An Elegant Theory Read online

  Copyright © 2016 Noah Milligan

  Cover and internal design © 2016 Central Avenue Marketing Ltd.

  Cover Design: Michelle Halket

  Cover Images: Courtesy & Copyright freeimages: Cliff Cheung

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Central Avenue Publishing, an imprint of Central Avenue Marketing Ltd. www.centralavenuepublishing.com

  Published in Canada

  Printed in United States of America

  1. FICTION/Literary

  2. FICTION/Thrillers - Psychological

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Milligan, Noah, author

  An elegant theory / Noah Milligan.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77168-099-8 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77168-100-1 (epub).--

  ISBN 978-1-77168-101-8 (mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS3613.I52E44 2016 813’.6 C2016-902755-4

  C2016-902756-2

  For Esmé

  If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or metaphysics, let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

  —David Hume

  THE ANCIENT GREEKS BELIEVED THAT IN THE beginning there was Chaos. Chaos birthed Earth, Earth produced Sky, and then Sky fathered children upon her. In Norse mythology, a chasm preceded mankind. It was called Ginnungagap, and it was bound by fire and ice. Fire and ice mixed and formed a giant named Ymir and a cow named Audhumbla, and we were then birthed from this cow. In the book of Genesis, there was darkness, and God created the heavens and the Earth in six days. All elegant theories when you think about it—simple, concise, linear. Before our world, disorder preceded creation, then creation begot something better. It’s human nature to believe our existence must be an improvement on what came before. We are at the top of the food chain. We are capable of thought and art and language. We must then be the pinnacle of existence. Being a scientist, I have my reservations about this.

  The advent of scientific inquiry spawned many more ideas, some of them good, some of them not. The Ptolemaic model bridged the gap between theology and science, confirming that Earth was not alone, though, it placated the church with its geocentric supposition. Copernicus first broached the idea that we weren’t the center of the universe—controversial, yes, but elegant nevertheless. Then came Newtonian laws of physics, classical mechanics, Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  Many people believe they understand relativity, but they don’t. Perhaps most misunderstood is time as a dimension. Despite common belief, time is not a constant, ticking away at regular, pre-determined intervals. It depends, among other things, on speed. Picture two parallel mirrors and a light pulse between them, bouncing off one mirror and then the other to mark the passage of time, much like a metronome. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. If the mirrors are stationary, the light pulse travels up and down ad infinitum. The distance remains constant; therefore, the speed of time is constant. If, however, the mirrors are in motion, the distance changes. It becomes longer. Time passes slower. The faster the mirrors travel, the slower time moves. It’s why astronauts who might travel to distant galaxies would age slower than the rest of us.

  Perhaps strangest of all is quantum probability theory. Understanding it requires a high degree of technical knowledge, a non-classical probability calculus depending upon a non-classical propositional logic. Most people can grasp the faintest idea of it with a simple experiment, the same experiment I begin each semester with: the double-slit light.

  The last semester I taught it, Quantum Physics 1 was overenrolled. Students filled every seat, every stair between rows, even the narrow walkway between the highest row and the exits. Most weren’t even enrolled in the class and only showed to get a glimpse of the Nobel Laureate, Dr. Allen Brinkman. Dr. Brinkman was eccentric like many scientists, but he was happier than all the ones I knew. He wore cardigans even in summer and dark-rimmed glasses too large for his face. He smiled incessantly. He carried fingernail clippers with him at all times. He, on numerous occasions, would miss important meetings or lectures, so certain he had more to gain by talking with a stranger at a coffeehouse or in line at the grocery store checkout. And I admired him greatly. As a teenager, I’d followed his career with great verve, much like my peers worshipped the Michael Jordans and Ken Griffeys of the world. I carried around his scholarly articles long before I understood them. He had, at the age of twenty-four, his first year at Cambridge, outlined a cosmological timeline down to hundredths of a second after the Big Bang, mapping billions of years of the universe’s existence. In my mind, he came closest to omnipotence.

  We both stood at the front of the packed lecture hall, Dr. Brinkman and I, and readied the experiment. It didn’t need much: a reflector plate, a barrier with two slits, and a light source.

  Light has always posed problems for thinkers, philosophers, and scientists. A vexing phenomenon, the ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Ptolemy thought light to be a ray, somewhat like a laser, that travelled from the eye to the observed object, an apple for instance, or a horse. Not a bad argument, but again, it highlights the human tendency to overestimate our importance in the world. Eight hundred years later the controversy was settled. Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham argued that if you look at the sun for a long time you will burn your eyes; this is only possible if the light travels from the sun to our eyes, not vice versa. Later, in 1672, another controversy erupted over the nature of light. Newton argued it consisted of particles. Hooke and Huygens argued that it was a wave. Thomas Young proved them all wrong in 1801 with the double-slit light experiment.

