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BERGER COOKIES AND PARTICLE PHYSICS

I went to Baltimore for the first time on Sunday. I've always wanted to go. My roommate Luke used to tell me late night stories of old bay seasoning, great food, crackhouses and shotguns when he lived off campus at Hopkins. When he first got there his friend drove him through some fucked up neighborhood without stopping at the lights. Stopping was too dangerous he said. Little eyes peered out of the houses and sapling trees grew from the middle of the street. Once Luke noticed a foul odor near his house and went to investigate. He found a huge bloated dead body in a nearby lot and told me about it. I don't know if that was all true but it sounded romantic at the time. It reminded me of Stand by Me. I was 22. Ben started out in some shitty place but ended up in a nice suburb of Baltimore and grew up there. He liked to talk about Berger cookies and other Baltimore things. It's a sign that people must have come from somewhere good, their family, the place, if they talk about it a lot. I had a Berger cookie finally and it was worth talking about like most things with Ben. I never thought it would take me 7 years to get there or that I'd be going there without him.

On Sunday, I drove down with Jill, Berrin and Sarafina. It was an odd sight to see those three stylish beautiful girls in black dresses and high heels leaning against the railing at Roy Rogers next to little kids and moms in sweatpants. Sarafina stocked the car with a 10 pack of pocket tissues, water bottles and Frito Lay's Munchies snack mix (which she says is the best). She announced she would never think of me the same way again for having Heart's Barracuda on my iPod and imagining me walking down the street rocking out to a seventies girlband. It's cause I'm so womanly, I guess, but I like that song, I told her. I'm glad I went with them. Last year when another friend died, I really had no one to talk to or that I wanted to talk to and I think that really screwed me up. And as much as it drove me crazy to see three girls I care about crying and so upset, their calm at other times seemed to come from more emotional experience than I have and made me feel like everything would be alright as long as I stuck with them.

The funeral was near Ben's mom's house in pikesville and we got there so early that I drove us downtown to eat lunch. I had a crabcake sandwich with homemade tartar sauce and it was as good as I thought it might be. Everyone kept talking about getting a drink but no one did. I ordered an iced tea. We stayed too long talking and had to race back up the highway to the funeral home. At that point I was sort of high on caffeine and taking it out on the MD-43. I dodged around cars and cursed the traffic lights. We were almost gonna be late and I had drank all those iced teas.

It's funny, you'd think that the people who know you the best would be the people that are most recently in your life. They're also often the people who've known you the briefest. And the concept of who you really are, this person you were in high school, in college, or who you are in the present suddenly becomes an issue. In your twenties, you're changing so much that you're a different person almost month to month. Slowly it adds up. Ben's most recent long term girlfriend maybe knew him the best because he was getting to know himself better than he ever did in the past. But when you die, who you were at the present ceases to matter that much, and you're suddenly all those people you used to be too. Everyone you ever were, to everyone that ever knew you. You obtain a sort of superposition in people's lives.

I think Ben and I were close friends because we were similar. We both grew up with strong females and very limited male role models that we allowed ourselves to look up to. It made growing up and knowing what to do with tons of testosterone, aggression or even success, very hard. I was older and tried to give him advice like don't hit on girls when you're out with your ex-girlfriend. Even if she doesn't seem to mind she probably does. But it's hard to be a friend and an older brother especially when you're not that much older.

I saw the soprano's on Monday and they tried to hit on the topic of quantum mechanics in relation to our own mortality. Oddly, Borko and I had a long drunken discussion about that the night I found out Ben died. A lot of people who are atheist or agnostic struggle to ignore the hopelessless of living in a universe that's just a jumble of molecules coming from nowhere and going nowhere in nothingness. Actually, though, you don't know the whole story. We don't really know what's going on so settling on a rudimentary and bleak understanding of the big bang is not only not satisfying, it's wrong. It turns out that on a very small scale, the universe is a strange place that we can't really comprehend. We know this because with experiments we can see small cracks in the illusion that separates our world from the quantum world. Kind of like in the matrix when you rip through the fabric of reality and see strange green symbolic computer language.

