Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  “I know what a yardstick is.”

  “So if I were to lay that yardstick through a doorway—”

  “Like going from your bedroom into your bathroom.”

  “Yes, now, how much time would you say it takes for the yardstick to go from the bedroom into the bathroom if I were pushing it at, say, five kilometers an hour?”

  “Trick question. No time, since it is already in the bathroom. Unless you mean completely in the bathroom. Is that what you meant?”

  “No, you got the trick question right. It is already in both the bedroom and the bathroom. It does not need to travel from one to other. Unless . . .”

  “Unless quoi?”

  “Unless you’re not looking at it like a whole thing?”

  Now it was Elle’s turn to tilt her head at Reinier.

  “You answered the question correctly, but by answering about the yardstick at all, you’re already tricked.”

  “How?”

  “The yardstick isn’t a yardstick.”

  “The yardstick isn’t a yardstick,” she repeated, raising an eyebrow. “There is no spoon.” *

  * * *

  * The last thing I expected was to stumble across an allusion to a Keanu Reeves movie.

  * * *

  Now Reinier rolled his eyes. “The yardstick is only a yardstick if you look at it that way. More precisely, it’s a collection of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles.”

  “So is everything, no?”

  “Precisely. It’s just a collection of atoms and molecules like everything else. Its essence as a yardstick doesn’t objectively exist.”

  Elle started to say something, but Reinier precountered.

  “Nor does a spoon!” he affirmed. “Objectively. To the universe, neither a yardstick nor a spoon has an objective essence beyond its mass, which is merely an aggregate of particles. There is a subjective essence that we perceive; a yardstick is a yardstick because it happens to be a length we’re interested in. A spoon is a spoon because it is useful to us for slurping soup.”

  “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” *

  * * *

  * Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii. There’s something arousing about a woman who quotes The Matrix and Shakespeare in the same minute.

  * * *

  “Exactly. The yardstick is only a yard long because we choose to differentiate its atoms from the atoms of air that lie just beyond it.”

  “But if I grab hold of the yardstick and pick it up, it lifts up as a whole, while the air that lies just beyond essentially stays where it lies. Molecules or not, it is a whole thing in and of itself which I can manipulate as a single unit.” Elle smiled down at him, impressed with her own point.

  “True. But if a giant were to come and pick up the house, then the yardstick, along with everything else in it, would simply become part of the house. The air beyond the house, if you ignore any vortex pull, would essentially stay in place. It all depends how you look at it.”

  “Huh,” Elle said. She looked around the room and scanned the ceiling, as if Reinier might have had a giant waiting on hand to demonstrate the correctness of his point.

  “I’m not saying there aren’t forces at work or that the molecules of the yardstick don’t exhibit a stronger binding to one another than they do with the air. But it’s we who choose which forces, which relationships take precedence in our assignment of meaning.”

  Reinier’s finger traced and retraced his equations up her thigh. “So the problem we’re left with when we go back to our original question of how long does it take for me to push the yardstick from the bedroom to the bathroom is . . . what yardstick? Which molecule of yardstick? Once we’re asking that question it becomes your high school physics problem that’s solved with kinematic equations. And once we’re there, we are operating within a structure of distance equals rate times time.”

  “And you don’t like that.”

  “That doesn’t get us anywhere.”

  “It gets us from here to there.”

  In response, Reinier performed an exaggerated yawn.

  “What?” Elle asked through a laugh. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Lag.”

  “Lag?”

  “Lag times. Time in general. It takes time to travel, whether it’s people, sound waves, or electromagnetic waves.”

  “Well . . . yes.” Elle didn’t see his problem with this.

  “Why did you originally answer that the yardstick was already where it was headed?”

  “Because you asked how long it would take to push it into the bathroom.”

  “And?”

  “It was already in the bathroom.”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Half of it was.”

  “Did you consider which half?”

  “Quoi?”

  “When you were imagining my hypothetical yardstick, did you picture which half was in the bedroom and which half was in the bathroom?”

  “I wasn’t considering which end was which. I was simply seeing a yardstick.”

  “The halves were interchangeable to you.”

  “Oui. Identical.”

  “So as a result of its fungibility it could be in both locations at once.”

  Elle considered the statement and finally nodded. “But you said ’zat was wrong to see it like ’zat.”

  “Not wrong, just a matter of perspective. It was an incorrect model on an atomic level. But what if we went smaller?”

  “Same problem, no? Which molecule, atom, proton, which neutron crosses from the bedroom into the bathroom?”

  “Oui, indeed.” Reinier nodded. He pushed himself up onto his elbow, clearly energized and animated. “The dilemma of differentiation persists because there are different types of subatomic particles.” Reinier flashed a devilish smile up at Elle. “But what if we went smaller? More fundamental.”

  “You mean, comment dites-vous? Quarks?”

  “Yes. There are still a variety of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom.”

  Elle giggled. “There are strange and charming quarks?”

  “They’re the third lightest of quarks. Mostly found in hadrons. Not to mention that every quark also has a twin antiparticle that has equal magnitudes of certain properties, but opposite signs.”