  I explained this history to my students who stared at me with eyes like oysters. They did not come here to listen to me lecture. They only wished to hear Dr. Brinkman, and this petrified me. Public speaking had always been a weakness of mine. Each time I stood in front of a group, my body proportions felt all wrong, my hands too big, my head too small. My tongue swelled. The inside of my palms crawled. Now, in addition to this, I had become, and was aware I had become, negligible in my audience’s eyes. I was merely the opening act to the Nobel Laureate, the band who played before the Rolling Stones while everyone stood in line for the toilet.

  To top this all off, I was being judged by Dr. Brinkman. While my graduation hinged on my successful dissertation defense, teaching had always been one of Dr. Brinkman’s passions, one of those rare academicians who didn’t sacrifice his students for his research. He always said he could judge a professor by the tone of his voice. Mine wavered more with each syllable I uttered, and the audience reflected this. Their faces sagged and their shoulders drooped as if my inane drivelling caused the gravitational force to strengthen, each word uttered pulling them closer to the center of the earth. I imagined their mass coagulating until they formed a singularity, puncturing the space-time continuum and turning all of MIT, all of Cambridge, the entire eastern seaboard even, into a black hole.

  “It was a revolutionary experiment. It still is, I mean. It hasn’t lost its importance. I think you might be surprised anyway what it shows us about our universe. Well, maybe not surprised actually
. Some of you might have already learned this in your high school classes. So this will actually be old hat for you—” I waited for Dr. Brinkman to come to my rescue as he’d been apt to do in previous semesters, but he declined that morning. For nearly half an hour, he’d stood off to the side, a smile on his face, his smallish chin upturned, eyes aglow. I couldn’t tell if he enjoyed watching me squirm or was trying to show support with a friendly face. Either way, it didn’t help—the students continued to sag with each awkward silence, my “ummms” echoing through the lecture hall like a sports announcer addressing an empty stadium. I had taught many classes before. I did have experience. Yet the first day of class never became easier.

  “Perhaps I’ll just show you.”

  I turned on the light source. The barrier’s two slits remained closed, so the light did not reach the reflector plate on the other side.

  “Since the light is blocked by the barrier and does not travel to the reflector plate,” I said, feeling more comfortable as I demonstrated the experiment, as I delved into the science and not the lecturing, “what can we determine about the nature of light?”

  No one responded. This was common amongst undergraduates. They were content being a part of the pack, a quark amongst billions of quarks. Over the years, they’d all even started to look alike to me. I wouldn’t even learn their names. Apart from there being too many of them to make this possible, I didn’t even try. Instead, I distinguished them by some outward physical attribute: the color of hair, type of dress, an unfortunate birthmark. Some professors had three or four Meghans in their class. I would have nine blonds, four big noses, and seven capwearers. I knew this to be dehumanizing to my students, and, if not unethical, simply wrong. I did it anyway, though. Not to be condescending, but more as a means of self-preservation. If I pictured them as people rather than individual sponges there only to soak up as much knowledge as they could, the pressure became unbearable—I would’ve never been able to summon the courage to stand in front of them day in and day out, to maintain the authority and expertise I feared I pretended to have.

  I opened one slit.

  As expected, a single line of light illuminated the reflector plate. I closed that slit and then opened the other.

  “What does this tell us about the nature of light?” Again, no response.

  I opened both slits at the same time. The students, for the first time, snapped to attention. It really is a remarkable sight, one that had floored me when I first witnessed it as an undergraduate. Back then I wasn’t much different than the students I later taught. I sat in the back of the class. I never spoke out or offered to answer a question. I took notes diligently, yet I never let my classmates know how hard I studied. When my professor had opened both slits, it was nothing like I’d been expecting. Instead of two slits of light appearing on the reflector plate, an interference pattern emerged, resembling a barcode, with intermittent sections of illumination and darkness. It seemed more like magic than a natural phenomenon, an illusion conducted on unsuspecting ignoramuses, so that I sat stunned and speechless like a man who had just witnessed the Statue of Liberty disappear. From that moment on, I no longer tried to blend into my peers, camouflaged as a normal student amongst many. I became obsessed. I wanted to be the best. I wanted, more than anything, to be the first to completely understand the very nature of the universe.

  “What does this tell us about the nature of light?” I again asked.

  Again, no answer.

  “Have you seen anything like this before?”

  No answer.

  “In the ocean maybe?”

  Nothing.

  They didn’t understand. But I couldn’t blame them for this. When I’d first witnessed this phenomenon, I’d been amazed, but I hadn’t understood. It took many years for me to grasp the possibilities. What we observe in the double-slit light experiment is called a probability wave. In essence, we’re not viewing actual light travelling from the light bulb through the slits to the reflector plate, only the probability that we’ll find light there. The brighter the reflection, the more probable we’ll find an individual photon. Darker, the less probable.

