Welcome to the Spot Writers. This month’s prompt is: Center your story around an absurd detail (for example, people walk on their hands, hedgehogs fly…). This week’s contribution comes from Chiara De Giorgi.
Chiara is currently in Berlin, Germany, doing her best to catch up with semi-abandoned writing projects. Her YA novel “Mi chiamo Elisa” was published in Italy by “Le Mezzelane Casa Editrice” in September 2020.
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Quantum Theory is for everyone
by Chiara De Giorgi
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While I was walking through the woods and around old houses, I pondered life as only 11-year-olds can do. I happened to pass by a paint factory, and my brain got excited.
Why? you ask.
Well, first of all I need to tell you that, although my field is humanities, I come from a family of physicists, and such a legacy is hard to shake off. I knew – don’t ask me how – that colour is nothing but an aspect of stuff, dependent on how said stuff reacts to being hit by light. Light contains all the colours, so when it hits an object and we see it as being, say, red, it means that the object has absorbed all colours except red.
Back to our paint factory. I started wondering what colour paint would be, before the lid of the can was lifted. Would it be black? And if you lifted it slowly and peeked inside, would you see a dark colour like grey, or brown, before the paint was fully exposed to light and showed its true colour – maybe yellow, or green? I came to the conclusion that paint could be any colour, until someone took the lid off the can.
It took me one hour to walk the two kilometers to my grandma’s house, because I took every possible wrong turn, and when I finally got there, my excitement about paint got damped because the poor woman was beside herself with worry. She, I realized, had lived a similar experience as finding out what colour the paint inside a can is: until she saw me, I could either be alive and well, or missing.
Years later, I read about Schrödinger’s cat. It is the story of a cat in its natural environment: a box. I’ll explain.
There’s a box. It’s closed, so you can’t see inside, but you know that it contains a cat and a vial of sleeping gas[1] which may or may not open. If it opens, the cat will fall asleep. If it doesn’t, the cat stays awake. Until you open the box, you have no way of saying whether the cat is awake or asleep, which means that, for you, the cat is both awake and asleep.
This is a simple introduction to a much more complicated concept called Quantum Theory, you might have heard of that.
The next step we have to take is understand what makes the vial open or not. Hold tight, because this is really insane. A single particle suddenly enters our story. This new character decides whether the sleeping gas will be released inside the box or not. But how can a particle decide anything, you ask. I’ll tell you how. Someone has to watch it. As soon as it’s watched, the particle decides. It will either open the vial or not, and if you want to try and predict which one it will pick, you may as well go and waste all your money in a casino, because it’s a 50/50 chance. But there’s more. Until the vial opens (i.e. until the particle decides, i.e. until the particle is watched) the cat itself is in a sort of suspended position, and is both awake and asleep.
Please, don’t ask me for proof, or equations. I’m sure someone has come up with something by now, but not I. For me it’s enough to know that it’s our perspective, our observation – my observation – that influences reality, and that until that moment anything can be – and is – true.
This long introduction was not just so I could show off my basic understanding of crazy stuff. It actually has to do with the story I’m about to tell. Yes, because after finding out about Herr Schrödinger and his cat, my brain got way more excited than it had been that morning in front of the paint factory.
You already know that I am no scientist, that I didn’t follow in my family’s path, but, seriously, Quantum Theory is for everyone.
Basically, I started applying Schrödinger’s theory to everything. For example: I would stand in front of the restroom’s door, and postulate that, until I opened the door, the restroom would be both free and occupied. Before looking into the fridge, I would think that it would, and would not, contain tiramisu. My hypothesis was that, as probability theory would have it, sooner or later I would actually open the fridge and find tiramisu there. I took notes. I also angered my roommates, but that’s another story.
One morning, upon waking up, I decided I would not look at the time. As long as I didn’t know what time it was, it could be any time at all. And that was probably the reason behind the events that followed.
I became the particle. A very confused one, admittedly.
Time stopped. Well, sort of.
What I mean is: nights kept following days, so I guess that the earth continued to rotate on itself and revolve around the sun. However, the earth’s inhabitants were suddenly unable to measure time in any way. It’s hard to explain, harder than it was to illustrate Schrödinger’s cat’s story at the beginning of this tale. We still had watches, and clocks, and hourglasses, and sundials, and whatnot. But they didn’t make any sense anymore. We couldn’t read them. Time as we used to know it suddenly ceased to exist, because we were unable to measure it.
At first it was great, and I mean really great. It was an endless party for everyone: no deadlines, no commitments, no appointments… we did what we wanted, when we wanted – ‘when’ had become a meaningless concept anyway. Soon, though, we realized we had a problem. A huge one. It wasn’t just that we didn’t know when – or should I say ‘how’ – to go to a doctor’s appointment, or to open up a shop. There was more serious stuff. It was impossible to deal with things like babies or animals that had to be fed at regular times. Nobody knew when it was time to harvest. I tell you: it was chaos. Ah, I know it’s impossible to understand: the full meaning of a world with no time. If I hadn’t witnessed it myself, I wouldn’t know how to imagine what I just described. Essentially, I broke time.
I knew it was my fault, so I had to find a solution. I had to.
I went to sleep, and I thought that, until I woke up, I would be both in the present and in the past. My mind struggled to grasp a concept that used to be so clear, but my aim was to wake up in a time (whatever that word meant, anyway) when the disaster had not happened yet. That would reset everything – at least that’s what I hoped.
So here I am, in 1731. The notions of ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’ are clear again in my mind. I decided not to go back to my time, though, I’m scared I may mess something else up. I’d rather stay here and leave this message as a warning for the future: Please, do not apply Quantum Theory to time. Ever.
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The Spot Writers—Our Members:
Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/
Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/
Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com
Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/
[1] In Schrödinger’s original story, the vial is filled with poisonous gas, but I recently found an adaptation by Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, who used sleeping gas. Being a cat lover myself, I obviously favour Dr. Rovelli’s version.
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