Lost and Wanted(42)

“Well, actually—there were some physicists who built a machine like that.”

“Really?” He sounded distraught.

“At Berkeley in the seventies. They called it the metaphase typewriter—it didn’t work, though.”

Jack cheered up: “You have to tell her that.”

“Well, but if that idea makes her feel better, for now—then maybe it’s okay?”

“But it’s wrong. You can only talk to people who are alive.”

“That’s what I think, too.”

“Is there a machine for talking to people who are alive?”

I did laugh then. “The phone?”

“Or the internet.”

“Right.”

“Even if they’re in China.”

“Yep.”

We pulled into our driveway just as Andrea was letting herself in, her stomach protruding from an unzipped jacket. She looked up and waved; I lifted my hand, but I felt a nagging worry. Andrea and Günter had never said anything to me about moving once they had a second child; as far as I knew, they put any extra cash they had into their films. I thought it was completely possible that they might sacrifice space and comfort for their growing family to filmic space for the Wampanoag, to whom they felt an almost religious devotion.

“Even if you don’t know where they are,” Jack said, “you can find them.”





23.


Although its name sounds absurd, Berkeley’s Fundamental Fysiks Group was composed of real scientists. After the Second World War, government funding poured into physics departments all over the country, nuclear and solid-state physics most of all. Graduate programs were suddenly oversubscribed, and there was no time to sit around dreaming up exotic or speculative ideas. The way that Einstein and his circle had made their extraordinary advances, meeting at cafés or in one another’s homes, playing music together and excitedly debating their vexing gedanken experiments, seemed more like a romantic movie than the real, historical past. Musical soirees and European coffeehouses were replaced by giant American lecture halls. The order of the day, as my colleague David Kaiser writes in his history of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, was “shut up and calculate,” Richard Feynman’s famous phrase to suggest that rigorous mathematical labor—not philosophy—was the path to understanding the quantum world.

    The Fundamental Fysiks Group was a casual gathering of ten scientists who met once a week to discuss those more philosophical ideas, beginning in 1975 in Berkeley. Kaiser suggests that the FFG’s open-mindedness toward parapsychology and ghosts, combined with their minor celebrity as members of the counterculture, helped to keep quantum entanglement—the “spooky action” between distant particles that Einstein refused to countenance—on the map. It turned out that spooky action, at least, was right: pairs of subatomic particles like electrons can be “entangled” in such a way that observing one of them instantly influences the other, even after they’ve moved far apart. The observer is important because these quantum particles exist as probabilities; they don’t have a fixed position or momentum until a scientist pins one down by measuring it. By measuring one, she instantly influences the other, simply because the pair of them once interacted with each other.

The uncertainty that is the defining feature of the quantum realm—the role of chance in the behavior of tiny particles of matter—made sense to scientists in the seventies. Randomness seemed compatible with events in the larger world. With far-fetched experiments like the metaphase typewriter, the members of the FFG hoped to push the idea of entanglement even further, to elucidate human consciousness. Instead, entrepreneurs have used entanglement to devise encryption systems for financial and other data. The fact that entanglement today is working out for banking and information technology rather than for parapsychology must disappoint those among the group’s members who are still living.

    A few days after our conversation in the car, Jack asked me to tell him about the scientists who had tried to invent a machine to talk to ghosts. I explained that an American physicist named Nick Herbert, along with a group of friends, hoped to be able to reach the spirits of the dead, in particular Harry Houdini. I told him that people had been designing instruments for this purpose throughout human history, but that this had been the only attempt I knew of by real scientists. First, Herbert had obtained a sample of thallium. He chose that element because it was a readily available radioactive material—and maybe also because it sits right between mercury and lead on the periodic table, elements associated with alchemy. Herbert and his friends were fascinated by the ideas of Evan Harris Walker, a physicist and parapsychologist, who believed that the brain is actually a quantum mechanical system. Walker thought that leftover human consciousness—what you might colloquially call a “soul”—persists after a person dies, and sometimes inhabits a living body. He speculated that the soul could dictate human behavior quantum mechanically, just as one entangled particle can influence another from a distance. The Fundamental Fysiks Group considered it unethical to try their consciousness experiments on human subjects, and so they invented a machine, through which those dead souls might be tempted to speak to the living.

Jack wasn’t interested in any of this history, of course. He just wanted to know how the machine was supposed to work. I explained, without much hope of him understanding, that thallium is a radioactive element, which means that it can decay. When that happens, it releases tiny, energetic particles. We call radioactivity a typical quantum event because it’s uncertain—you can’t predict exactly when this energy will be released, or in what form. You can only give an average interval between the decay of individual thallium atoms. Herbert hooked his thallium sample up to a Geiger counter, and the Geiger counter to a teletype machine. (How my father would have loved tinkering with the metaphase typewriter, if he’d been in Berkeley in the seventies.) If the thallium atoms decayed at the average rate for that element, as measured by the Geiger counter, the teletype machine printed one of the most common letters in English—E or S. When the rate departed from that average, a statistically rarer letter, like J or U, was printed. I explained to Jack that the FFG invented this complicated machine mostly for fun, and that the word “metaphase” is actually meaningless in physics. The idea was that the scientists might induce the dead to enter the machine and spell out messages to the living: they proposed to contact a recently deceased colleague, who’d known the inner workings of the experiment. It was never clear to me why, if the dead could enter human minds and influence behavior, they wouldn’t simply encourage a pair of hands to type out a message on an ordinary typewriter—but I also have to admit that the Fundamental Fysicists were probably enjoying themselves a lot more than we do in our symposia and colloquia today.