The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “And your name?” she asked, hands poised over the computer.

  “Ruth Baringer.”

  “We don’t show a reservation for you.”

  We have made impressive advances in quantum physics in the ninety years since Planck’s constant, but they have by and large been advances in technology, not theory. We can make advances in theory only when we have a model we can visualize.

  —Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  I high-entropied with Tiffany for awhile on the subjects of my not having a reservation and the air conditioning and then switched back suddenly to the problem of Darlene’s key, in the hope of catching her off guard. It worked about as well as Alley’s delayed-choice experiments.

  In the middle of my attempting to explain that Darlene was not the air conditioning repairman, Abey Fields came up.

  “Have you seen Dr. Gedanken?”

  I shook my head.

  “I was sure he’d come to my Wonderful World workshop, but he didn’t, and the hotel says they can’t find his reservation,” he said, scanning the lobby. “I found out what his new project is, incidentally, and I’d be perfect for it. He’s going to find a paradigm for quantum theory. Is that him?” he said, pointing at an elderly man getting in the elevator.

  “I think that’s Dr. Whedbee,” I said, but he had already sprinted across the lobby to the elevator.

  He nearly made it. The elevator slid to a close just as he got there. He pushed the elevator button several times to make the door open again, and when that didn’t work, tried to readjust its fractal-basin boundaries. I turned back to the desk.

  “May I help you?” Tiffany said.

  “You may,” I said. “My roommate, Darlene Mendoza, will be arriving some time this morning. She’s a producer. She’s here to cast the female lead in a new movie starring Robert Redford and Harrison Ford. When she gets here, give her her key. And fix the air conditioning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said.

  The Josephson junction is designed so that electrons must obtain additional energy to surmount the energy barrier. It was found, however, that some electrons simply tunnel, as Heinz Pagel put it, “right through the wall.”

  —From “The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,” A. Fields, UNW

  Abey had stopped banging on the elevator button and was trying to pry the elevator doors apart. I went out the side door and up to Hollywood Boulevard. David’s restaurant was near Hollywood and Vine. I turned the other direction, toward Grauman’s Chinese, and ducked into the first restaurant I saw.

  “I’m Stephanie,” the waitress said. “How many are there in your party?”

  There was no one remotely in my vicinity. “Are you an actress-slash-model?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m working here part-time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons.”

  “There’s one of me,” I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. “I want a table away from the window.”

  She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me. “Our breakfast specials today are papaya stuffed with salmonberries and nasturtium/radicchio salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll take your order when your other party arrives.”

  I stood the extra menu up so it hid me from the window, opened the other one, and read the breakfast entrees. They all seemed to have cilantro or lemongrass in their names. I wondered if “radicchio” could possibly be Californian for “donut.”

  “Hi,” David said, grabbing the standing-up menu and sitting down. “The sea-urchin pâté looks good.”

  I was actually glad to see him. “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “Tunneling,” he said. “What exactly is extra-virgin olive oil?”

  “I wanted a donut,” I said pitifully.

  He took my menu away from me, laid it on the table, and stood up. “There’s a great place next door that’s got the donut Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk in It Happened One Night.”

  The great place was probably out in Long Beach someplace, but I was too weak with hunger to resist him. I stood up. Stephanie hurried over.

  “Will there be anything else?” she asked.

  “We’re leaving,” David said.

  “Okay, then,” she said, tearing a check off her pad and slapping it down on the table. “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”

  Finding such a paradigm is difficult, if not impossible. Due to Planck’s constant the world we see is largely dominated by Newtonian mechanics. Particles are particles, waves are waves, and objects do not suddenly vanish through walls and reappear on the other side. It is only on the subatomic level that quantum effects dominate.

  —Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  The restaurant was next door to Grauman’s Chinese, which made me a little nervous, but it had eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice and coffee. And donuts.

  “I thought you were having breakfast with Dr. Thibodeaux and Dr. Hotard,” I said, dunking one in my coffee. “What happened to them?”

  “They went to Forest Lawn. Dr. Hotard wanted to see the church where Ronald Reagan got married.”

  “He got married at Forest Lawn?”

  He took a bite of my donut. “In the Wee Kirk of the Heather. Did you know Forest Lawn’s got the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme?”

  “So why didn’t you go with them?”

  “And miss the movie?” He grabbed both my hands across the table. “There’s a matinee at two o’clock. Come with me.”

  I could feel things starting to collapse. “I have to get back,” I said, trying to disentangle my hands. “There’s a panel on the EPR paradox at two o’clock.”

  “There’s another showing at five. And one at eight.”

  “Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address at eight.”

  “You know what the problem is?” he said, still holding on to my hands. “The problem is, it isn’t really Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, it’s Mann’s, so Sid isn’t even around to ask. Like, why do some pairs like Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman share the same square and other pairs don’t? Like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?”

  “You know what the problem is?” I said, wrenching my hands free. “The problem is you don’t take anything seriously. This is a conference, but you don’t care anything about the programming or hearing Dr. Gedanken speak or trying to understand quantum theory!” I fumbled in my purse for some money for the check.