  “So strange antiquarks or antistrange quarks.”

  “Both work. Anyhow, lots of quark varieties, which are in essence the same. Some have a slightly larger mass than the others, but that’s mostly a matter of varying fractional charges. Not to mention that down at that level, their ‘masses’ are more fluid than on a macro level. The units measuring their mass describe this, mega electron volts, i.e. an electron’s rest mass, which is essentially a lump of energy.”

  “Quarks’ masses are measured in energy?”

  “Yes! To be fair, though, down at that level, mass and energy look a lot alike. Quarks tend to misbehave. They don’t stay in one place nor do they necessarily move via trajectory. Instead they can wink out of existence here and then back into existence there. That’s where E = mc2 is the law of the land. Quarks dance across the equal sign turning from matter into energy and back again.”

  Elle was caught up thinking about dancing quarks, changing back and forth from butterflies into caterpillars. Dualism meant nothing to the universe. Her Cambodian monk was right.

  Between her second and third year of university, Elle had backpacked through Southeast Asia. One morning in Siem Reap, Elle ended up sharing her breakfast with a Buddhist monk on his way to bribe a family to send their daughter to school in exchange for five kilograms of rice a month. As a thank-you, he led her on a brief meditation. When you breathe in, you know, when you breathe out, you know. That was his mantra. Though, no matter how often he repeated it, in her head Elle kept wanting to end it with you don’t know.

  When you breathe in, you know. When you breathe out, you don’t know.

  Afterward, she brought her ebb-and-flow impulse up
to the monk. He smiled and shook his head. Buddha doesn’t experience the universe in opposites. Contradictions, paradoxes—these are illusions of division. They are constructs within which attachment, separation, and suffering bloom. Separation, however, is a delusion. A mirage conjured by consciousness and ego. To define oneself, it is necessary to separate from all else. This demarcation creates a false boundary, disconnecting the soul from the whole. It is a lethal and limiting misconception that can trap souls in a house of mirrors for thousands of lifetimes. The reality is there is no opposite of everything.

  Nothing? Elle proffered naïvely.

  Everything includes nothing. And nothing can be the opposite of itself.

  When you breathe in, you know. When you breathe out, you know.

  “Elle? Are you with me?” Reinier asked.

  “Dualism means nothing to the infinite or the infinitesimal.”

  Reinier paused. “Exactly. Not to mention our yardstick dilemma is rendered moot. Down at the quark level, there’s no differentiating between yardstick quarks, air quarks, carpet quarks, et cetera. Matter itself loses meaning even.”

  “Matter doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes!” Reinier was sitting up now. “Even within atoms’ mass is sort of a question mark, since 99.9999999999999 percent,” Reinier counted off the thirteen nines after the decimal to make sure he said it correctly, “is empty space between the orbits of its electrons and its nucleus. Mass is really just a consistent manifestation of dynamic forces.”

  Elle couldn’t help but smile. For years, in her youth, she had been distressed that she had no passion. She would marvel at a friend who lost herself playing guitar for afternoons, or a cousin who would play blackjack for twelve hours straight, or a classmate who read anything and everything about Shakespeare’s Tempest. Where was her obsession, her calling? But then one melancholy evening, while her father poured her a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, she poured out her teenage angst. He surprised her with a deep laugh instead of his normal sympathetic ear. Don’t you see mon trésor, your passion is passion.

  “So where do the chromodynamics come in?” Reinier was now sitting fully up and cross-legged. She slid her foot between the tight pocket of his calf and thigh and tucked her foot under. She had to be in direct contact with his crackling energy. Or at least as close as the 0.0000000000001 percent of masses could get.

  “Entangled quantum chromodynamic.”

  “Do you think it’s a fetish how your big terms turn me on?” Elle slid her foot deeper into the pocket of his legs.

  “A fetish? No. A blessing, absolutely.” Reinier slipped his hand behind the knee of her leg that was tucked into his. In spite of her innuendo and his affections, he was still all physics. “What you have to realize is this is magic,” he gestured to his equations written on her inner thigh, “as far as the scientific community is concerned.”

  Elle tilted her head. “Isn’t magic the antithesis of science?”

  “It is. But no one knows quite how to account for entanglement, let alone explain it.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Entangled quarks are essentially a quantum system in which one of them cannot fully be described without consideration of the other.”

  “How very equitable.”

  “What I mean is, together, they share a single quantum state: their spin. All quarks have spin. They can, for example, spin ‘up’ or ‘down.’ It’s not really analogous to the ‘real’ macro world, but just accept spin as a property of quarks.”

  “Consider it accepted.”

  “Ok, so then we’ve got two entangled quarks, quark A, who we’ll call Alice, and quark B, Bob, that make up a quantum system. Both quarks share a single spin state. This is known as a superposition. Although they share this state, one of them must spin up while the other must spin down. As long as neither of them measures their spin, however, they both have a fifty-fifty shot of being either. Their probabilities are equal. With me so far?”

