“Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”
“And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a chapeau.”
They dragged him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.
“He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a paper plate in one hand and a styrofoam cup in the other.
“Did you get that at the breakfast brunch?” I asked.
“Yes. It was the last one. And they ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t in Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.
“No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.
“You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut into her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”
Friday, 9–10 A.M. “The Eureka Experiment: A Slide Presentation.” J. Lvov, Eureka College. Descriptions, results, and conclusions of Lvov’s delayed conscious/ randomed choice experiments. Cecil B. DeMille A.
Dr. Whedbee eventually came in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.
“Here,” Dr. Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal-basin boundaries adjusted.” She whacked the side of the projector.
There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit it again. The light came on. “I learned that in the chaos seminar last night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”
“I believe I’m ready to begin,” Dr. Whedbee said. Dr. Takumi and I sat down. “Information is the transmission of meaning,” Dr. Whedbee said. He wrote “meaning” or possible “information” on the screen with a green Magic Marker. “When information is randomized, meaning cannot be transmitted, and we have a state of entropy.” He wrote it under “meaning” with a red Magic Marker. His handwriting appeared to be completely illegible.
“States of entropy vary from low entropy, such as the mild static on your car radio, to high entropy, a state of complete disorder, of randomness and confusion, in which no information at all is being communicated.”
Oh, my God, I thought. I forgot to tell the hotel about Darlene. The next time Dr. Whedbee bent over to inscribe hieroglyphics on the screen, I sneaked out and went down to the desk, hoping Tiffany hadn’t come on duty yet. She had.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m in room six-sixty-three,” I said. “I’m sharing a room with Dr. Darlene Mendoza. She’s coming in this morning, and she’ll be needing a key.”
“For what?” Tiffany said.
“To get into the room. I may be in one of the lectures when she gets here.”
“Why doesn’t she have a key?”
“Because she isn’t here yet.”
“I thought you said she was sharing a room with you.”
“She will be sharing a room with me. Room six-sixty-three. Her name is Darlene Mendoza.”
“And your name?” she asked, hands poised over the computer.
“Ruth Baringer.”
“We don’t show a reservation for you.”
We have made impressive advances in quantum physics in the ninety years since Planck’s constant, but they have by and large been advances in technology, not theory. We can make advances in theory only when we have a model we can visualize.
I high-entropied with Tiffany for a while on the subjects of my not having a reservation and the air-conditioning and then switched back suddenly to the problem of Darlene’s key, in the hope of catching her off guard. It worked about as well as Alley’s delayed-choice experiments. In the middle of my attempting to explain that Darlene was not the air-conditioning repairman, Abey Fields came up.
“Have you seen Dr. Gedanken?” I shook my head.
“I was sure he’d come to my Wonderful World workshop, but he didn’t, and the hotel says they can’t find his reservation,” he said, scanning the lobby. “I found out what his new project is, incidentally, and I’d be perfect for it. He’s going to find a paradigm for quantum theory. Is that him?” he said, pointing at an elderly man getting in the elevator.
“I think that’s Dr. Whedbee,” I said, but he had already sprinted across the lobby to the elevator.
He nearly made it. The elevator slid to a close just as he got there. He pushed the elevator button several times to make the door open again, and when that didn’t work, tried to readjust its fractal-basin boundaries. I turned back to the desk.
“May I help you?” Tiffany said. “You may,” I said. “My roommate, Darlene Mendoza, will be arriving some time this morning. She’s a producer. She’s here to cast the female lead in a new movie starring Robert Redford and Harrison Ford. When she gets here, give her her key. And fix the air-conditioning.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
The Josephson junction is designed so that electrons must obtain additional energy to surmount the energy barrier. It was found, however, that some electrons simply tunnel, as Heinz Pagel put it, “right through the wall.”
Abey had stopped banging on the elevator button and was trying to pry the elevator doors apart. I went out the side door and up to Hollywood Boulevard. David’s restaurant was near Hollywood and Vine. I turned the other direction, toward Grauman’s Chinese, and ducked into the first restaurant I saw.
“I’m Stephanie,” the waitress said. “How many are there in your party?”
There was no one remotely in my vicinity. “Are you an actress-slash-model?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m working here part-time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons.”
“There’s one of me,” I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. “I want a table away from the window.”
She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me. “Our breakfast specials today are papaya stuffed with salmonberries and nasturtium/ radicchio salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll take your order when your other party arrives.”
I stood the extra menu up so it hid me from the window, opened the other one, and read the breakfast entrees. They all seemed to have cilantro or lemongrass in their names. I wondered if “radicchio” could possibly be Californian for “donut.”
“Hi,” David said, grabbing the standing-up menu and sitting down. “The sea-urchin paté looks good.”
I was actually glad to see him. “How did you get here?” I asked.
“Tunneling,” he said. “What exactly is extra-virgin olive oil?”
“I wanted a donut,” I said pitifully.
He took my menu away from me, laid it on the table, and stood up. “There’s a great place next door that’s got the donut Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk in It Happened One Night.”