“Oh, yeah,” Amit nodded. “So it’s the first night there in the new apartment, and I’m looking out the window at the great view, and I’m imagining all the WiFi nodes I’ll be able to access. Piece of cake. I decide I better set up in the bathroom since Aaron might come back at any time, and locking myself in the bedroom might be suspicious. I check out the bathroom, I figure out how I’m going to set up the directional WiFi antenna, and I’m heading out to get my gear when I note something funny about the smoke detector.”
“A smoke detector… in the bathroom?” That made no sense to me.
“Exactly,” Amit grinned. “So I get my camera and take a picture of myself in the bathroom to send my folks to tell them I’ve arrived and all is well. I make sure the smoke detector is in the background. The lights are dim and I use my flash. Sure enough when I send the photo to my folks, I see this red reflection from what looked like a black hole in the smoke detector.”
“A camera?” Holy paranoia. “They had video surveillance in the bathroom?!?”
“Real close call,” Amit looked genuinely shaken. “There I was about to set up a secure comm channel back to the Reactance right under the Civic Circle’s video surveillance.”
“Why the bathroom of all places?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s not all,” Amit continued. “Both bedrooms and the common areas had the same damn smoke detectors. Six of them in an 800 square foot two-bedroom apartment.”
“The Civic Circle, they take their fire safety real serious,” Rob said sarcastically, “only it’s not the conventional kind of fire they’re eager to nip in the bud.”
“Wow, Amit,” I was trying to imagine having to live in a place you know is under continuous surveillance. “I begin to see why we didn’t hear much from you.”
“Exactly,” Amit acknowledged. “It really spooked me. If they had me under continuous video surveillance, I was worried they’d search the room and find my comms gear and laptop.” He took a deep breath. “The next morning, I snuck my gear bag into my backpack. On the way into work I threw the laptop and comms gear away in a random dumpster. Couldn’t take the chance of them finding it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, someone swept through the apartment. All the little search tells I planted were disturbed.”
“That was a smart move, Amit,” Rob confirmed. “You have to know when to cut your losses, even if it means a temporary setback like sacrificing your gear.”
I heard some noise from the bathroom. The secret underground part of Uncle Rob’s place was accessed by a hydraulic lift that lowered the bathroom floor down to the level of the underground complex. Then, I heard the toilet flush. A moment later, Marlena came out of the bathroom.
“You’re blonde!” Her long auburn hair was gone. She looked like a different person. It took me a second to realize that was probably the general idea.
She smiled when she saw me.
“Peter! Like the new look?”
Actually, I preferred her old look. “It’s certainly different. I like it,” I lied.
“I don’t,” she replied, “but different is good when you’re on wanted posters all over the country. Anyway, I’ve made the most amazing progress on the MacGuffin manuscript.”
“She refused to tell me about it until you were here,” Amit said flatly. Was that jealousy? Or just sarcasm. I couldn’t tell, but Marlena ignored him, came over and gave me a hug.
“What, I don’t get a hug?” Amit asked in obviously fake outrage.
“You’ve had plenty from what you’ve been telling us,” Marlena countered.
Rob smiled indulgently at her. “Maybe you could start from the beginning and try to explain it to us all one more time?”
Marlena slipped naturally into teacher mode, patiently explaining the obvious. “Heaviside discovered that when electromagnetic waves interfere with each other, they exchange energy. The natural balance of electric to magnetic energy in radiation is upset. Some of the energy becomes electrostatic or magnetostatic. The energy stops momentarily and changes direction. The waves exchange energy with each other.”
“She keeps trying to tell me about this stuff,” Rob confided, “but it doesn’t make any more sense when she explains it than when you tried, Peter. I get it, but I don’t know why it’s important.”
Marlena rolled her eyes. “It’s because physicists are all operating under the wrong picture of how reality works. They assume that energy and fields are tightly coupled. They aren’t. Fields exchange energy all the time. Electromagnetic waves and fields guide energy. Fields go one way, other fields go another way, and the energy they convey goes in a completely different trajectory under the influence of the interacting fields.”
“OK,” Amit said, struggling to understand, “but I still don’t get why this is such a big secret worth killing people over.”
Marlena looked up intently a moment as she tried to figure out how to explain it. Finally, her eyes refocused on Amit. “Consider two slits in a plane. An electromagnetic wave is incident on the plane, and some of the fields and energy pass through the slits. The fields from each slit are ‘coherent,’ synchronized with each other because they originally came from the same incident wave. They interfere with each other, adding up constructively in some places and cancelling out destructively in others. The energy is guided along streamlines, nudged toward the interferences. You get an interference pattern of bright and dark lines if you project the light on a screen or a photographic plate on the other side of the two slits.”
Amit was nodding his head. He got it. Rob, he still looked indulgent, like he was merely humoring her and us.
Marlena continued. “Now assume we no longer have the classical case of streams of energy moving through the two slits. Imagine that energy is discretized, quantized, in discrete little lumps we call photons, and suppose we lower the intensity until we have just one photon at a time passing through the slits.