I'll simplify this so it's not too boring for people allergic to science and math so bear with me. A couple paragraphs down it will get interesting in terms of philosophy and your understanding of the world, I promise. Imagine you have a large wall separating a harbor with two gaps for boats to go in and out. When waves roll in from the ocean they hit the wall and propagate through the two gaps in a particular way. Everytime an ocean wave hits the wall, out of each gap comes a little semi-circle wave against the wall extending into the harbor. These two semi-circles interfere with each other. When two high points of the wave flow into each other they make a double high point. When two low points come together they make a double low point and all other points mix together in between accordingly. What you get on the beach is a big wave in the middle between the two gaps and smaller waves distributed equally to the sides. This is called a wave interference pattern. When the surf is big it's exaggerated. When the surf is small it's very subtle but still the same pattern.

Now imagine instead that we stand outside the harbor wall on a boat with a machine gun. We give the gun to Dick Cheney and he fires randomly into the wall like a maniac. Everytime his big stupid arms point the gun at one of the gaps, the bullets will fly through and hit the beach. These are the only bullets that make it through and you would see two patterns in the sand corresponding to where the bullets from each gap hit the beach. Thanks Dick that's enough.

A funny thing happens when you try to do this kind of thing with light or electrons. When you shoot somewhat coherent light (single file) through a screen with two gaps or slits, you get an interference pattern on the film on the other side. Just like with the ocean waves. If you turn down the intensity of the light so that it's very dim, something funny happens. Instead of a very subtle wave pattern like the small waves in the ocean, you get little spots indicating the light is made of little particles that travel through the slits and hit the film. Like the machine gun. Eventually if you let the spots build up they make a big interference pattern on the film like a wave. So is light both a wave like the ocean and a particle like a bullet? Here's where it gets interesting, and sorry I had to explain all of that, now comes the good part.

Let's do that experiment one more time but this time with little detectors over the gaps in the screen. So we can see and count if the particles went through one gap or the other. When you get the results, it turns out that half the particles went through one gap and half through the other just like you'd think. But the film on the other side is different from before. There are two patterns as if we'd fired bullets and not light. That makes no sense. If you take the detectors away and do it again, it goes back to the interference pattern. Even weirder if you set up the detectors so that they don't count independently and instead just count the total number of light particles at both gaps, you get an interference pattern again. It appears that just the act of tracking where the light went seems to change what it does. Suddenly if you watch the cute little guys, they behave and fly through the holes just like a bullet. Once you look away, they sort of do whatever they want. It's as if they haven't made up their mind yet which hole they went through until you ask. It turns out that in the quantum world of light and matter (which we're all made of) everything is sort of random and up in the air until you go looking for it.

It appears that when you leave particles alone, their properties lose their objective reality, and we can't make a mental picture of where they're going. Almost as if nature doesn't keep track of details until they're needed. Like there's no answer ready to a question until you ask it. So how does this affect us. We think of life in terms of metaphysical reductionism. Large objects like us are made up of smaller ones. So we depend on the movements of this micro world. But it turns out that's only half true. The micro world depends on and is changed by us. When we look for these little light particles, suddenly they change what they do. We effect their bizarre little alien world where nothing seems to make sense and everything is random. We, by observation, seem to be necessary to make anything in our reality happen.

The notion that our experiences here on earth are just a fluke byproduct of a giant universe created by a big bang that's going nowhere is shaken by quantum mechanics. When we peek through little tears in the curtain of reality and see those little green symbols, they teach us that experience itself and the immediacy of consciousness, what's going on right now, are important. Maybe the only thing that's important. That trusting objective reality, in a large universal scale or even the cold scale of life and death, may not be right. Science teaches us that our lives and the things we do are important. Perhaps, from our perspective, our own consciousness really is more important than flesh and blood or is at least somewhat autonomous from it.

Posted on Wednesday, April 05, 2006, 02:41 AM

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