Quantum Times (3 page)

     “Not so fast big man, first give us your wallet and that nice coat you’re wearing,” the one who had first spoken said.

     The alien then realized that now he was being directly threatened; the demeanor of the three young men had become more bellicose. He thought about his instructions but they had not covered this point, and besides he knew he was not going to surrender his coat and he had no wallet. “I’m sorry but that cannot happen,” he said.

     “What you mean ‘cannot happen’? And where you from anyway, your accent is strange as hell!” This speaker was the shortest of the three. His facial features were not at all attractive, the alien thought. His nose looked broken and his skin was splotchy. The alien was surprised that someone would allow himself to have such a deficient appearance.

     The alien was disappointed to hear that his accent seemed strange to their ears. He thought he had pronounced his English appropriately. But he had to admit that their pronunciation did seem different from his. “I think you should let me pass now – it would be better,” the alien responded. He regarded the three young men with what he thought was a benevolent and friendly gaze. He observed however that it seemed to have no effect. In fact their look at him seemed to harden and take on a feral anticipation.

     It was then that things went badly. One of the young men, the tall one who had first confronted the alien reached into a pocket and pulled out what the alien recognized as a dangerous projectile weapon and pointed it at him while the other two tried to grab hold of his arms. The alien came from a warrior culture where such actions were intolerable and the insult unforgivable. So his response was immediate and severe. Though he had been issued none of his usual advanced weaponry for what was supposed to be an unprovocative excursion, he had of course carried within the sleeve of his right arm what in English he thought would be called a ‘slicer’, the electromagnetic blade of which could instantly cut through the hardest of materials.

     It sprang into his hand and in the next instant it was slicing through the wrist of the young man who had held the gun which then fell to the ground. The next flashes of the alien’s arm brought the slicer through the throats of the young man who had held the gun and the other man who had been standing next to him. The third man who had been further way from the alien did not move as he watched the alien slice into his comrades. The alien paused and regarded the man – letting the man decide what next to do. The man looked down at his two friends who were now bleeding and dying on the sidewalk.

     This one remaining was the short one with the broken nose who had questioned the alien’s accent. His eyes were wide and unbelieving but his muscles seemed paralyzed. He was confounded by a turn of events that was both unexpected and fatal for his friends. He could see his own future in their dead eyes.

     The alien saw that the man no longer mattered. “Go away!” The young man turned and ran off.

     The alien looked around to see if there were any other threats to him. He saw someone across the street look his way then turn and walk quickly down the street. He looked back at the two young men now lying on the pavement.

     “Regrettable,” the alien said to himself as he walked away. He would have to report the incident to his commanders though his actions had been irreproachable. As he continued walking, he considered the objectives of the mission to this Earth in light of what he was learning about its people. He knew that the three young humans would not be the last ones to die. He also knew that a microcosm of experience often is a true reflection of a macro environment. As he had already observed, humans were by nature predatory and dangerous. 

Chapter Two

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.”

Max Planck

     David Randall’s day began with a blast; a blast that hit everyone in the world who was linked to an electronic communication device. As David did most mornings, just before getting up out of bed he reached for his smartphone lying on his bedside table and scanned it for messages that might have come in overnight. And there on the screen as soon as he turned the phone on, ignoring the phone’s message protocols was The Object’s email blast.  Once again in every favored language of the device owner, a simple text message was displayed. It read:

“We would like to communicate with Benjamin Planck. He will know how to reach us.”

     David called out to Gabriela who he could hear stirring in the kitchen, “Gabby, check your phone! The Object is speaking again!”

     Gabriela still clad in the running shorts and tee shirt she usually slept in came into the bedroom carrying a cup of coffee, “What are you saying?”

     David handed her his phone and showed her the message. She read it and with her natural skepticism said, “How do you know it’s The Object?”

     “I’m sure it is but you check your phone and see.” She picked up her phone from her bedside table and checked for the message. She nodded when it was there too.

     She added, “Who’s Benjamin Planck? I’ve never heard of him.”

     “Let’s google him.” They both entered the name and scanned the entries. There weren’t that many and nothing stood out. No Benjamin Planck seemed to have ever done anything notable let alone done anything that would get the attention of beings from a different world. Lots of entries for Max Planck, not so much for Benjamin.

     “This just gets more bizarre,” David said. “The Object arrives and then except for the message about the missiles the Chinese and Russians fired at it, it goes radio silent for 4 weeks and then says it wants to talk to someone that nobody has ever heard of!”

