Chapter 5E

Zoë, Wednesday 10th March, afternoon
I'm determined to get through some more of those lecture notes before Charlie comes up with another plan for getting us off our heads – at least he's run out of home-made wine for the time being.
Jasmine says “you're getting obsessed,” but I shut myself in my room and get out the notes for lecture two – I have this vague hope that I'll come across a previously unnoticed reference to salt substitute, or find the electrons and stuff waving microscopic tricolores and guillotining each other in my little drawings.
Each lecture had its own vaguely amusing title – this one was called Measuring Up, apparently because the subject matter is something known as the “Measurement Problem“. To me that sounds like a difficulty with clothing sizes, but it actually turned out to be the reasonably amazing idea that these tiny little particles seem to know what you want them to do:
Their ability to fit in with our expectations as to whether we want particle-like or wave-like behaviour almost gives the impression that the human mind is directly affecting reality. Nobody has ever been too happy with that idea, and in a few weeks I will devote the last lecture of this series to an alternative which is much more satisfying but no less astonishing.
The details, though, went back to the usual stuff about complicated experiments with electrons, and once again all I have to go on is a series of sketches from which I try to reconstruct Richard's rather psychedelic computer animations. The same blurry blue blobs curved and rippled their way through gaps in walls – I realise now that this represented the experiment he showed us in the first lecture and that I played with this morning, the one which proves the particles are spread out so that they can be in several places at once.
In this version he added a line of things he said were particle detectors, looking like little Smarties tubes, and as the waves washed up on them they snapped back together into the original blue ball bearings and fell into one or other of the tubes, piling up to different heights like a kind of graph. I try to remember what Richard said about it, but all this business with electrons is making my head hurt. I go and make a cup of tea instead.
One of the Mad Professor's early albums is on at full volume and Charlie's doing what seems to be an impression of a dinosaur while Jasmine nearly suffocates laughing. I watch in puzzled amusement while the kettle boils, but I resist the temptation to join in – it's still early and I might be able to make some progress with this Richardology. I'm vaguely aware that I ought to be spending more time on my course: not as long as it seems until the exam season. Bollocks to exams, though, I have to find out what's going on. Maybe Jasmine's right, maybe I am getting unhealthily obsessed.
I take my tea back into my room and try to turn the notes in front of me back into Richard's words.
The double-slit experiment is one designed to test wave-like behaviour – the phenomenon of interference in which waves cancel each other out in the way that only waves can. And sure enough that's what we find when we look on the scale of the whole experiment – this little graph showing the number of particles that fall into each detector has peaks and troughs corresponding to the stripy pattern I showed you in the last lecture. Where the waves cancel out we don't detect anything.
The individual detectors, though, are looking for particle-like properties – the single position and chunk of energy of each particle, instead of the smooth spread-out properties of waves. And again that's what we find – no particle dumps half its energy into one detector and half into another, it's all or nothing.
A particle's choice of which detector to hit is completely random – the blurry uncertainty of the wave turns into a random selection like a dice roll when we look for a single position, with the intensity of the wave becoming the probability of its turning up in a given place.
There's a knock on the door and a sudden smell of weed. I turn round to see Charlie's hand poking round the edge of the door and making one of his elaborate creations dance like a freaky puppet. “Hello, I'm Mr. Spliffy!” he says in a squeaky voice.
This is Charlie's ploy to get me away from the physics notes, but I'm determined not to give in. Charlie tries to persuade me that it'll help me get my head round the wacky physics concepts, but I'm not convinced. “I'll be with you in a minute,” I promise.
I turn back to the notes and try blurring my eyes at the pictures of little balls, turning them back into fuzzy waves, and then focussing again, like in Richard's animation. Could these minuscule things really be reading people's minds? I wonder about this for a while, and about how much weirder that is than a mere unexplained death and mad letter. Then I decide I've probably got the wrong end of the stick and try to press on with the notes.
There are more sketches of waves and detectors and such-like shit, and then a few last paragraphs, which I've copied down as near word-for-word as I could manage and must have originally been something like:
So if we give an electron, a photon or any such tiny entity the chance to behave like a piece of wave motion it does so, whereas if we choose to treat it as a particle, a particle is what we find. The way it does this begs all kinds of questions. For a start many physicists have found it hard to stomach the idea that randomness figures in the fundamental laws of physics – Albert Einstein famously declared that “God does not play dice with the universe.”
I remember Jasmine's ears pricking up at the mention of God – maybe that was what set her off with her theological wittering in the pub that evening.
The big question is how the particles know what kind of behaviour we expect of them. What causes the so-called “collapse of the wavefunction” – this transition from fuzzy wavy behaviour to a situation where things are in just one place at a time? We have been looking for a physical cause for this phenomenon ever since the idea was first suggested, but so far without success.
