going to live for a while yet, I might as well be reasonably comfortable. What would Tali think if she saw this mess?
Another wave of self-pity. Tali probably doesn’t give two shits about me. I just hope Heller remembers to call me when he hears from her. If he hears from her. Tali could be dead for all I know. I smile ruefully as I think of Tali in a box, alive and dead at the same time. I suppose she could remain that way, if Heller never calls. Or if he calls and I don’t answer. (I know, it doesn’t work like that. It’s a fucking metaphor, relax.) Anyway, I’m not sure I trust him, which is the main reason I asked to come back tomorrow. I mean, I want to hear the rest of his story too, but mostly I want to see if Tali shows up.
I wash the dishes in the sink and do a little straightening up and then go back to reading Heller’s book. I have nothing else to occupy my time, and maybe understanding Heller’s work will help me figure out what happened with Tali. The book isn’t all gooey quasi-mystical stuff; much of it is devoted to a rather lucid explanation of the weirdness of quantum phenomena – the same weirdness demonstrated by the “double slit experiment.” Heller further illustrates this weirdness with something he calls a “Box-Pairs Experiment.” The experiment has some similarities to a shell game, where the player has to try to guess which shell a pea is hidden under. The difference is that with the shell game, observation only reveals the location of the object. With the Box-Pairs Experiment, observation actually determines the location of the object. If you’re willing to trust me on that, you can skip this excerpt:
In a shell game, the pea has an equal chance of being under each shell. But this probability is purely epistemic. The pea has an actual location under one of the shells, so its location cannot be fully described in terms of probability. Observation doesn’t change the pea’s location; it only reveals its location.
In our experiment, we will put equal parts of the waviness of a single atom in each of two boxes, so that the atom has equal probability of being in either box. But our experiment differs from the shell game in that there is no “actual atom” in a particular box. The wavefunction split between the two boxes is the complete description of the physical situation. And in our experiment observation does change the physical reality. Here’s how it works:
You have two boxes, called Box A and Box B, which are specially designed to trap and hold individual atoms. There is no way to tell whether one of these boxes holds an atom without opening the box. You arrange a semi-transparent mirror in front of these boxes as indicated in the diagram. This mirror is designed so that if an atom hits it, there ’s a fifty percent chance that the atom will bounce off the mirror and get trapped in Box A and a fifty percent chance that the atom will go straight through and get trapped in Box B. You have a gun pointed at the mirror. The gun has the capability of firing a single atom at a time.
You pull the trigger on the gun, trapping the atom. The question is: where is the atom? Common sense would tell you that it’s either in Box A or Box B. But common sense doesn’t apply to quantum mechanics. The fact is, until you open one of the boxes, the atom is in both boxes simultaneously . It isn’t split in two, with half of it being in Box A and half of it in Box B; it’s both entirely in Box A and entirely in Box B.
Here ’s how we know this to be the case: let’s suppose that we have a large number of box pairs that have been prepared as described in the previous paragraph. We position a box pair in front of a screen on which an impacting atom would stick. We open a narrow slit in each box at the same time. An atom hits the screen. If we repeat this action with many identically positioned box pairs, we will find that atoms cluster in some areas of the screen and not others,
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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