     “And even more strange,” Gabriela pointed out, “it said that the now mysterious Benjamin Planck will know how to communicate with The Object. Tell me David, would you know how to communicate with The Object?”

     “Good question.”

     As Gabriela headed back to the kitchen, she asked, “What are you up to today?”

     As David headed to the bathroom to take a shower he said, “I’m meeting with Dr. Wheeling and then I guess I’m going to try and figure out who Benjamin Planck is….you know that name sort of rings a bell in my brain. I think I’ve heard it before. “

     “Well if he’s not in Google he doesn’t exist.”

     “That’s not entirely true.”

     As she drank her coffee she thought about how good it was to see her longtime boyfriend excited about a project. Too often he was in between projects and not really doing anything. He didn’t have steady income and though he was a brilliant writer, he didn’t get paid much for what he wrote – not living in New York City kind of income. She had to admit he wasn’t good marriage material. At least according to her mother. Her mother had really been getting on her lately about that. Her parents wanted grandchildren. She was starting to want a baby too and that definitely meant getting married first. Her old world parents would kill her if she wasn’t married.

     David was the problem. The very thing she loved about him, his easy way about doing things and that he never got mad at her – unlike her strict parents when she was growing up – was the flip side of his lack of drive and ambition. And he loved her, she knew that – even though she was quite hard on him at times – and usually she regretted it afterwards. Still she still had hopes for him. If he ever found something to really sink his teeth into, he could be as big a success as anyone in the big competitive city they lived in. She was sure of that – well mostly sure.

     When David entered Dr. Wheeling’s office at Columbia, the Nobel winner was frowning at an equation he had written on the large whiteboard hanging on the side wall. The physicist was tall and thin and slump shouldered. His dark hair was sprinkled with gray and pulled back in a short ponytail. His eyes were almost crystal blue and wide spaced. Though approaching 60 years old, he radiated an intensity and energy that was off-putting to anyone who wasn’t used to being around him. He had won his Nobel Prize for work he had done years earlier that had led to the reduction of the amount of heat generated by electronic devices – work that he now casually dismissed as ‘practically engineering.’ Like many others in the field he was enthralled with chasing the holy grail of the “T. O. E.”: the Theory of Everything that would unite the world of physics.

     Without turning away from his work on the whiteboard, Wheeling said to David, “Have you decided to come back to physics yet and leave your stupid writing business? Such a waste of a good mind!”

     “Still writing Professor -- which is why I’m here. I’m writing about The Object – specifically about the science of it. I hoped you might have some ideas.” As he spoke David sat down on a chair across from where Dr. Wheeling was standing. From past experience he knew the professor liked to stand or sit on his desk while having David sit on that particular chair – hopefully raptly attentive to the professor’s every word. David didn’t mind – most of what Wheeling had to say was well worth listening to.

     Wheeling wrote a few notations on the whiteboard, then stared at the work and nodded his head up and down a few times. With his skinny frame, long neck and thin face he looked a bit like a crane bobbing for a fish. Then he turned to face David and nodded his head a few times more and said, “The science of The Object …. By which of course you mean the physics …. In such a situation it is of course about the physics!” As he spoke, he sat down on the edge of his desk.

     “You know I have been thinking about The Object – and some people from the government have asked me about it … what I think. I don’t think the government people know anything.”

     David agreed, “I don’t think they know anything more than we do.”

     “I’m sure they know much less!”

     “So what do we know?” David asked.

     “I will tell you but first let me ask you a question. Is there anything, any data, anything at all to contradict what we think we saw when it first arrived… that is….anything to suggest that it did not just pop into existence into our sky?”

     David shook his head, “So far no one anywhere has claimed to have detected it on its way to Earth. Far as we know it just all of a sudden was there.”

     “Exactly!” Wheeling emphasized with his long index finger stabbing at David who had taken a seat across from the desk. “So let us assume that is what occurred. Now how did it get here? That is the question. To my mind there are only two possibilities. One is that it arrived travelling faster than the speed of light. If that were true, no one would see or detect The Object until after it had arrived. Unfortunately, Einstein told us that is not possible. Einstein’s reasoning is very compelling and no one has been able to prove differently in the last hundred years. In fact according to all that we know, travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible!”

     This was precisely the kind of conversation David had come to meet with the brilliant professor hoping to have. So to keep it going, David asked, “So what is the second possibility?”