“The fields still pass through the two slits and generate an interference pattern. The photon randomly follows one of the same energy flow trajectories from the classical case and ends up in the interference pattern.
“See, everyone gets wrapped around the axle asking themselves which slit the photon went through, assuming it had to go through both slits in order to generate the interference pattern and had to be in both places at the same time. Feynman said that all the weirdness of quantum reality is wrapped up in this simple experiment. It’s not weird at all, though. It’s not wave-like particles that can be in two places at once, or particle-like waves that ‘collapse’ to deposit energy in a single lump. Fields behave like waves. They generate interference patterns between the two slits, throughout the region, ‘non-locally,’ even when there’s only enough energy for one photon to be moving through the slits. Energy behaves like particles, following a particular trajectory under the influence of the interacting waves. Each does its own thing. The quantum weirdness and confusion are gone.”
“The part I do get,” Rob offered, “is how apparently a bunch of scientists started working out a quantum theory along those lines and they got shut down. Hard.”
Marlena nodded. “Louis de Broglie laid the foundation in an amazing doctoral dissertation in 1924. He argued that particles had a wave nature associated with them. He won the Nobel Prize for his contribution. He argued that the waves guide the matter in a common-sense way. Schrödinger took this idea as the basis of his wave theory of quantum mechanics. The wave approach was attacked and nitpicked and overwhelmed by critics. No one would take it seriously, because they were all committed to the Copenhagen Interpretation. They believed that nothing could be said about what was really going on, and all we could do is model statistical likelihoods mathematically. Von Neumann came up with a bogus mathematical ‘proof’ that theories like de Broglie’s had to be wrong. For twenty years, no one paid much attention.
“A man named David Bohm revived the de Broglie–Schrödinger approach in the 1950s. He was invited to be a professor at Princ
eton University. He fell under suspicion for his communist views. They fired him, and he ended up in Brazil. There was a symposium at Princeton, run by Robert Oppenheimer – the man who led the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. They spent hours trying to debunk Bohm’s approach. When they failed, one of the attendees reported Oppenheimer dismissed Bohm’s ideas as ‘juvenile deviationism’ and said, ‘since we can’t disprove him, we’ll just have to agree to ignore him.’”
Amit’s jaw dropped. “Wow.”
“Oppenheimer himself fell under suspicion of communist ties and they revoked his clearance not long thereafter,” Marlena noted. “I think it was because he failed to censor Bohm’s heretical ideas quickly enough to suit the Civic Circle. It took another twenty years before a physicist named John Bell started untangling what quantum mechanics really meant. Before long, the secret was out, and physicists all over the place were beginning to pay attention.
“Today there’s a small community in physics working to develop and apply and understand the pilot wave approach, but they’re dismissed by the mainstream community that wants everyone to ‘shut up and calculate,’ and ignore any physical picture of how the quantum realm really works.”
“You’d think physicists would be excited about understanding how it all works,” Rob offered.
“Some are,” Marlena pointed out, “but many of the rest want to ignore it because, in truth, you don’t have to understand what’s going on in order to apply the equations and get useful results.”
I thought about what Marlena was saying. “If you have the right picture of how things really work,” I thought out loud, “you have a basis for making new insights and progress.”
“Exactly!” Marlena looked triumphant. “Faraday was confused by the action-at-a-distance thinking that was at the basis of electromagnetic theory as he struggled to understand it. The theory was mathematically correct, but defied common sense with charges and currents over here influencing charges and currents over there without the intervention of any intermediate process or mechanism. Faraday devised the concept of fields, occupying the space between the interacting entities and conveying their interactions from place to place. As early as 1832, he was already thinking in terms of field interactions giving rise to electromagnetic waves. Faraday discovered magnetic induction, and laid the foundation for Maxwell and his successors to develop electromagnetic theory.
“Now, we’re all confused by quantum weirdness, and the simple picture Heaviside devised – fields guide energy – is the key to justifying the pilot wave approach and making sense of quantum mechanics. The pilot wave approach to quantum mechanics is just the extrapolation of Heaviside’s thinking on classical electromagnetic energy flow to the quantum realm.”
“So, Heaviside’s discovery explains and supports the pilot wave thinking in quantum mechanics,” Amit recapitulated, “but is there any actual new discovery that helps the Reactance in our fight against the Civic Circle?” Rob was nodding his head in approval of Amit’s practical focus.
“The MacGuffin manuscript is the key,” Marlena explained, turning back to me. “You recall the basic idea we worked out back at Georgia Tech?” She smiled again.
I remembered it of course, but for entirely different reasons. I’d been struggling to understand the physics in MacGuffin’s manuscript when Marlena walked into the lab. She’d been under pressure for her defense of Professor Chen, and the full weight of the university bureaucracy had been aimed at forcing her out. She’d decided to take a break from it all and was dressed for a night out on the town. Instead, she and I had solved equations at the blackboard for hours, working side-by-side in the confined space, getting chalk dust all over each other. I’d always found her attractive, but it was then I really fell in love with her. I’d tried to kiss her, but she prevented me. A few weeks later, that love for Marlena was part of what made me risk my life to save her and Professor Chen. There was still an obvious chemistry between us.
