
“That is true,” said Ruth.
:
And that turned out to be the problem. Non-volatile EPROMs were normally used to house smaller programs that would stay active, or in place, even though the computer would power down. Julian and Ruth spent the next three weeks both on rescheduling Colombia and Borneo, and on tracking down a sufficiently large EPROM. They estimated that to capture all the data from the Borneo twin as it sped toward the Borneo laser would take at least 2 terabytes, and the largest EPROM chip in production was 1 terabyte.
Intel, however—owing much of its existence to Cal Tech in the first place—promised that they could serialize four 1 terabyte EPROMs for a total of 4 TBs which would be plenty, with room to spare. Give us two weeks.
And two weeks later, they had the chips (four sets of them, actually, to facilitate four individual experiments), nicely aligned and ready for deployment.
They also adjusted the Cambridge particle firing angles so that the twin particles would not reach their respective beams for a full twelve seconds, which would give them a meaningful window large enough to look, then not-look, then look again. There was some concern that the vastly increased travel time
would minimize the difference of arrival too much, but this—once the calculations were made—proved to not be a problem, there would still be an easily measurable time difference between their arrivals.
That settled, they also had a detector laser installed at Cambridge, which would provide a sensor beam along which the Borneo particle would fly en route to the Borneo laser. This way they would have a complete data stream of that twin’s behavior, first setting out, then on its way, and then at arrival—displayed real-time on two trajectory screens, one RAM-fed and one EPROM-fed (TSR and TSE in their diagrams).
“Twelve seconds,” said Ruth. “That’s the travel time?”
“Yes,” said Julian.
“So, if we read the RAM-fed trajectory screen for the first four seconds, then look away for four, and then look back for the last four, we should receive meaningful data.”
Julian nodded. “Yes.”
“Looks like we’re ready,” said Ruth.
“Agreed.”
:: 86 :: (Pasadena)
The experiments—four separate ones run precisely eight minutes apart, giving their engineers ample time to exchange the EPROMs—took place the third week of January 2027.
The results could not have been more conclusive, nor more astonishing. For Melissa had hit it on the nail.
Imagine three computer monitors, connected to individual Central Processing Units (CPUs) each of which is receiving a direct fiber feed from their respective sources.
Monitor A (TSR—the RAM-fed trajectory screen) will show the entire journey of the Borneo particle from firing to arriving at the Borneo beam, a journey of twelve seconds, as received and passed on by volatile RAM.
Monitor B (TSE) will show the very same journey, but from data received and passed on by non-volatile EPROM.
Monitor C will wait for the Borneo particles arrival at its detection beam and then simply report its polarity.
The Cambridge crew will of course have to be aware of, and monitor (which amounts to viewing), the Borneo particle firing, and so will exist it into place. But their directions are that once fired, no further human observation of any kind will be made at Cambridge.
Once fired, the only viewing of the Borneo particle, anywhere, by any life, will take place at Cal Tech, by Julian and Ruth.
At precisely four o’clock in the morning Pasadena time (precisely noon in Cambridge) the first particle was fired into perfect conditions. A countdown was given real-time over audio connection, four, three, two, one, fire.
At four seconds past four, both Julian and Ruth looked up from Monitor A and studied the ceiling for one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three, one-thousand-four seconds and then looked back down at Monitor A, which now showed the unbroken trajectory of the Borneo particle toward its beam.
Four seconds later Monitor C reported that the Borneo particle had, as expected, sensed the polarity shift of its Colombia twin (which was fired as positive, then changed to negative by the Colombia beam), and instantly turned negative as well.
Monitor A now painted a long white streak starting with a bright blip at the bottom left of the screen (Cambridge) arriving at the top right (Borneo beam) twelve seconds later, showing an unbroken journey.
Two deep breaths after that (one each) Julian and Ruth turned their attention to Monitor B which showed the bright blip at the bottom left—the firing of the Borneo particle. Then:
A white streak heading for the top right corner of the screen, reaching about one-third of the way before it vanished. It then stayed vanished for about another third of the screen (four seconds) before it re-appeared and completed the journey to its beam.
Julian and Ruth looked at each other, then back at the monitor. According to the EPROM, seconds five through eight of the Borneo-particle’s travel had never happened.
They looked back at Monitor A, which still displayed the full trajectory.
“Which is what we expect to see,” said Ruth.
“And the Borneo particle obliges,” said Julian. “Even producing a bit of revisionist history.”
“Well, we expected life to affect instant change, revisionist or not, in RAM,” said Ruth. “And prove to us that the Borneo particle never went away.”
