Entanglement Page 6

  “Okay. Fair enough.” Jack sat down at his laptop, while Peter picked up a notebook.

  “Um, Mr. Keller?” Jack said a few minutes later.

  Peter looked up at Jack, who was squirming in his seat. Unconsciously, he’d raised his hand just like a student.

  “Yes?”

  “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “You don’t need permission. How old are you?”

  “Can I trust you to keep an eye on the computer?”

  Peter smiled in spite of himself. “Sure. Of course I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  As soon as he was alone, Peter let out a deep sigh, then went over and checked Jack’s computer.

  Nothing new. He returned to his desk, sipped his coffee, and stared at the sugar cookie on the plate. Two halves facing one another. He had a sudden realization. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a small tape recorder, hit rewind then listened to his own voice: “Pull up any additional journal reports on the Geneva twin-photon experiment. If possible, find parallel examples dealing with quantum entanglement.”

  Peter raised the projection screen and began writing on the chalkboard. He stopped the recorder as Jack reentered. Jack hesitated when he saw that the screen was raised, exposing a massive equation on the chalkboard.

  Around the equation were all sorts of other equations, lists, and names. By now Peter was writing something near the top of the board.

  “Man, what is that? I hope that’s not what you’re giving for homework these days.”

  Peter turned around, pulling down the screen to cover what he had been writing.

  “No, this is my personal madness … my private research.”

  “So why do you keep it hidden? Is it some kind of secret?”

  “No, I’ve just learned over the years that it’s good to be cautious with whom I share my ideas.”

  “So can I see it?”

  Peter hesitated, then raised the screen again “Okay, knock yourself out. Just don’t go telling any of your hoodlum friends about it.”

  Jack approached the board and studied it.

  “Did you end up going to college?” Peter asked.

  “Art school.”

  Jack read the top line above the equations out loud. “The Divine Matrix: An Ancient Approach to a Unified Field Theory, by Dr. Peter Keller.”

  “That’s just a working title. It’s kind of been co-opted by the popular culture. But it’s still better than a lot of them out there.”

  Jack examined a list of names on the side chalkboard: “Supersymmetry, the Higgs Field, the unified field.”

  “Those are all related terms,” Peter said.

  Jack continued reading: “Blueprint, grid, virtual fluctuation field, ether.”

  “Yeah, those have a little too much baggage. Bad associations.”

  “Quantum noise, quantum soup, blanket, the Force, Brahman, the net of Indra, the mind of the universe, the web of Spider Grandmother.”

  “That’s a Hopi story.”

  “Yeah, I know. My roommate’s all into the Native American stuff.” Jack stared at the list of names, then pointed at the equations. “But how does this relate to all of this?”

  Peter drew a circle on the board and cut it into quarters. “All over the world, we have different languages, all basically describing the same thing.” He stopped drawing and stared at the circle for a moment.

  “Would you like a cookie?” Peter asked. This seemed out of the blue, and Jack was perplexed but said okay. Peter walked over to his desk, returned with the plate, and continued.

  “All these different cultures, all describing the same thing, which is the fabric of the universe or ‘the mind of God’—if you believe in that sort of thing.”

  Jack looked at him in surprise. “Me? How about you? A scientist using the G word? Isn’t that heresy?”

  “Well, there are separate camps. You have the religious community, who believe in the existence of God without actual proof. And you have the scientific community who are equally committed to the Big Bang theory, which also, by the way, lacks verifiable evidence.”

  “Right, the whole Creationists versus the old Darwinians thing.”

  “Correct. Which brings to mind my favorite adage, All truths are but half truths.”

  “The law of polarity,” Jack said, picking up a cookie.

  Peter looked at Jack, impressed. “Listen to you—yes, the law of polarity.”

  “We do read books in art school,” Jack said.

  “Then you know that any universe that is composed of inextricably linked pairs of opposites, like light and dark, hot and cold, up and down, life and death … that it’s very easy to become overwhelmed by the apparent contradiction inherent in all things. Right? So? We have these buffers that come up, that act as blinders to keep us from going crazy in the face of all this conflicting information. But, and here’s another contradiction, the same blinders that keep us from losing our minds are the ones that keep us in the dark, by not letting us see the whole picture of the paradoxical nature of things.”

  “Well, I understand that, but it’s this math stuff that’s beyond me.”

  Peter smiled. “I think you might understand that better than I do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Peter went to his desk and took out his cigarettes and ashtray.

  “That means if you ever tell anyone I was smoking in here, I’ll kill you.”

  He lit up, then pushed open a classroom window, and leaned on the sill. Smoke from his cigarette spilled out into the night.

  Jack said, “What’s with these persistent rumors about your being a government man, working for NASA?”

  Peter laughed. “Why is it that every scientist is supposed to have worked at NASA? No, I was at a place called Fermilab, outside of Chicago. At the time, it housed the world’s largest particle accelerator.”

  “Particle accelerator? What’s that do? Speed up particles?”

