Every time I look at the TV news at seven, he thought miserably, I end up feeling this way before midnight. It's almost as if they're afraid somebody might have a flicker of hope or a good opinion of humanity (at least in potential) or a brief moment of delusory security. Every night, to prevent such unrealistic moods, they have to remind us that the violence and brutality is still continuing.
With a shock, Benny discovered that he was weeping again, silently, guiltily, privately. He had thought he was past that.
So much for booze as a tranquilizer.
He fought against it. It was self-indulgence, disguised self-pity actually. He dabbed his eyes and tried to think of something else. Om mani padme hum, Om mani padme hum…
"Nice night." An Unidentified Man had walked out onto the balcony.
"You don't feel the smog up here," Benny said, embarrassed, wondering if he had gotten rid of the last tear before this stranger had seen him.
The Unidentified Man looked up at the stars, smiling slightly. He was good-looking enough to be an actor, Benny thought, and at second glance he did look remotely familiar, as if his face had been in the newspapers sometime. "The stars," he said, "don't they get to you?"
Benny looked up. "I used to think I'd live to see people go there," he confessed, suddenly sure he had met this man somewhere before, a long time ago. "Not likely with Lousewart leading us back to the Stone Age."
"You're non-ec," the man said, in mock accusation.
"Guilty," Benny replied, realizing that this man was remarkably easy to talk to. "I think that if we used more of our brains, we'd be able to create a world where people would have a right to High Expectations."
"Hopelessly reactionary," the man said, grinning. "You probably still read science fiction."
"Guilty again," Benny said.
"Suppose I were an extraterrestrial," the man said quietly. "Suppose I were several million years ahead of this planet. What one question would you ask me?"
"Why is there so much violence and hatred among us?" Benny asked at once.
"It's always that way on primitive planets," the man said. "The early stages of evolution are never pretty."
"Do planets grow up?" Benny asked.
"Some of them," the man said simply.
"How?"
"Through suffering enough, they learn wisdom."
Benny turned and looked at his odd companion. He is an actor, he thought. "Through suffering," he repeated. "There's no other way?"
"Not in the primitive stages," the man said. "Primitives are too self-centered to ask the important questions, until suffering forces them to ask."
Benny felt the grief pass through him again, and leave. He grinned. "You play this game very well."
"Anybody can do it," the man said. "It's a gimmick, to get outside your usual mind-set. You can do it too. Just try for a minute-you be the advanced intelligence, and I'll be the primitive Terran. Okay?"
"Sure," Benny said, enjoying this.
"Why me?" The stranger's tone was intense. "Why have I been singled out for so much injustice and pain?"
"There is no known answer to that," Benny said at once. "Some say it's just chance-hazard-statistics. Some say there is a Plan, and that you were chosen to learn an important lesson. Nobody knows, really. The important thing is to ask the next question."
"And what is the next question?"
Benny felt as if this was easy. "The next question is, What do I do about it? How ever many minutes or hours or years or decades I have left, what do I do to make sense out of it all?"
"Hey, that's good," the stranger said. "You play Higher Intelligence very well."
"It's just a gimmick," Benny said, feeling as if a great weight had been taken off him. They laughed.
"Where did you ever learn that?" Benny asked. "From a book on Cabala," the man said. "It's a way of contacting the Holy Guardian Angel. But people don't relate to that metaphor these days, so I changed it to an extraterrestrial from an advanced civilization."
"Who are you? I keep feeling I've seen your face…" The man laughed. "I'm a stage magician," he said. "Cagliostro the Great."
"Are you sure you're not a real magician?" Benny asked.
SCHRODINGER THE MAN
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
–neils bohr, quoted by beynam, Future Science
Erwin Schrodinger did a lot more than just make up mathematical riddles about fictitious cats. His equations describing subatomic wave mechanics, which earned him a Nobel Prize, were among the most important contributions to particle theory in our century. Later, he turned his attention to biophysics and in a small book called What Is Life? he offered the first mathematical definition of the difference between living and dead systems, throwing off as a side reflection the idea that life is negative entropy. This insight was to trigger quite a few new ideas in many of his readers, including Norbert Wiener of MIT and Claud Shannon of Bell Labs, who got so deep into negative entropy, due to Schrodinger, that they created mathematical information theory and laid the foundations of the science of cybernetics, resulting ultimately in the Beast. Schrodinger didn't even believe in his own Cat riddle; he had propounded it only to show that there must be something wrong with quantum theory if it leads to conclusions like that. Schrodinger didn't like quantum theory because it pictures an anarchist universe and he was a determinist, like his good friend Albert Einstein. Thus, even though he had helped to create quantum theory and used it every day, Schrodinger kept hoping to find something seriously wrong with it.
The Cat problem presupposes a Cat, a device of lethal nature, such as a gun or a poison-gas pellet, and a quantum process which will, eventually, trigger the weapon and kill the Cat. Very simple. An experimenter, if he wanted to find out when the device had fired and killed the Cat, would look into the laboratory where all this was transpiring and note what actually happened. But- Schrodinger points out with some glee-modern physics, if it's all it's cracked up to be, should allow us to find out what is happening without our actually going into the laboratory to look. All we have to do is write down the equations of the quantum process and calculate when the phase change leading to detonation will occur. The trouble is that the equations yield, at minimum, two solutions. At any given time-say one half hour-the equations give us two quantum eigenvalues, one of which means that the Cat is now definitely dead, kaput, spurlos versenkt, finished, and the other which tells us that the Cat is still alive as you and me.
Most physicists preferred to ignore Schrodinger 's damned Cat; quantum mechanics worked, after all, and why make a big thing about something a little funny in the mathematics?
Einstein loved Schrodinger 's Cat because it mathematically demonstrated his own conviction that subatomic events couldn't be as anarchistic as wave mechanics seemed to imply. Einstein was a Hidden Variable man. He claimed there must be a Hidden Variable-an Invisible Hand, as Adam Smith might have said-controlling the seemingly indeterminate quantum anarchy. Einstein was sure that the Hidden Variable was something quite deterministic and mechanical, which would be discovered eventually. "God does not play dice with the world," he liked to say.
Decade followed decade and the Hidden Variable remained elusive.
In the 1970s, Dr. Evan Harris Walker solved the Cat paradox (to his own satisfaction) and defined the Hidden Variable (to his own satisfaction). The Hidden Variable, he said, was consciousness. There was muttering in some quarters that Walker was smuggling pantheism into physics disguised as quantum psychology, but many younger physicists-especially the acid-heads-accepted the Walker solution.