Where does the fuzzy uncertainty go – what happens to all the other possibilities present in the wavy blur, apart from the one that gets randomly chosen?
Worse still, it seems that this uncertainty – which, remember, we can prove by experiment to be real, not just a result of our ignorance of finer details – the particle really does go through two holes at the same time – this uncertainty disappears at the moment when the human mind becomes conscious of the outcome. To physicists used to objective reality that is a monstrous conclusion. Can human consciousness be directly acting on reality, and if so does it mean the real world is all in our minds?
He didn't answer that of course, and when we tried to press him for details later he just said that all would be revealed in good time. Well it bloody wasn't, was it, 'cause he went and shot himself. If that's really what he did – why build up all this suspense and then go and blow your head off before you unveil the answer?
There also doesn't seem to be any further clue in all this to any of the other stuff that's bugging me – my fictitious sister, the unexplained references to the French Revolution and so on. I give up for now and go to find out why Charlie was walking like a dinosaur. Apparently this is a reference to Glen's band becoming “Dinosaurs of Rock.” I've clearly missed the beginning of this.
Strangely, Charlie still gets on quite well with Jasmine's ex-boyfriend Glen and even goes to his gigs, although he hates the music Glen's band play. They take the piss out of each other endlessly and relentlessly but in quite good humour, which Charlie sees as some kind of intellectual sport. There's a parallel here with his obsession with political factions, I think, he's fascinated with things which at the same time he despises.
“Glen's musical conversations,” he explained once, “are the thinking man's blood sport, like a kind of virtual boxing only with less brain damage.”
“So how is Glen's band?” I ask when Charlie trips over a cushion trying to show me his dinosaur walk once more and goes sprawling on the floor, which sends Jasmine off into giggling fits again until she's gasping for air.
“You know they're not the Hip Critters any more?” Charlie asks, making absolutely no attempt to get up from his prone position on the floor.
“No?”
“Apparently they had a serious discussion of their musical direction,” he sits up and wiggles his fingers to indicate speech marks.
“Oh.” I'm not sure what else to say.
“More drunken than serious, to be honest. Glen's got this new idea that they should all start listening to Wagner and Motörhead.”
“At the same time?”
“He got shouted down, fortunately. Anyway, they're now called Felonious Monkey.”
“What do they play now then?”
“The same old shit.”
If it hadn't been for Glen's cacophonous band I might never have got off with Richard, and his death would be something I could read about in the paper and say “shit, poor guy” and then forget about. I wish there was some way to rewind time and take that other path instead. Or send a message to my five-weeks-ago self: Hello Zoë, this is you speaking from the future. You will soon meet a reasonably attractive academic. Do not under any circumstances let it cross your mind that it would be fun to shag him.
Charlie is still doing his stegosaurus stomp and Jasmine's still giggling. I'm glad Jasmine's giggling rather than being pretentious or anxiously introspective, but I'm not really in the mood for watching Charlie's antics today, and I start to wonder if his weed smoking's getting a bit excessive. Mind you I'm the one who isn't getting any coursework done. Jasmine makes a funny sad face at me. I get the impression she's a bit worried at my uncharacteristic seriousness. What a role reversal.
Charlie thinks for a moment and then says, “actually, Vikings of Rock might be more appropriate,” and tries to do a Viking, which consists of putting his left hand on his head with the fingers sticking out in an attempt to look like a horned helmet and waving the right one around as if wielding an axe.
I go into the kitchen to see if there's anything left to eat. I seem to have forgotten to go shopping, and now that the falafel's finished about the only thing I could conceivably make a meal out of is baked beans and tortilla chips. I wonder about going to the kebab shop but decide I can't be arsed. For a moment I feel gloomy and utterly exhausted, standing alone in the tatty kitchen and the unhealthy-looking fluorescent light as I heat up my beans.
When Charlie goes to the loo Jasmine pops her head round the door and asks if I'm OK. I'm putting the finishing touches to my meal of baked beans, tortilla chips, grated fridge-hardened cheese and chilli sauce. I carry it into the lounge and make Jasmine and Charlie listen to my woes while I eat it: I'm confused and upset, I'm spending all my precious time on an obsession which isn't getting me anywhere, this afternoon I nearly strangled a would-be journalist who might be a perfectly nice bloke for all I really know, and I haven't got anything to eat except some shit out of a tin. Actually it's quite nice, sort of like nachos only a bit too sweet.
Jasmine and Charlie hug me and say nice things until I feel better. I do wonder how much longer I can go on like this though. I wish I had some of Richard's mind-reading particles so I could get it all sorted out once and for all.