  “You’re familiar with the Hubble Telescope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, Hubble is a giant telescope that allows you to see into the farthest reaches of outer space. The particle accelerator is a giant microscope that allows you to view the farthest reaches of inner space.”

  “So what do you see?”

  “Heavenly bodies of subatomic particles. The Higgs boson, the holy grail of modern physics, connected to the Higgs field.”

  “Yeah, those are just words to me.” Jack pointed at the board. “What does the Higgs field mean?”

  “Well, one of the roles of science is to create an accurate understanding of the universe. The current model, the so-called Standard Model, is incomplete. It’s like a puzzle that’s missing some very important pieces. Such as, why does mass exist? And proving the existence of this all-pervasive field of energy—Higgs field—it would be the key to pulling a lot of these missing pieces together.”

  “Okay, I get it. Wow. So, you were like the real deal.”

  “I got a little attention coming out of grad school—”

  “Where?”

  “A place back East … MIT.”

  “Dude, I’ve heard of MIT,” Jack said, rolling his eyes.

  “Right. So, yeah, it was a heady thing, being anointed and admitted into that particular inner sanctum. Every science major’s dream come true, getting to plumb the depths of life on Earth and beyond, to be on the forefront of solving the great enigmas of how the universe came into existence.

  “It all felt very important down there with the subatomic particles.” Peter put out his cigarette. His face had paled, and his words grew halting. “Then one day they got ahold of me at work because I hadn’t been back to my apartment for three days. They were calling to tell me that my girlfriend, ugh … such a deeply inadequate term to describe what she was … the love of my life, Manuela, had been found dead. Hit and run. She was on a bicycle one minute and gone the next.”

  Peter pointed to her photo on his desk.


  “Wow, that’s heavy,” Jack said, looking at the photo for the first time. The woman staring out at him had a sensitive yet serious face. She wasn’t smiling, but looking intently at the camera, as if in challenge. “I’m really sorry.”

  “I kinda cracked up, or cracked open for a little bit. Lost it for a while there. The shock of it sent me on a search, which funnily enough, took me all the way back around to something that had been there all along.”

  “What was that?”

  Peter got up and moved toward the front of the room.

  “There’s a quote, by one of my heroes, Max Planck, godfather of quantum physics: ‘All matter exists by virtue of a force … and we must assume that behind that force … is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. The Matrix of All Matter.’ And suddenly I saw what all the equations and theories had been leaving out. Consciousness.”

  Outside there were thunder and lightning.

  Peter smiled at Jack. “Looks like the universe agrees.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Jack said. “I need to clear my head.”

  “Good idea. The teachers’ lounge should be open.”

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Peter and Jack walked down the dark hallway; both were deep in thought.

  Eventually Jack said, “You know what I remember from your class? That story about the plate glass. Who was that? Einstein?”

  “It was actually his colleague John Wheeler.”

  “Yeah. Something about how scientists are always viewing the universe safely behind a thick slab of plate glass. It’s all happening out there somewhere. Separate from us.”

  They turned a corner and headed down the stairs.

  Peter said, “But we now know, that’s just not how things work. To observe an object as small as an electron is to change the object. And beyond that, more recently, we’ve found that at even deeper quantum levels, to observe something is to actually create it! If we really want to know the true nature of things, Wheeler suggested—”

  Jack finished his thought, using a German accent, “Ve must smash the plate glass.”

  “He was American. But good accent. And yes—once we remove this artificial barrier, we can no longer deny that we are intrinsically linked to this outer space through our inner space consciousness. We are not observers, but participants.”

  The teachers’ lounge held tables, a microwave, and a wall-length chalkboard. When they arrived, Peter asked Jack if he wanted something to drink.

  Peter began to dig through boxes of tea.

  “The herbal stash. Pomegranate. Mellow Mint. Peach Orchard. How about Lemon Zinger?”

  “Fine. Zinger’s good.”

  Peter smelled the bag. “Really? You want something with it?”

  “No, I’ll take it straight.”

  Peter made the tea, then poured out a bowl of mixed nuts. They sat together at one of the tables.

  “So, then what’s the big difference between what you’re doing, and the Standard Model with the Higgs thing?” Jack asked.

  “Well, for starters, my math is a lot prettier. But beyond that, there are implications, which is what really matters. What are the implications of this field of subtle energy, in which all things live and breathe and have their being? The idea at the core of it is the oldest idea in the books. We are one. The uni-verse. The poetry of oneness.

  “We’re not separate objects floating around in empty space, but part of one undulating, pulsing, multidimensional uni-being organism, from the realm of all suns and planets down to the subatomic quantum level. All vibrating together at varying frequencies, transmitting, absorbing, digesting, reflecting, radiating light and energy, endlessly held together by this invisible yet omnipresent force of consciousness.”

  Jack’s eyes were alight with amazement as he listened to Peter, whose own face was flushed.

  “Dude, you need to go to Burning Man, because they would friggin’ love you there.”

  The two men watched it rain for a moment. Then Jack said, “So before, what was that thing you started to show me—when you were drawing the circle?”