  At first I had accepted this as a plain fact, a probability wave. It made sense. I could do the math associated with it. I could regurgitate it on a test. I could impress my father with it at home. But I always knew I was missing something. And then, at my first year of graduate school, it hit me: the nature of probability in quantum realms does not bend to certainties. There will never be a one hundred percent chance that an event will happen. Nor, for any given location is there a zero percent chance that light can be found there. It may be miniscule, approaching a billionth of one percent, but it will never reach zero. An individual photon must literally travel through every conceivable path from the light source to end up on the reflector plate. It travelled from the rear of the auditorium and back to land on our reflector plate. It zigzagged up Blonde #2’s nostrils, out her ear, and then landed on the reflector plate. It zoomed from the light source to Alpha Centauri and landed back here, on Earth, on our reflector plate. In quantum mechanics, we cannot pinpoint exactly where a particular photon will be in one given instance, only the probability of it being in that spot. The strange reality is that all these possibilities actually occur.

  I oftentimes daydream I can see all these possibilities playing out, the smallest changes causing ripple effects that alter the future, what’s called the Butterfly Effect. Yet, they don’t feel like daydreams. They feel so real, the scene unfolding before me so vividly, my consciousness so lucid. It’s as if I am an astral projection, an invisible voyeur able to witness all of our alternate universes. Sometimes I’m not even there. I’ll see my mother after she’d left home and moved to California. I’ll see myself as a child with my father and his girlfriend right after Mom left. I’ll see myself in the future with my dead wife and son, us middle-aged, he a teenager. It’s a strange feeling these sightings. When they happen I lose all sensation of the present, and when I come back to, I have no memory of the lost time.

  My students that day in class, however, did not surmise the possibilities of the double-slit light experiment. They’d been impressed, but they didn’t understand. None could answer my question about the nature of light, not even scratching the faintest of surfaces by noting light’s duality. Before I could point this out to them, though, the class ended, and each of them trampled up one by one to shake Dr. Brinkman’s hand and introduce themselves, hoping beyond hope he would remember their names and take them under his wing and forgetting completely my lecture and what I had failed to teach them about the fundamental nature of reality—it is so much stranger than we ever would’ve thought.

  A storm system rumbled through southwest Oklahoma, the result of a Rocky Mountain cold front colliding with warm Gulf of Mexico trade winds. This mixture had accumulated over the panhandle of Texas, grown in mass, and then spun out of the jet stream with such force that any sane person hid underground, grasping a handheld radio, waiting to hear that all was clear.

  Coulter, his father, and his father’s intern, Dianne Feinstein, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, approached the storm system from the southeast, well out of harm’s way. This was the first time Coulter had tagged along storm-chasing with his father. “A birthday present,” he’d said. “A chance for you to prove how much you’ve grown.”

  To prepare, Coulter had studied all that he could about storms. He read about the water cycle, how heat evaporated water from the ground so that it turned to vapor. The vapor would then rise into the atmosphere, and as it cooled, it would turn back into water. The molecules would collide, causing electrons to charge—the positive would rise to the top of the system, the negative to the bottom. Air ionization would cause a conductor, and the electrical current would flow to the ground, creating lightning.

  Despite this understanding, he harbored a very specific fear: that he would be struck by lightning and instantly burst into flames.

&
nbsp; His father, however, showed no such fear. In fact, Coulter had never seen him afraid or worried or crying. Not that he was stoic by any means or relentless under pressure; he just had this calmness about him, that if Coulter ever felt afraid, he could look at his father and know that everything would be all right. Because of this, Coulter would get into arguments with his classmates, debating whose father was the bravest and strongest and always right. My dad is a molecular biologist, they would say. Mine is a firefighter. Mine is a lawyer and puts bad guys away. Well, Coulter would say, mine chases tornadoes. Beat that.

  His father checked the equipment, adjusted the position and angle of the Doppler satellite. Dianne scanned the GPS for state highways and old dirt roads. There was a mounted anemometer and a sling psychrometer and a handheld HAM radio broadcasting NOAA weather updates. Dianne grabbed an instrument to read atmospheric pressure, and his dad’s hand was already outstretched to take it from her, his eyes still locked on the road.

  “We’re going to have to punch it if we’re going to stay out in front of this thing,” Dianne said. “There’s not too many roads from here to the city that get us very close.”

  Coulter’s father gassed the Bronco, lurching them forward. They barreled over dirt roads, the Bronco bouncing over mounds of clay and gravel. Rocks clamored against the undercarriage. The storm cloud billowed upward toward the stratosphere shaped like an anvil, resembling a volcanic eruption or a bomb explosion, sort of. An atomic bomb would send millions of pounds of sand and dirt into the air, and the heat would pulverize it into trinitite. Everything would constantly be in motion. Smoke would swell and debris would burst into flame and ash would flutter to the ground like snow. This storm, however, looked frozen. With the exception of bulbous bursts of lightning, it appeared to simply hover. In reality, the floating was a mirage. The molecules making up the cloud were lighter than air, and the cloud lay on top of the atmosphere because it had less mass, like oil on water. But the illusion was sublime nevertheless. It made Coulter’s heart sticky and pound faster in his chest.