  “I thought that was what we were talking about,” David said, sounding surprised. “The problem is, where do these lion statues that guard the door fit in? And what about all those empty spaces?”

  Friday, 2-3 P.M. Panel Discussion on the EPR Paradox. I. Takumi, moderator, R. Iverson, L. S. Ping. A discussion of the latest research on singlet-state correlations, including nonlocal influences, the Calcutta proposal, and passion. Keystone Kops Room.

  I went up to my room as soon as I got back to the Rialto to see if Darlene was there yet. She wasn’t, and when I tried to call the desk, the phone wouldn’t work. I went back down to the registration desk. There was no one there. I waited fifteen minutes and then went into the panel on the EPR paradox.

  “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox cannot be reconciled with quantum theory,” Dr. Takumi was saying. “I don’t care what the experiments seem to indicate. Two electrons at opposite ends of the universe can’t affect each other simultaneously without destroying the entire theory of the space-time continuum.”

  She was right. Even if it was possible to find a model of quantum theory, what about the EPR paradox? If an experimenter measured one of a pair of electrons that had originally collided, it changed the cross-correlation of the other instantaneously, even if the electrons were lightyears apart. It was as if they were eternally linked by that one collision, sharing the same square forever, even if they were on opposite sides of the universe.
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  “If the electrons communicated instantaneously, I’d agree with you,” Dr. Iverson said, “but they don’t, they simply influence each other. Dr. Shimony defined this influence in his paper on passion, and my experiment clearly—”

  I thought of David leaning over me between the best pictures of 1944 and 1945, saying, “I think we know as much about quantum theory as we do about May Robson from her footprints.”

  “You can’t explain it away by inventing new terms,” Dr. Takumi said.

  “I completely disagree,” Dr. Ping said. “Passion at a distance is not just an invented term. It’s a demonstrated phenomenon.”

  It certainly is, I thought, thinking about David taking the macrocosmic menu out of the window and saying, “The sea-urchin pâté looks good.” It didn’t matter where the electron went after the collision. Even if it went in the opposite direction from Hollywood and Vine, even if it stood a menu in the window to hide it, the other electron would still come and rescue it from the radicchio and buy it a donut.

  “A demonstrated phenomenon!” Dr. Takumi said. “Ha!” She banged her moderator’s gavel for emphasis.

  “Are you saying passion doesn’t exist?” Dr. Ping said, getting very red in the face.

  “I’m saying one measly experiment is hardly a demonstrated phenomenon.”

  “One measly experiment! I spent five years on this project!” Dr. Iverson said, shaking his fist at her. “I’ll show you passion at a distance!”

  “Try it, and I’ll adjust your fractal-basin boundaries!” Dr. Takumi said, and hit him over the head with the gavel.

  Yet finding a paradigm is not impossible. Newtonian physics is not a machine. It simply shares some of the attributes of a machine. We must find a model somewhere in the visible world that shares the often bizarre attributes of quantum physics. Such a model, unlikely as it sounds, surely exists somewhere, and it is up to us to find it.

  —Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  I went up to my room before the police came. Darlene still wasn’t there, and the phone and air conditioning still weren’t working. I was really beginning to get worried. I walked up to Grauman’s Chinese to find David, but he wasn’t there. Dr. Whedbee and Dr. Sleeth were behind the Academy Award winners folding screen.

  “You haven’t seen David, have you?” I asked.

  Dr. Whedbee removed his hand from Norma Shearer’s cheek.

  “He left,” Dr. Sleeth said, disentangling herself from the Best Movie of 1929–30.

  “He said he was going out to Forest Lawn,” Dr. Whedbee said, trying to smooth down his bushy white hair.

  “Have you seen Dr. Mendoza? She was supposed to get in this morning.”

  They hadn’t seen her, and. neither had Drs. Hotard and Thibodeaux, who stopped me in the lobby and showed me a postcard of Aimee Semple McPherson’s tomb. Tiffany had gone off duty. Natalie couldn’t find my reservation. I went back up to the room to wait, thinking Darlene might call.

  The air conditioning still wasn’t fixed. I fanned myself with a Hollywood brochure and then opened it up and read it. There was a map of the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese on the back cover. Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner didn’t have a square together either, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy weren’t even on the map. She made him waffles in Woman of the Year, and they hadn’t even given them a square. I wondered if Tiffany the model-slash-actress had been in charge of assigning the cement. I could see her looking blankly at Spencer Tracy and saying, “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

  What exactly was a model-slash-actress? Did it mean she was a model or an actress or a model and an actress? She certainly wasn’t a hotel clerk. Maybe electrons were the Tiffanys of the microcosm, and that explained their wave-slash-particle duality. Maybe they weren’t really electrons at all. Maybe they were just working part-time at being electrons to pay for their singlet-state lessons.

  Darlene still hadn’t called by seven o’clock. I stopped fanning myself and tried to open a window. It wouldn’t budge. The problem was, nobody knew anything about quantum theory. All we had to go on were a few colliding electrons that nobody could see and that couldn’t be measured properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And there was chaos to consider, and entropy, and all those empty spaces. We didn’t even know who May Robson was.

