Lost and Wanted(9)

    It was his own photograph of the largest telescope at the Observatorio del Teide on Tenerife—the white dome with a yellow moon hanging behind it—which he and his team were planning to use in their tests of Bell’s Inequality. I’ve never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they’ve been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking.





6.


    PLEASE JOIN US TO CELEBRATE THE LIFE OF

CHARLOTTE ADELAIDE BOYCE

THE MEMORIAL CHURCH, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

SATURDAY, JULY 11, AT 10:00 A.M.



The invitation included a photograph framed inside a piece of heavy gray-blue card stock. It was a close-up of Charlie laughing: I recognized it as one of a series taken by a photographer before she went to L.A., when she still thought she wanted to act as well as write. It wasn’t that the laughter was fake; you could see Charlie had hit it off with the photographer, and was really amused by something he or she had said. (Something about her expression made me think the photographer had been a man.) But this was her social, extroverted persona, and more than anyone I’ve ever met, Charlie had two distinct selves, one private and one public. You had to come fairly close before you could see the other one, much less capture it on film.

The card had been tucked into the corner of our dry-erase calendar for several days, but Jack hadn’t mentioned it. That in itself suggested to me that he understood. On the Thursday before the memorial, I picked him up from soccer camp, and we walked home from the park through the humid afternoon. At home I gave him peanut butter crackers and a banana. A Lego catalog had come, and he paged through it, leaving crumbs in the binding. There was something called a “hydroponic space station” that he’d been eyeing for months.

    “You can build all this,” he said. “You can buy it.”

“Remember I told you about my friend Charlie?”

“Uh huh.”

We were sitting at a green-and-yellow laminate table that I’d had since college, in our small kitchen, where I’ve hung two spider plants from the ceiling in rope baskets. Sun was coming in around their leaves, making patterns on the table.

“There’s going to be a memorial.”

“I remember.”

“I don’t think we’ve ever talked about the memorial.”

“I mean—I remember her.”

“That’s right,” I said. “She came to visit when you were four.”

“No,” Jack said, in a new wounded way he has. Now that he’s seven, all of a sudden there are times when he’s able to correct me, when he’s observed a physical object or a situation more carefully than I have. This is normally true of things that he’s more interested in than I am, such as the route of the ice-cream truck, or the progress of the new construction along Mem Drive.

“I saw her,” he insisted.

“Where?”

“In your office.”

I thought I understood. “Are you thinking of Rose in my office?”

Rose was one of the Knight Science Journalism fellows this year, who was interested in an article I’d written on NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. She had come to talk with me on a day when Jack was hanging out in my office after school. Rose was both younger and less glamorous than Charlie in that photograph, but she was a tall Nigerian woman with short hair; I thought she was the only person Jack might have seen in my office whom he could have confused with Charlie.

    “Rose?” Jack said incredulously. “I know Rose. She got me the CMB with googly eyes.”

I had told the Knight fellows that Jack was curious about the cosmic microwave background. Sometimes it feels like I end up regretting every anecdote I allow myself to tell about my son at work. Anyone would be attracted to the brightly colored map of the early universe created by NASA’s WMAP—an especially pretty golden satellite that spins around the project’s home page in animated form. A basic version of the concept—that the satellite took a picture of light left over from the Big Bang, teaching us a lot about the history of the universe—is possible to explain even to a six-year-old; it didn’t signify anything exceptional about my child that he was interested. Nevertheless, Rose had managed to find a cosmic microwave background stuffed toy (an item that could have been procured only in the immediate vicinity of MIT) and bring it in for Jack, and so naturally he remembered her.

“So who did you see in my office who looked like Charlie?”

“Not your work office,” Jack said. “Upstairs.”

I was lost. “Here?”

Now Jack finally looked at the picture on the calendar. “She’s pretty.”

“Yep.”

If he doesn’t want to answer a question, you can’t push him. I waited, and sure enough, he continued.

“She was sitting at your desk, and I said, ‘Hi.’ I scared her.” He smiled, as if at a real memory. “She—” He jumped a little in his chair and opened his eyes wide, a parody of adult surprise.

I have always thought that if there were ghosts, they would be unlikely to act as purposefully as they do in popular representations. It didn’t make sense to think of incorporeal human beings who nevertheless retained all of the preoccupations of the living. If they appeared among us, I thought it would be in the manner of subatomic particles, appearing and disappearing according to the energy transfers of quantum mechanics; and further, that our ability to perceive anything about them would be severely limited, just as all interactions between classical and quantum systems are limited.