He nodded slowly. “If they can do it, we can do it. We just have to figure out how.” For a moment he was gone, lost completely in thought, even the alertness of the trained soldier distracted by the intense introspection of the thinker. “Let’s break it down,” he said. “First: photography collapses the wave function of light.”
“Yes. Or so you told me. So I’m just going to sit here and say yes.”
“So,” he continued, “if we can interfere with that collapse—” And then seeing the stupid look on my face, tried, “If we can keep the quantum balls in the air—”
“Like, by not opening the lid of the box?”
“What box?”
“The box with the cat in it. Schr?dinger’s cat.”
He gave a little shake of the head. “That’s just a thought experiment. But you’re onto something,” he said.
I knew perfectly well that it was a thought experiment. But that could wait. It felt like we were on the trail of something. And I was fascinated—and a little alarmed—by the subtext, which seemed to be that this wasn’t all just a dry academic research project, but something akin to an active military campaign. Someone, somewhere in the world was doing magic. The government of the United States didn’t know how—or perhaps even who. It was a Sputnik moment: someone else had stolen a march on us. Tristan’s shadowy government entity had obviously been thrown together in a panicky effort to catch up.
Tristan settled back down, and muttered buzzwords (“collapse of wave function,” “quantum entanglement”). I typed them into Google, while Tristan, hunched over his Shiny Hat terminal, used other search engines only available to people working for shadowy government entities. An initial search for “quantum wave function” yielded four hundred thousand responses (it went up to three million without the quotes) and advanced searches—adding “collapse,” etc.—had brought it down to about thirty-five thousand. Mostly what came up were YouTube videos of geeky-looking high school kids attempting experiments in their parents’ cellars, often with refrigerators or the remnants of darkroom chemicals, frequently resulting in small but interesting explosions. There were also a kajillion academic papers that Tristan, the undergraduate physicist, dismissed by their titles alone. We added more and more modifying terms to focus the search. In this way, several hours passed. No dice.
We stopped for dinner (take-out Indian—actual Indian food, not the insipid so-called ‘curry’ now coming into fashion here in Victorian London thanks to the East India Company’s running riot over the Punjab). We then continued the search all evening; I biked home, slept, and biked back, and we kept searching. Late morning, we paused long enough to take a walk along the Charles, as being cramped in that small dingy office so long was crazy-making. For most of the walk, Tristan continued to brainstorm in a soliloquy that further convinced me he was both brilliant and a pretty bad listener.
Back at his office after the walk, he ransacked the fridge for some leftovers that hadn’t gone bad, while I returned to my desk to scroll through the results of yet another highly modified Google search. As long as Tristan wasn’t looking over my shoulder, I tried something: I searched on “Schr?dinger’s cat experiment” and then began adding in other terms to narrow it down. I excluded “thought experiment” and its German equivalent, Gedankenexperiment. I threw out anything that included such phrases as “will shock you!” and “you won’t believe what happened next!” I skewed the search in favor of words like “actual,” “practical,” and “real-world.”
Reader, you won’t believe what happened next. A single response came up.
“Rejected patent application,” I read aloud to Tristan. “Someone from MIT applied for a patent for . . . hang on . . .” My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to read. “Something he calls a cavity, intended to quote ‘jam enemy nations’ surveillance systems by maintaining a feline test subject in an indeterminate state of existence.’ Unquote.”
I heard the microwave shut down. “I can’t hear a thing when this is running,” Tristan said. He turned to look at me. “I could have sworn you just said something about a feline test subject.”
I looked him in the eye and nodded. “It’s called the Ontic Decoherence Cavity. ODEC. Proposed by Professor Frank Oda. Kind of a narcissist, I guess.”
“How do you figure?”
“He named it after himself. Oda—ODEC.”
“I’m not so sure. ‘Ontic’ means—”
“I know what it means.”
“Something to do with knowledge. Decoherence, as I am sure you are well aware, means its negation. Something about this cavity prevents the formation of definite knowledge. So, it lines up pretty well with what we are looking for.”
“Cool!” I exclaimed, and began Googling Frank Oda. “Let’s figure out where he lives and—”
“But it’s a joke,” Tristan said flatly. “The guy is a troll. Oh, a scientifically sophisticated troll. Making a very clever in-joke. But a troll nonetheless.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The part about the feline test subject. Mel, this is just a prank. A fake patent application that this guy put on the Internet for the lulz. He slipped it past some dipshit patent examiner who didn’t know physics, had never heard of Schr?dinger’s cat. Any physicist who stumbles across it will get a belly laugh out of it and move on. But we need to confine ourselves to serious—”
He stopped to read the screen of my laptop, which I had swiveled around to aim in his direction.
It was a thirty-year-old article I had dredged up from the archives of The Howler, an alternative weekly newspaper, now defunct, but once a common sight on the streets of Boston and Cambridge. Known for its leftist politics and muckraking fervor. The article featured two photographs. On the left, a middle-aged Asian-American man, captured by a sidewalk paparazzo as he took out the garbage. On the right, a stock photograph of a wire mesh enclosure in some animal shelter, housing a menagerie of stray cats.
CAT’S OUT OF THE BAG, PROFESSOR ODA!
MIT professor denies cruelty to animals, but accepts early retirement.
Tristan licked curry from his fingers, reached for the trackpad, and zoomed the image on the left. “Empty boxes, old newspapers, a milk jug, and a wine bottle.”
“You’re identifying the contents of the garbage bag?”
“No dead cats. Or live ones.”