Entanglement (8 page)

“No, no.”

“Did this Ernesto guy tell you something?”

“Not really.”

“I don't understand.”

“Look, I don't know how to explain it, but I just know he's in serious danger right now.”

“What do you mean, you just know?”

Jack took a deep breath. “I saw something happen to him.”

“You
saw
?”

“Yes. Saw. A premonition, or a dream.”

“Okay, so you broke into school in the middle of the night because you had a bad dream.”

“My brother could be dying over there, and you're grilling me over using the school's Internet?”

“I'm grilling you about breaking into the school and then not being straight with me about why.”

“But I am being straight with you—I
told
you I know something is wrong. I know something bad is going to happen to Charlie, unless I can warn him!”

“You don't
know
that.”

“I do!”

“No, you
think
you do, but you don't have any factual information.”

“Look, I don't expect someone like you to understand. I'm not making this up. We're
twins!
We just know things.”

This stopped Peter, who looked at Jack's face, then turned and moved over to his desk.

Jack went back to his computer. Peter opened a book and pretended to read. Finally Jack looked up at Peter.

“You want facts? Okay! Jack and I were seven. We were at camp, playing by a river. I slipped on the mud. It was raining. The river was moving fast, and I fell into it. It was so cold that I could barely breathe. All I could do was try to keep my head above water. Charlie ran to get help from the counselor, and he told him what happened and that I was under an old bridge.

“I
was
under a bridge, but miles downstream from where we'd been playing. I was washed underneath this thing, and I grabbed on to a strut, and I was holding on for dear life. Charlie had no way of knowing that. Yet he knew. He knew exactly where I was. He
knew
.” Jack paused and looked at Peter, who was listening to him closely. “I get it. You're a science teacher, and you don't believe in anything you can't prove with a stupid equation—”

“You have no idea what I believe.”

“Whatever …”

There was a long silence between them; finally Peter spoke. “Look, I completely appreciate your concern for your brother, I do. I guess all I'm saying is that when you're upset, it's very easy to start using your imagination. And one can never overestimate the power of a negative imagination.”

Jack jumped to his feet and said fiercely, “It's not my imagination! I saw it through my heart. I
felt
it.” He smacked his chest for emphasis. “It's here.”

Peter stared at him, now more curious than skeptical. Something Jack said had struck a nerve. “What do you mean, you
felt
it?”

“It's beyond words, but it's real. Hasn't there ever been anything you just knew was true?”

Peter looked down at his messy desk, considering Jack's words. His eyes fell on a photo of Manuela.

“Look, I need to speak to my brother, Mr. Keller.” He began making gathering movements, as if he were leaving. “I'll do it somewhere else if I have to—”

“All right, calm down,” Peter said. “You can stay. Just promise me that when your brother calls and says he's fine, which he will, you'll go home and get some rest.”

“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.