  Peter crossed to the back wall, picked up a piece of chalk and drew a wheel. “Actually, this was told to me by my mother when I was a kid.” He started drawing spokes. “All paths and religions are like spokes on a wheel. And the farther out you are from any of them, the more superficial, the more disparate and distant, they’ll seem from one another. However, the deeper you go, the more similar they become. They meet in the center.

  “All things are interconnected through consciousness. From the farthest reaches of outer space, the macrocosm; to the farthest reaches of inner space, the microcosm and quantum physics—all are reflections of one thing. I had the audacity to put out a paper that intimated that science is just another teaching trying to find its way into the center of the circle. The aim of which is consciousness.”

  Jack said, “That must have gone over great with the scientific community.”

  Peter quickly erased the chalkboard in the lounge and smiled ruefully. “Yeah, it was a big hit. That’s why I rarely publish anymore.”

  “To hell with them, dude. They’re all just part of the system,” Jack said. “So is that why you’re hiding out here?”

  Peter seemed startled by his comment; this conversation was getting too close for comfort. The truth was that he preferred the lab to his apartment, where everything reminded him of Manuela. It was easier here, where he could control his environment, just like one of his experiments. None of these were topics he intended to discuss with Jack—or anyone else.

  “Who says I’m hiding out? I like to think I’ve chosen to cultivate my ideas in an open-minded atmosphere. There’s something about being around kids. Especially when they’re this age, at the dawn of self-awareness. They’re so open, and they’re asking questions. It’s inspiring—they’re not afraid to indulge in wild and outrageous possibilities.”

  “Is that why you said I understood your ideas better than you do?”

  “Well, that’s part of it. But it has to do with this.” Peter touched his chest. “Direct apprehension. The power of the heart to transcend thought. We’re talking about the field of subtle energy that is the conduit between our consciousness and that of all worlds. It’s in us. Small children have access to it. They don’t separate themselves from their world. But as we grow older, buffers emerge. Societal indoctrinations start to hypnotize us, and gradually there’s a tendency to lose that connection. Soon, boom, we’re shut down, and it takes a shock to blow the heart back open to the intuitive, nonverbal language of feeling.”

  Jack nodded. “When you’re a twin, you can never entirely separate yourself from the outside world. You look over there, and, well, there you are. Maybe that’s why we still retain this sensation of just knowing through feeling.”

  There was a crack of thunder as the huge downpour increased outside, giant raindrops pelting down from the sky.

  Peter studied Jack closely for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, there may be something to that. Sympathetic resonance. There was this experiment in Geneva in 1997, where a scientist took a photon, a single particle of light, and split it into two separate twin particles with identical properties. Then they fired the twins in opposite directions down two fiber-optic pathways for a distance of seven miles, so by the time each twin reached its target, fourteen miles separated them. At that point they were forced to choose between two random routes that were identical in every respect.

  “The two particles made exactly the same choice at exactly the same time. Each time the physicist repeated the experiment, the results were the same. Information was being passed between the two particles instantaneously. Somehow they were communicating. This phenomenon is referred to as quantum entanglement.”

  Jack said, “So it’s almost going to a molecular level—Charlie and me—quantum entanglement.”

  “Or ‘spooky action at a distance’—that’s what Einstein called it. Could be a
good title for my book,” Peter said, taking a drag from his cigarette.

  Jack said, “But wait a minute. If even science is saying we’re psychically connected, then there really must be something wrong with Charlie.”

  “Science would never say ‘psychically connected.’ It’s all just speculative … we’re just talking.”

  “Yeah, we’re talking too much. What time is it anyhow?”

  Peter looked at his watch. His expression was enough; Jack took off running toward the physics lab.

  Jack tore into the room and went straight to his laptop.

  “Charlie! I’m sorry, I’m here, don’t hang up!” He stopped dead in his tracks.

  On the computer screen, Charlie’s name was still grayed out. So was Ernesto’s. No messages. Nothing.

  Peter walked into the room. “Jack!”

  Jack quickly checked his e-mail. Nothing. “Oh, God. No!”

  “Did you miss him? What happened?”

  “He didn’t call. Something really did happen.”

  “Jack, calm down. Listen to me. You don’t know for sure.”

  “Or what if he did call, and I missed it! Because we were so busy talking!” Jack began to pace back and forth, his fists clenched, a strange look on his face.

  Peter studied him and made a decision. “What did you see, Jack? Tell me now. What did you see?”

  “I saw Charlie in the desert. I saw sand and a hill and a ridge. And in the distance what looked like a coyote—”

  “A coyote?”

  “Or something like one … and the guys, they were talking. But then there was this horrible buzzing, screaming sound! And then, I felt it burning through me! This horrible feeling! Burning through me!”

  Enraged, Jack pushed over a lab table, causing equipment to crash to the floor.

  “Jack, that’s not happening. Get it out of your head. That’s not real.”

  “It was real. Why would I see it if it wasn’t real?” Jack put his hands to his temples, his breathing strained.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it was a premonition like you said—”

  “But how can I warn Charlie if I can’t speak to him?”