Unfortunately, I got the impression Marlena was more interested in discussing physics right now instead of chemistry. I recapitulated what we’d discovered.
“MacGuffin noted that electromagnetic energy is in balance, with equal amounts of electric and magnetic energy in electromagnetic waves,” I explained. “In terms of the field intensity, that balance is given by the free space impedance, the ratio of electric to magnetic intensity is 377 ohms. As waves interact, the balance shifts, the fields start to become electrostatic or magnetostatic, and the energy flow slows down.”
“Right,” Marlena agreed. “If you normalize the energy velocity with respect to the speed of light and normalize the Lagrangian – the difference between the electric and magnetic energy – with respect to the Hamiltonian or the total energy, you find they describe a circle – the “Great Electromagnetic Circle,” according to MacGuffin’s manuscript, because it defines exactly how electromagnetics works and the full transition between forward waves at the speed of light, electrostatics, reverse waves, magnetostatic, and back to forward waves.”
That was the result I’d obtained with Marlena in the lab on that memorable evening. There was an earlier result I’d figured out on my own – the Rosetta Stone that made unlocking the MacGuffin manuscript possible.
“It turned out that the Chinese mysticism in MacGuffin’s manuscript was actually a thinly-veiled tutorial on electromagnetics,” I reminded everyone. “Yang was electric fields, yin was magnetic fields, and so on. When you interpret and plot the result for the impedance of the fields of a dipole on a Smith Chart, you get the taijitu, the Yin-Yang symbol.”
Marlena was nodding her head in agreement.
Amit looked puzzled. “So, was the MacGuffin discussion an allegory or analogy to existing Chinese philosophy? Or was that philosophy based on actual ancient teachings on electromagnetics?”
“Chicken or egg,” Rob muttered.
I disagreed. “We know the manuscript dates back to a Shaolin Monastery that was raided and burned back in the 1600s. That aligns with the legends of the Red Flower Tong as well as contextual clues in the manuscript. You’ll find distorted fragments of the MacGuffin version in the accepted interpretations of Chinese writing on yang, yin, divine harmony, and so forth. I think the electromagnetics tutorial version was the original and the I Ching and other Chinese writings are distorted, half-remembered, and garbled versions of the original.”
“Much as I enjoy the ancient history lesson…” I was sure Rob was lying, but there wasn’t a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “…you guys need to know what Marlena’s been up to the last few weeks.”
Marlena lit up even more with excitement. “I figured out how electrons work: they’re a standing wave turned in on itself constructively interfering to yield what appears to be a static charge.”
I thought about that a moment. It didn’t make sense. “A wave has to have a magnetic component to make the energy move,” I pointed out.
“Electrons have a bit of a residual magnetic moment,” Marlena replied, “a little magnetic dipole.”
I thought about how the fields would interact. “You’d get a circular flow of energy around the electron.”
“Exactly,” Marlena confirmed, “and when you calculate the angular momentum, it’s h-bar over two – the quantum ‘spin.’ It’s close even in a first order calculation. There’s an electromagnetic basis for quantum spin. What’s more, that crossed field configuration is described in Hertz’s Electric Waves.
Amit beat me to the obvious conclusion. “That’s why they were so eager to kill Hertz. He’d already unlocked the fundamental secret to explain the quantum behavior of electrons. It was waiting right there in his book for anyone to put the pieces together.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t manage to get his book redacted or suppressed, too,” I offered.
“It may have already pushed past the critical point where enough people had found out about it,” Marlena noted, “but that’s not all. If you look to where the electron field
s have an impedance of 377 ohms, you find the circumference is exactly half the Compton wavelength.”
Wow! I could tell Amit wasn’t following why that was significant. “The Compton wavelength of a particle is the wavelength of a photon whose energy is the same as the mass of a particle,” I explained, taking in the implications. “So, an electron really is just a standing wave, and another mysterious quantum property follows from ‘classical’ electromagnetics and energy flow.”
“Exactly!” Marlena seemed happy I was following her line of reasoning. “Even more significant, I finally understand neutrinos and how Nexus Detectors work.”
“Finally, we’re getting to the good part,” Rob offered with a smile, obviously bored by all the physics.
“It’s apparently what Majorana and MacGuffin were discussing with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires back in 1939.” She’d been so depressed when I’d last seen her over a month ago. Now? Marlena was almost giddy with excitement.
“The Garden of Forking Paths.” I explained to Amit the story I found, and then turned back to Marlena. “So, you’re saying the ‘Many Worlds’ hypothesis is really true? The universe splits into uncountably many duplicate copies with every quantum variation?” I was skeptical how that could work.
“Not exactly,” Marlena clarified. “It turns out most quantum fluctuations or alternatives are completely irrelevant. There’s a bit of tension, locally, as the two possible universes exist side by side, but almost always, they merge back together, with none the wiser.
“Even more significant divergences can happen. Did you have a turkey sandwich for lunch two days ago? Or was it ham? It could have been either. Since it makes no difference, the universe in which you chose ham and the universe in which you chose turkey have merged back together.
The Brave and the Bold Page 12