  “Alice and Bob are flipping a coin. One has to get heads, the other tails, but as long as the coin’s spinning, each has neither,” Elle suggests.

  “Each also has both. Together they have both heads and tails potential.”

  It wasn’t his big terms per se, it was his animation, his investment, the energy he harnessed from his creativity. Her own creativity had the opposite effect. Whenever she got taken up in her writing, she ended the day happy, but enervated. Reinier, on the other hand, was like contained fusion. He was his own nuclear sun, and his gravity drew her in. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Or her hands. “I understand.”

  “But if Alice claps her hand over the coin and checks—i.e. measures her spin—then she drops out of her superposition and has, let’s say tails. Then Bob must—”

  “Have heads.”

  “Exactly. Perfectly anticorrelated. Bob’s is always opposite to Alice’s. This is the essential nature of entanglement.”

  “Alors, as long as neither checks, then they both share the same super state. However, as soon as one of them checks, they have polar opposites.”

  “Yes, and in knowing their own state, they also immediately know the other’s. Now, remember what I said earlier about locality?”

  “Everything has to travel.”

  “For one thing to be affected by another there must be a direct interaction, whether through photons or an electromagnetic field.”

  “Got it.”

  “Yeah, quarks don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t care about locality. Locality can suck it as far as quarks are concerned.”

  “Explain.”

  “Ok, so back to Alice and Bob and their spinning coin. They share their superposition while it’s spinning.”

  “Oui.”

  “What if Alice caught it and slapped it down on the back of her hand but left it covered. Who has head and who has tails?”

  “Still unknown, no?”

  “Completely unknown. So they’re still in their shared superposition, each having a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now, suppose that Alice and Bob had a special device that could slice the coin along the circumference into two half-coins, without them seeing, and then seal each half-coin into an envelope, giving one to Alice and the other to Bob.”

  “Still unknown states, therefore still in superposition, as long as they don’t peek.”

  “So assuming no peeking, Alice could get on a plane and fly to Fiji and take a boat to an isolated island. She could then open up her envelope—”

  “Drop out of her superposition—”

  “And instantaneously know Bob’s state.”

  “Oui.”

  “No, I mean, imagine she had a cell phone with her. Cell signals are electromagnetic waves that propagate at the speed of light. Now, tell me, what would take longer, for her to see tails after she’s opened her envelope or for Bob to tell her over the phone that he has heads?”

  “It would take longer for Bob to tell her.”

  “So then the information about Bob’s state of heads ‘travels’ faster to her than the speed of light.”

  “Yes, but, can’t nothing travel faster than the speed of light? Isn’t it ’ze universal speed limit?”

  In response, Reinier opened up his hands, palms up as if to say, and there you have it, abracadabra.

  “Wait,” Elle protested. “But ’ze information, I mean I know it did, but it didn’t really travel.”

  Reinier repeated the gesture and said in a horrible French accent, “Et voilà. As far as I’m concerned, traveling is for suckers. That, my love, is entanglement. Obviously quarks aren’t coins, and it’s not just a simple matter of slicing one in half and sending the halves on their merry way to opposite ends of the world, but the analogy holds. Two entangled quarks share a superposition. If you affect the spin of one, the other instantaneously registers it without any transfer of information—locality be damned
. Not to mention, that on my end, I can pick the state. By pairing Bob’s quark with another one on his end, I can make the new one spin up, so Bob’s has to spin down, so Alice’s has to spin up.”

  “And then there’s your information transfer. No, not transfer, iteration.”

  “An information iteration. I like that. We call it entanglement swapping, but information iteration really has a nice ring to it. I might steal that.”

  “Copyright!! Trademark!” Elle scrambled to plant her literary flag, pushing him over and smothering him with her naked body. The two laughed and kissed. Elle grabbed hold of his hands and intertwined her fingers between his.

  “So,” Elle said, inches away from Reinier’s face, eyes locked. “These two entangled quarks, they stay connected, in sync with each other, no matter how far apart they go?”

  “They could cross the universe. If Alice spins up, she knows Bob must spin down.”

  “How romantic.”

  Reinier rolled his eyes in response.

  Elle shifted her leg and applied a solid pressure with her thigh against his groin. “It’s romantic. Dites-moi. Dis-le,” she hissed.

  Reinier laughed and quickly capitulated. “Alice and Bob are very romantic. They’re romantic,” he groaned through mock pain.

  “That’s right. They are.” Elle kissed him and sucked his bottom lip as she pulled away. Then she bit it and tugged gently.

  “So romantic,” Reinier continued with his faux pleading, with only one of his lips available to him. “We should double with them.”

  “As long as you realize there will be NO entanglement swapping of any sort,” Elle said and rolled off him, onto the mattress. She lay next to him, still holding his hand, fingers entwined. “Alors, entanglement not so inexplicable.”

  “Not as an analogy. But for the life of us, we physicists can’t figure out how it actually works. Drove Einstein nuts. Nevertheless, a sailor can still cross an ocean without being able to explain the wind.” Reinier shrugged, “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

  Elle took that in. “That is good. I might steal ’zat.”