Here they looked up and then stepped aside as the engineers descended on their Monitor B computer to change the serialized EPROMs to a fresh set.
This sequence of events was repeated three more times, precisely eight minutes apart, with the exact same result (apart from the Borneo twin’s reported polarity which went positive-negative-positive, to match its Colombia twin, which was fired negative-positive-negative then reversed by the Colombia beam).
They reviewed the data on the four different EPROM sets, and there was no doubt: in each test, the Borneo particle vanished after four seconds and stayed vanished until again viewed by life four seconds later, when it reappeared. Each time.
There was no way of telling (without ruining the experiment) whether the RAM-fed connected Monitor A (TSR) had displayed the same information as the EPROM-fed Monitor B (TSE) during seconds five through eight, for at eight seconds the particle evidently revised the prior four seconds worth of history stored in RAM to now show a continued presence; but without violating prior agreements, as Ruth had put it, it could not alter the history irrevocably burned into the EPROM.
Did this prove that non-local communication was facilitated by life? Not as such, but what it did prove rendered the non-local question moot.
What Julian and Ruth had proved was that not only is non-local communication facilitated by life, the particles themselves are made possible by life. Without life looking, there are is no particle.
Without life looking, there is nothing there.
“What does this mean?” was Melissa’s only response to Ruth’s and Julian’s congratulations later than evening: it was Melissa, after all, who had predicted this result.
“I’m not really sure,” said Julian. “But it should shake a few people up.”
“It means,” said Ruth, “that I can begin my mission in earnest.”
“It does?” Melissa looked to Ananda for support. Surely not?
But Ananda only shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly, meaning: Ruth had a point.
“No,” said Melissa, refusing to believe, or accept.
“If there ever was a marriage of science and religion,” said Ruth, facing her mother. “This is it.”
:: 87 :: (Pasadena)
To make doubly and trebly and even more sure than that, Julian requested eight more sets of serialized EPROMs from the Intel labs, which arrived two days later. Two days after that they repeated the experiment, this time eight times over, eight minutes apart, with precisely the same result each time.
While there had been no doubt in their minds after the initial experiment, Julian wanted to rule out any possibility of mistake or fluke and as a result he now had twelve sets of serialized EPROMs each one showing that at four seconds (give or take some fraction) after firing, and for seconds five through eight, the Borneo particle simply ceased to be.
No life looking = nothing there.
:
It was a warm for the season and sunny early February afternoon. Ruth and Julian sat in his office, the set of EPROMs safely ensconced in protective, UV resistant rapping, on the desk between them.
William had brought tea for the two of them, and Ruth was now sipping hers while Julian looked out the window at the green meadow of a garden behind his lab. He breathed very slowly, and very carefully, as if any sudden movement would disturb the dream and wake him up.
Ruth, a little less awed by their success, broke the silence, “What now?”
Still a little dazed and careful about keeping the world in place—for this was a world he did not want to vanish by some mental blunder of his, this discovery was too amazing to take any chances with. Even so, he managed to say the correct thing, what they must do next.
“We have to document this, as clearly and as car
efully as we can, and publish our findings in a peer paper.”
“Peer paper?”
“The next step is to have others replicate the experiment.”
“Why?”
Which Julian ignored. “We make this possible by writing a technical paper addressing the scientific community, documenting the experiment in sufficient detail to allow others to run the exact same experiment, to the exact same result. Unless this is done, we will not—and I can guarantee you this, Ruth—we will not be believed.”
“But the EPROMs,” she said, nodding at the silvery package on Julian’s desk. “They’re right there.”
“Easily doctored,” said Julian. “Any discovery of magnitude—and nothing has ever been of this magnitude, ever—must be replicated and verified. That’s a natural scientific law.”
Ruth seemed uncomfortable with this.
“What?” asked Julian.
“How long will this take? How much time do you need?”
“Do I need? There’s no ‘I’ here, Ruth. This is our experiment, our paper. This will be published jointly.”
Ruth didn’t answer.
“What? I don’t get it, Ruth.”
“I had hoped to tell the world.”
“We will tell the world, but not until the experiment has been verified. You’ll just have to hold your horses.”
“How long will this take?”
“Well, once you stop pouting, it shouldn’t take more than a week, two perhaps—it has to be approved by Cal Tech review as well.”
“All this red tape.”
“Do you want to be believed or not?”
Ruth shrugged her shoulders, striking Julian as the picture of a slightly petulant teenager. “Of course,” she said.
“Then we have to go about it the red-tape way.”
Ruth sighed her concession.
