Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

For all of those reasons, it might seem puzzling that our Joint Committee on Weapons Research Analysis had never tried to cut off funds for even Psi-War. There were reasons for that. The big reason was that these projects were so cheap they didn't matter. Given that it was U.S. national policy to maintain a strong defense-and with President Reagan in the White House there was no doubt about that policy—there had to be something like Sandia. If Psi-War and genetics and the Cathouse were all a total waste of money, as I rather thought they were, the amounts involved were so pitifully tiny that they simply weren't worth the trouble of defunding. Psi-War and the Cathouse together cost less per year than the upkeep on a single missile silo.

And if any of them should actually turn out to make a workable weapons system .

Well, the potential was simply enormous. Especially the Cathouse.

The Cathouse was named after something called Schroedinger's Cat. What was Schroedinger's cat? Well, said the physicist who was testifying before us the first time this came up, Schroedinger was a man who had discovered something called quantum mechanics. Ah, yes, and what was quantum mechanics? Well, said the physicist, basically it was a new way of looking at physics. When that explanation didn't seem quite to satisfy any of us hard-bitten politicos on the Joint Committee he tried again. Quantum mechanics, he said, got its name from Schroedinger's discovery that energy, for instance, didn't come in a sort of uniform endless flow, like water out of a tap (although, he corrected himself, even water out of a tap only looks uniform and endless, it being in fact made up of molecules and atoms and even smaller particles)—it didn't come in an endless flow, that was, but in unitary packets called quanta. The basic quantum of light was the photon. Well, we began to feel we might be getting to solid ground there, because even senators and congressmen had heard of photons. But then he dashed our hopes by getting back to the cat. What did the cat have to do with all this? Well, said the physicist, gamely hanging in there in the face of our expressions, that was a kind of mind experiment Schroedinger proposed. You see, there is this other thing called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And what was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle when it was home? Well, he said, shifting uncomfortably in the witness chair, that was a little hard to explain. .

He was wrong about that. It wasn't hard to explain at all. It was just hard to understand. According to Heisenberg, you could never know both the position and the movement of a particle. Either you could know where it was, or you could know where it was going. You couldn't know both.

Worse than that, there were some questions that you not only couldn't find an answer to, but there wasn't an answer, and that's when we got to the cat. Suppose you put a cat in a box, said Schroedinger. Suppose you put in with the cat a radioactive particle, which has exactly one chance in two of fissioning. Suppose in with the cat and the radionuclide, you put a can of poison gas with a switch that will be triggered if the particle fissions. Then you look at the outside of the box and ask yourself if the cat is alive or dead. If the particle has fissioned, it's dead. If the particle hasn't fissioned, the gas was not released and the cat is alive.

But from outside there is no knowing which is true. From outside, there is a five-tenths chance that the cat's alive.

But a cat can't be five-tenths alive.

So, said the physicist triumphantly, beaming around at us in pleasure at having made it so clear, the point is that both things are true. The cat's alive. The cat's dead. But each statement is true in a particular universe. At the point of decision the universes split—and now, forever after, there will be parallel universes. A cat-alive universe, and a cat-dead universe. A different universe every time a subnuclear reaction takes place that could go either way—for it goes both ways, and universes are multiplied endlessly.

Senator Kennedy cleared his throat at that point. "Ah, Dr. Fass," he said, "that is most interesting, as an exercise in speculation. But in the real universe we open the box and see if the cat's dead."

"No, no, Senator!" cried the physicist. "No, that's wholly wrong. They're all real."

We looked at each other. "In a mathematical sense, you mean?" Kennedy tried.

"In every sense," cried Fass, wagging his head violently. "Those parallel universes, created at the rate of millions every microsecond, are just as 'real' as the one I'm testifying before you in. Or, to put it in a different context, the universe we inhabit is exactly as 'imaginary' as any of them."

So we sat there like dummies, eighteen of us, congressmen and senators from all over the United States, wondering if this man was trying to put us on—wondering what it all meant if he wasn't. A congressman from New Jersey leaned over to whisper in my ear:

"Do you see any military application in this, Dom?"

"Ask him, Jim," I whispered back, and when the congressman did the physicist looked astonished.

"Oh, I do beg your pardon, gentlemen," he said. "And ladies, too, I mean," he added, nodding toward Senator Byrne. "I thought all that had been made clear. Well. Suppose you want to H-bomb a city, or a military installation,, or anything at all, anywhere in the world. You build your bomb. You take it into one of the parallel universes. You fly it to the latitude and longitude of Tokyo-I mean, of whatever the place is—and you push it back into our world and detonate it. Boom. Whatever it is, it's gone. If you have ten thousand targets—say, the entire missile capacity of another country—you just build ten thousand bombs and push them all through at once. It can't be defended against. The other people can't see it coming. Because, in their world, it isn't coming ... until it's there."

And sat back, looking pleased with himself.

And we all sat back too. We looked at each other. But I do not think any of us really were looking pleased.

Even that might not have sold the committee, except for the one big fact. I've mentioned it already: If this program didn't work, as all of us thought, and most of us hoped, it wouldn't, very little would be lost. For it, like Psi-War, was very, very cheap.

Well, they finally brought this guy in, and I have to say it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. Not painful. Not intolerable. But nonpleasant, wholly without pleasure in any way.

Like most men, I really dislike shopping. Especially for clothes. And one of the principal reasons for that is that I detest those threeway mirrors they have in clothing stores. They are simply unfair. They catch you by surprise. You try on a suit; the salesperson tells you lyingly that it fits as though custom-tailored; he walks you down the store to where three mirrors are linked together, like a medieval triptych. You look into them all unaware, and the first thing you know you're staring at your own profile. I never voluntarily look at my profile. I consider the idea almost obscene. It is not the way God intended me to see myself, and the proof of that is that when I do see myself that way I look perfectly terrible. I don't even recognize that simpering fellow with the funny-shaped nose and the stick-out chin. How he got into the mirror that should have been reflecting me is always a great mystery ... and yet I am not wholly lost to reality. I know that person is really me. I just don't want to know it.

That's how it was in the Cathouse at Sandia.

When they brought this person in he didn't look at me. He didn't look at anybody. They'd let him splash water on his face, at least, but then they'd handcuffed his arms behind his back. Maybe one reason he kept his eyes on the ground was fear of falling. I don't think so. I think there was only one reason, and that was that he knew if he raised them the eyes he would be looking into would be his own. Or my own. Ours.