Quantum Mechanics

It is a bit murky this morning, and the sound of rain pounding the patio pours in the window. I am home, which is good, since I can find my way around in the dark, but the place is so cluttered with junk that I still can stub my toe or trip over a shoe on the way to the bathroom.

I have known for a long time that I either need to simplify my life- get rid of all this crap- or find a more efficient box to put it all in.

It came to me, talking on the cell phone as I drove the loop through the old trench-lines of the Cold Harbor Battlefield yesterday. Six thousand men died there, and it is a brief jog off the interstate that helps me break up the monotony of the trip from Norfolk to Washington.

I had one of those epiphanies between the Union and Confederate lines. At some point the kids are going to have to come in and sort all that stuff out. Maybe I ought to thin it down to a manageable mass, otherwise there is the chance that they would do the logical, if horrifying, thing.

Which would be to call the Estate Broker and have him  come in to get all the stuff into the right bins for weekend resale; call the book guy, and the rug guy and the man who does old medals and militaria. Be done with it, for pennies on the dollar.

I have thought about how that works before, wandering in Portabello Road in London. It is the great flea market and attic of the world, where anything and everything pre-owned is for sale. Trays of wedding rings, racks of imperial medals, objects sundered by death from their owners and the lives that went with them.

It is sobering to contemplate that aspect of eternity, and it did not help when I read the elegant and approachable article this morning by Brian Greene in the New York Times.

I didn’t know Brian before this morning, but discovered that he is a noted young man of Physics. As I read, the BBC droned out of the account of the burial of Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. I will go to visit someday, I hope, and duck down the stairs below the little door next to the altar where his sarcophagus will be placed with the other Pontiffs that have gone before.

Some have remarkably life-like sculptures on top of their tombs. I expect this Pope will be more modest in his approach. They say he specified a wooden He was a humble man, though one of steely and indomitable will. They say his will directed all his papers and files should be burned. It is an approach I will consider, since that should be a matter of for serious thought.

Richard Burton, the famed explorer and Aribist, had all his papers piled up in the courtyard after his passing, and his wife burned them. Too salacious, she thought, and harmful to the great man’s reputation. Since it all winds up on Portabello Road anyway, it might be better to go out with a clean slate.

I don’t know. But considering the dimensions of the universe is too much before the first pot of coffee. I looked up Brian Greene on the web, to see if his ruminations on Quatum Physics were worth the investment in my time. His picture depicts a young man with a modest grin who resembles the actor John Cusack. He has written bestsellers on things like String Theory, which appears to be part of the quest for the Unifying Field principle that explains everything. His bona fides include matriculation at Harvard and Oxford, class of 1987.

Ah, to be so smart, and good-looking and young! Understanding not much of the universe than the entropy that appears to have me in its grip, I read Brian’s take on Einstein, a hundred years after that smart young man’s golden year of the four theoretical papers blew the world of Newton into applesauce.

Quantum Physics is the area that was most troubling to Einstein, far more so than that E=mc2 stuff. I know what the symbols mean, Energy equaling matter at the speed of light multiplied by itself. But I don’t have a clue what it means, except in the most relativistic of terms.

Brian explained, briefly, that according to quantum mechanics, physicists cannot make definite predictions. Even if things generally- even almost always- turnout the way you predict they should, based on the apparent rules of the physical world, it isn’t going to happen that way all the time.

Quantum mechanics is a model that says that although probabilities highly favor one outcome and effectively suppress most others. Brian points out that just because a baseball smacked off a bat, with sufficient data, can be predictably modeled to its destination, there is always the possibility that the ball can, once in a while, land somewhere else altogether.

The very act of measuring the results of an experiment provides only a snapshot to a completely variable world. Taken to its logical conclusion, it means the Moon isn’t necessarily there if you are not looking at it.

This is what troubled Einstein in the years after he published his paper. He reportedly called for a notepad and a pencil on his deathbed, hoping that at the uttermost moment he could pen the equation that explained things rationally.

He failed.

The whole thing makes my head hurt, but in a curiously hopeful way. I feel like the baseball. Perhaps it is quantum mechanics that determined how I wound up at Big Pink in the first place, and this week, how my bid on the two bedroom, two bathroom unit on the fourth floor came to be accepted, given the variance in the number and nuance of the contracts offered, and that if I can juggle the funds properly, I will soon have even more floor space on which to spread the detritus of my life.

The view is good, and the distance to the ground is sufficient that I can conduct physics experiments from the balcony. I should have the opportunity to move again, the fourth time in four years in Big Pink.

No wonder the mailman gets confused. I suspect he thinks my whereabouts can only be explained by the Chaos Theory, or perhaps just the variables of quantum mechanics.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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