Paul Levinson: The Chronology Protection Case

Carl put the call through just as I was packing up for the day. “She says she’s some kind of physicist,” he said, and although I rarely took calls from the public, I jumped on this one.

“Dr. D’Amato?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“I saw you on television last week—on that cable talk show. You said you had a passion for physics.” Her voice had a breathy elegance.

“True,” I said. Forensic science was my profession, but cutting edge physics was my love. Too bad there wasn’t a way to nab rapist murderers with spectral traces. “And you’re a physicist?” I asked.

“Oh yes, sorry,” she said. “I should introduce myself. I’m Lauren Goldring. Do you know my work?”

“Ahm…” The name did sound familiar. I ran though the Rolodex in my head, though these days my computer was becoming more reliable than my brain. “Yes!” I snapped my fingers. “You had an article in Scientific American last month about some Hubble data.”

“That’s right,” she said, and I could hear her relax just a bit. “Look, I’m calling you about my husband—he’s disappeared. I haven’t heard from him in two days.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well that’s really not my department. I can connect you to—”

“No, please,” she said. “It’s not what you think. I’m sure his disappearance has something to do with his work. He’s a physicist, too.”

Forty minutes later I was in my car on my way to her house, when I should have been home with a pizza and the cat. No contest: a physicist in distress always wins.

Her Bronxville address wasn’t too far from mine in Yonkers.

“Dr. D’Amato?” She opened the door.

I nodded. “Phil.”

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, and ushered me in. Her eyes looked red, like she suffered from allergies or had been crying. But few people have allergies in March.

The house had a quiet appealing beauty. As did she.

“I know the usual expectations in these things,” she said. “He has another woman, we’ve been fighting. And I’m sure that most women whose vanished husbands have been having affairs are quick to profess their certainty that that’s not what’s going on in their cases.”

I smiled. “OK, I’m willing to start with the assumption that your case is different. Tell me how.”

“Would you like a drink, some wine?” She walked over to a cabinet, must’ve been turn of the century.

“Just ginger ale, if you have it,” I said, leaning back in the plush Morris chair she’d shown me into.

She returned with the ginger ale, and some sort of sparkling water for herself. “Well, as I told you on the phone, Ian and I are physicists—”

“Is his last name Goldring, like yours?”

Lauren nodded. “And, well, I’m sure this has something to do with his project.”

“You two don’t do the same work?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “My area’s the cosmos at large—big bang theory, black-holes in space, the big picture. Ian’s was, is, on the other end of the spectrum. Literally. His area’s quantum mechanics.” She started to sob.

“It’s OK,” I said. I got up and put my hand on her shoulder.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t OK. Quantum mechanics could be frustrating, I know, but not that bad. Why am I using the past tense for Ian?”

“You think some harm’s come to him?”

“I don’t know,” her lips quivered. She did know, or thought she knew.

“And you feel this has something to do with his work with tiny particles? Was he exposed to dangerous radiation?”

“No,” she said. “That’s not it. He was working on something called quantum signaling. He always told me everything about his work—and I told him everything about mine—we had that kind of relationship. And then a few months ago, he suddenly got silent. At first I thought maybe he was having an affair—”

And the thought popped into my head: if I had a woman with your class, an affair with someone else would be the last thing on my mind.

“But then I realized it was deeper than that. It was something, something that frightened him, in his work. Something that I think he wanted to shield me from.”

“I’m pretty much of an amiable amateur when it comes to quantum mechanics,” I said, “but I know something about it. Suppose you tell me all you know about Ian’s work, and why it could be dangerous.”

What I, in fact, fully grasped about quantum mechanics I could write on a postcard to my sister in Boston and it would likely fit. It had to do with light and particles so small that they were often indistinguishable in their behavior, and prone to paradox at every turn. A particularly vexing aspect that even Einstein and his colleagues tried to tackle in the 1930s involved two particles that at first collided and then traveled at sublight speeds in opposite directions: would observation of one have an instantaneous effect on the other? Did the two particles, having once collided, now exist ever after in some sort of mysterious relationship or field, a bond between them so potent that just to measure one was to influence the other, regardless of how far away? Einstein wondered about this in a thought experiment. Did interaction of subatomic particles tie their futures together forever, even if one stayed on Earth and the other wound up beyond Pluto? Real experiments in the 1960s and after suggested that’s just what was happening, at least in local areas, and this supported Heisenberg’s and Bohr’s classic “Copenhagen” interpretation that quantum mechanics was some kind of mind-over-matter deal—that just looking at a quantum or tiny particle, maybe even thinking about it, could affect not only it but related particles. Einstein would’ve preferred to find another cause—non-mental—for such phenomena. But that could lead to an interpretation of quantum mechanics as faster-than-light action—the particle on Earth somehow sent an instant signal to the particle in space—which of course ran counter to Einstein’s relativity theories.

Well, I guess that would fill more than your average postcard. The truth is, blood and semen and DNA evidence were a lot easier to make sense of than quantum mechanics, which was one reason that kind of esoteric science was just a hobby with me. Of course, one way that QM had it over forensics is that it rarely had to do with dead bodies. But Lauren Goldring was wanting to tell me that maybe it did in at least one case, her husband’s.

“Ian was part of a small group of physicists working to demonstrate that QM was evidence of faster-than-light travel, time travel, maybe both,” she said.

“Not a product of the mind?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “not as in the traditional interpretation.”

“But doesn’t faster-than-light travel contradict Einstein?” I asked.

“Not necessarily,” Lauren said. “It seems to contradict the simplest interpretations, but there may be some loopholes.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Well, there’s a lot of disagreement even among the small group of people Ian was working with. Some think the data supports both faster-than-light and time travel. Others are sure that time travel is impossible even though—”

“You’re not saying that you think some crazy envious scientist killed him?” I asked.

“No,” Lauren said. “It’s much deeper than that.”

A favorite phrase of hers. “I don’t understand,” I said.

“Well, Stephen Hawking, for one, says that although the equations suggest that time travel might be possible on the quantum level, the Universe wouldn’t let this happen…” She paused and looked at me. “You’ve heard about Hawking’s work in this area?”