  At seven-thirty the phone rang. It was Darlene.

  “What happened?” I said. “Where are you?”

  “At the Beverly Wilshire.”

  “In Beverly Hills?”

  “Yes. It’s a long story. When I got to the Rialto, the hotel clerk, I think her name was Tiffany, told me you weren’t there. She said they were booked solid with some science thing and had had to send the overflow to other hotels. She said you were at the Beverly Wilshire in room ten-twenty-seven. How’s David?”

  “Impossible,” I said. “He’s spent the whole conference looking at Deanna Durbin’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and trying to talk me into going to the movies.”

  “And are you going?”

  “I can’t. Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address in half an hour.”

  “He is?” Darlene said, sounding surprised. “Just a minute.” There was a silence, and then she came back on and said, “I think you should go to the movies. David’s one of the last two charming men in the universe.”

  “But he doesn’t take quantum theory seriously. Dr. Gedanken is hiring a research team to design a paradigm, and David keeps talking about the beacon on top of the Capitol Records building.”

  “You know, he may be onto something there. I mean, seriousness was all right for Newtonian physics, but maybe quantum theory needs a different approach. Sid says—”

  “Sid?”

  “This guy who’s taking me to the movies tonight. It’s a long story. Tiffany gave me the wrong room number, and I walked in on this guy in his underwear. He’s a quantum physicist. He was supposed to be staying at the Rialto, but Tiffany couldn’t find his reservation.”

  The major implication of wave/particle duality is that an electron has no precise location. It exists in a superposition of probable locations. Only when the experimenter observes the electron does it “collapse” into a location.

  —The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics, A. Fields, UNW

  Forest Lawn closed at five o’clock. I looked it up in the Hollywood brochure after Darlene hung up. There was no telling where he might have gone: the Brown Derby or the La Brea Tar Pits or some great place near Hollywood and Vine that had the alfalfa sprouts John Hurt ate right before his chest exploded in Alien.

  At least I knew where Dr. Gedanken was. I changed my clothes and got into the elevator, thinking about wave/particle duality and fractals and high-entropy states and delayed-choice experiments. The problem was, where could you find a paradigm that would make it possible to visualize quantum theory when you had to include Josephson junctions and passion and all those empty spaces? It wasn’t possible. You had to have more to work with than a few footprints and the impression of Betty Grable’s leg.

  The elevator door opened, and Abey Fields pounced on me. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “You haven’t seen Dr. Gedanken, have you?”

  “Isn’t he in the ballroom?”

  “No,” he said. “He’s already fifteen minutes late, and nobody’s seen him. You have to sign this,” he said, shoving a clipboard at me.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a petition.” He grabbed it back from me. “‘We the undersigned demand that annual meetings of the International Congress of Quantum Physicists henceforth be held in appropriate locations.’ Like Racine,” he added, shoving the clipboard at me again. “Unlike Hollywood.”

  Hollywood.

  “Are you aware it took the average ICQP delegate two hours and thirty-six minutes to check in? They even sent some of the delegates to a hotel in Glendale.”

  “And Beverly Hills,” I said absently. Hollywood. Bra museu
ms and the Marx Brothers and gangs that would kill you if you wore red or blue and Tiffany-slash-Stephanie and the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme.

  “Beverly Hills,” Abey muttered, pulling an automatic pencil out of his pocket protector and writing a note to himself. “I’m presenting the petition during Dr. Gedanken’s speech. Well, go on, sign it,” he said, handing me the pencil. “Unless you want the annual meeting to be here at the Rialto next year.”

  I handed the clipboard back to him. “I think from now on the annual meeting might be here every year,” I said, and took off running for Grauman’s Chinese.

  When we have the paradigm, one that embraces both the logical and the nonsensical aspects of quantum theory, we will be able to look past the colliding electrons and the mathematics and see the microcosm in all its astonishing beauty.

  —Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

  “I want a ticket to Benji IX,” I told the girl at the box office. Her name tag said, “Welcome to Hollywood. My name is Kimberly.”

  “Which theater?” she said.

  “Grauman’s Chinese,” I said, thinking, This is no time for a high-entropy state.

  “Which theater?”

  I looked up at the marquee. Benji IX was showing in all three theaters, the huge main theater and the two smaller ones on either side. “They’re doing audience-reaction surveys,” Kimberly said. “Each theater has a different ending.”

  “Which one’s in the main theater?”

  “I don’t know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons.”

  “Do you have any dice?” I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory, not Newtonian. It didn’t matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment, and David was already in flight.

  “The one with the happy ending,” I said.

  “Center theater,” she said.

  I walked past the stone lions and into the lobby. Rhonda Fleming and some Chinese wax figures were sitting inside a glass case next to the door to the restrooms. There was a huge painted screen behind the concessions stand. I bought a box of Raisinets, a tub of popcorn, and a box of jujubes and went inside the theater.