At The Rialto

by Connie Willis

  “It’s eight fifty-five,” I said. “I am going to the chaos seminar.”

  “If you can find it,” he said, getting down on one knee to look at the signature.

  “I’ll find it,” I said grimly. He stood up and grinned at me, his hands in his pockets. “It’s a great movie,” he said.

  It was happening again. I turned and practically ran across the street.

  “Benji IX is showing,” he shouted after me. “He accidentally exchanges bodies with a Siamese cat.”

  Thursday, 9-10 P.M. “The Science of Chaos.” I. Durcheinander, University of Leipzig. A seminar on the structure of chaos. Principles of chaos will be discussed, including the Butterfly Effect, fractals, and insolid billowing. Clara Bow Room.

  I couldn’t find the chaos seminar. The Clara Bow Room, where it was supposed to be, was empty. A meeting of vegetarians was next door in the Fatty Arbuckle Room, and all the other conference rooms were locked. The channeler was still in the ballroom. “Come!” she commanded when I opened the door. “Understanding awaits!” I went upstairs to bed.

  I had forgotten to call Darlene. She would have left for Denver already, but I called her answering machine and told it the room number in case she picked up her messages. In the morning I would have to tell the front desk to give her a key. I went to bed.

  I didn’t sleep well. The air conditioner went off during the night, which meant I didn’t have to steam my suit when I got up the next morning. I got dressed and went downstairs. The programming started at nine with Abey Fields’s Wonderful World workshop in the Mary Pickford Room, a breakfast buffet in the ballroom, and a slide presentation on “Delayed Choice Experiments” in Cecil B. DeMille A on the mezzanine level.

  The breakfast buffet sounded wonderful, even though it always turns out to be urn coffee and donuts. I hadn’t had anything but an ice-cream cone since noon the day before, but if David was around, he would be somewhere close to the food, and I wanted to steer clear of him. Last night it had been Grauman’s Chinese. Today I was likely to end up at Knotts’ Berry Farm. I wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he was charming.

  It was pitch-dark inside Cecil B. DeMille A. Even the slide on the screen up front appeared to be black. “As you can see,” Dr. Lvov said, “the laser pulse is already in motion before the experimenter sets up the wave or particle detector.” He clicked to the next slide, which was dark gray. “We used a Mach-Zender interferometer with two mirrors and a particle detector. For the first series of tries we allowed the experimenter to decide which apparatus he would use by whatever method he wished. For the second series we used that most primitive of randomizers—”

  He clicked again, to a white slide with black polka dots that gave off enough light for me to be able to spot an empty chair on the aisle ten rows up. I hurried to get to it before the slide changed, and sat down.

  “—a pair of dice. Alley’s experiments had shown us that when the particle detector was in place, the light was detected as a particle, and when the wave detector was in place, the light showed wavelike behavior, no matter when the choice of apparatus was made.”

  “Hi,” David said. “You’ve missed five black slides, two gray ones, and a white with black polka dots.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “In our two series, we hoped to ascertain whether the consciousness of the decision affected the outcome.” Dr. Lvov clicked to another black slide. “As you can see, the graph shows no effective difference between the tries in which the experimenter chose the detection apparatus and those in which the apparatus was randomly chosen.”

  “You want to go get some breakfast?” David whispered.

  “I already ate,” I whispered back, and waited for my stomach to growl and give me away. It did.

  “There’s a great place down near Hollywood and Vine that has the waffles Katharine Hepburn made for Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year.”

  “Shh,” I said.

  “And after breakfast we could go to Frederick’s of Hollywood and see the bra museum.”

  “Will you please be quiet? I can’t hear.”

  “Or see,” he said, but he subsided more or less for the remaining ninety-two black, gray, and polka-dotted slides.

  Dr. Lvov turned on the lights and blinked smilingly at the audience. “Consciousness had no discernible effect on the results of the experiment. As one of my lab assistants put it, ‘The little devil knows what you’re going to do before you know it yourself.’ ”

  This was apparently supposed to be a joke, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I opened my program and tried to find something to go to that David wouldn’t be caught dead at.

  “Are you two going to breakfast?” Dr. Thibodeaux asked.

  “Yes,” David said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Dr. Hotard and I wished to eat somewhere that is vraiment Hollywood.”

  “David knows just the place,” I said. “He’s been telling me about this great place where they have the grapefruit James Cagney shoved in Mae Clark’s face in Public Enemy,” Dr. Hotard hurried up, carrying a camera and four guidebooks. “And then perhaps you would show us Grauman’s Chinese Theatre,” he asked David.

  “Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

  “And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a chapeau.”

  They dragged him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.

  “He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a paper plate in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other.

  “Did you get that at the breakfast brunch?” I asked.

  “Yes. It was the last one. And they ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t in Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.

  “No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.

  “You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut into her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”

  Friday, 9–10 A.M. “The Eureka Experiment: A Slide Presentation.” J. Lvov, Eureka College. Descriptions, results, and conclusions of Lvov’s delayed conscious/ randomed choice experiments. Cecil B. DeMille A.

  Dr. Whedbee eventually came in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.

  “Here,” Dr. Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal-basin boundaries adjusted.” She whacked the side of the projector.

  There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit it again. The light came on. “I learned that in the chaos seminar last night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”

  “I believe I’m ready to begin,” Dr. Whedbee said. Dr. Takumi and I sat down. “Information is the transmission of meaning,” Dr. Whedbee said. He wrote “meaning” or possible “information” on the screen with a green Magic Marker. “When information is randomized, meaning cannot be transmitted, and we have a state of entropy.” He wrote it under “meaning” with a red Magic Marker. His handwriting appeared to be completely illegible.

  “States of entropy vary from low entropy, such as the mild static on your car radio, to high entropy, a state of complete disorder, of randomness and confusion, in which no information at all is being communicated.”

  Oh, my God, I thought. I forgot to tell the hotel about Darlene. The next tim
e Dr. Whedbee bent over to inscribe hieroglyphics on the screen, I sneaked out and went down to the desk, hoping Tiffany hadn’t come on duty yet. She had.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m in room six-sixty-three,” I said. “I’m sharing a room with Dr. Darlene Mendoza. She’s coming in this morning, and she’ll be needing a key.”

  “For what?” Tiffany said.

  “To get into the room. I may be in one of the lectures when she gets here.”

  “Why doesn’t she have a key?”

  “Because she isn’t here yet.”

  “I thought you said she was sharing a room with you.”

  “She will be sharing a room with me. Room six-sixty-three. Her name is Darlene Mendoza.”

  “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 a while 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 paté 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 watts 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-P
odolsky-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 light-years 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.

  “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 pat é 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.