     Wheeling wagged his finger at David, “Well, let’s see if you remember ANYTHING from your studies of physics. We believe there is something that pops in and out of existence. So David my lapsed physicist friend, do you remember what it is?”

     David started to shake his head and make the excuse that it had been awhile, but then he thought he knew the answer – even though it could not apply because it related to actions occurring at the smaller than atoms level. “Well, quantum mechanics argues that particles can pop in and out of existence but that is at the subatomic level. The probability that anything with any real mass could pop in and out is so highly unlikely that it borders on impossible.”

     “Very good David, you do remember some first semester physics….Now note that you said it was highly improbable but NOT IMPOSSIBLE! That is correct! Traveling faster than light is impossible but popping in and out of existence at the quantum level is not impossible and only approaches impossibility
though it never gets there
as the mass of the object increases. ”

     “So what is the point as it applies to The Object?”

     Dr. Wheeling gave David a grin that David had come to recognize as usually preceding a smug but enlightening observation. “As Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

     “I don’t believe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that with Physics in mind.

     “That is irrelevant!”

     “So you are saying that to understand The Object we have to look at Quantum Physics to explain its behavior?”

     “Indeed. That is correct.”

     “That would be so bizarre!” David exclaimed.

     Dr. Wheeling rather resignedly nodded, “The behavior of particles at the quantum level is very bizarre. As our friend Einstein said, ‘it is spooky!’ But it is all we have for now.”

     David thought about what he remembered about quantum mechanics and shuddered at the thought of going down that rat hole. Then he said, “We also have the new communication from The Object about wanting to talk to someone named Benjamin Planck.”

     The professor spread his hands out with his palms up. “I know nothing about a Benjamin Planck. I asked about him. No one seems to know him.”

     “The funny thing is Professor I recognize the name. It sounds familiar.”

     “Of course it sounds familiar David! Max Planck…one of the most famous names in physics. Of course Planck sounds familiar.”

     And that’s when David remembered. Benjamin Planck! All of the physics students at Columbia just called him ‘Planck.’ How could they not? When he had Max Planck’s last name….and David then remembered that Planck had said Max Planck was his like great great great uncle. But when Planck introduced himself he said his name was Ben.

     “Professor, I remember now! About ten years ago, the same time I was there, Ben Planck was a doctoral candidate in Physics at Columbia. We were sort of friendly competitors. But honestly, he was way smarter than I was. He was smarter than the professors!”

     “But I have never heard of him. Did he not move forward in a career in Physics?”

     “It was ten years ago … but as I remember it....His doctoral degree advisors didn’t like what he wanted to do his thesis on. They pushed him to do something related to Super String Theory. He considered that a fun mathematical puzzle but not what he was interested in. So he did what they said, he got his degree and then dropped out of sight. I never heard from him or of him again.”

     Professor Wheeling was intrigued. “Do you remember what it was he wanted to pursue – what was the core idea?”

     David leaned back in his chair and tried to remember back ten years earlier. He knew he would remember…he always remembered things. All he had to do was get his mind back into that frame of reference. He stared up at the ceiling and then as if it was written on the ceiling of Dr. Wheeling’s office he recalled a discussion Planck and he had had over beers at Planck’s apartment one night. Planck had just been told he couldn’t do his thesis on what he wanted. The powers that be thought it too insignificant and silly – they had actually used the word ‘silly’.

     David nodded to himself and then said, “He wanted to explore the issue of the need for an observer in quantum physics. He could never choose to ignore that the famous double slit experiment produced different results if the passage of the electrons through the slits were observed versus not observed. He thought that the classic Schrödinger’s Cat thought problem was actually true at a deeper level of existence. I recall he used to take the philosophical question of ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?’ and add to it. Planck would ask: if there is no one ever to observe the fallen tree, does it even fall? Or is its falling suspended until an observer finally arrives. Then he would ramble a little about ‘consciousness’ and some equation that he had envisioned. “

     “So what else?” Dr. Wheeling asked.

     David thought a moment longer, “He thought the universe was a vast sea of potentiality and it was consciousness that gave it form.”

     Dr. Wheeling’s focus was full on David, with all its intensity boring into him. “And what else?”

     “There is no ‘what else?’ The Ben Planck I knew was not much of a talker. That conversation was the longest I ever had with him. We were in his apartment because he almost never left it and talking to him was usually like talking to the wall. He was very shy and usually monosyllabic.”