Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

The next time Dr. Whedbee bent over to inscribe hieroglyphics on the screen, I sneaked out and went down to the desk, hoping Tiffany hadn’t come on duty yet.

She had. “May I help you?” she asked.

“I’m in room 663,” I said. “I’m sharing a room with Dr. Darlene Mendoza. She’s coming in this morning, and she’ll be needing a key.”

“For what?” Tiffany said.

“To get into the room. I may be in one of the lectures when she gets here.”

“Why doesn’t she have a key?”

“Because she isn’t here yet.”

“I thought you said she was sharing a room with you.”

“She will be sharing a room with me. Room 663. Her name is Darlene Mendoza.”

“And your name?” she asked, hands poised over the computer.

“Ruth Baringer.”

“We don’t show a reservation for you.”

We have made impressive advances in quantum physics in the ninety years since Planck’s constant, but they have by and large been advances in technology, not theory. We can only make advances in theory when we have a model we can visualize .

—EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

I high-entropied with Tiffany for a while on the subjects of my not having a reservation and the air-conditioning and then switched back suddenly to the problem of Darlene’s key, in the hope of catching her off guard. It worked about as well as Alley’s delayed choice experiments.

In the middle of my attempting to explain that Darlene was not the air-conditioning repairman, Abey Fields came up. “Have you seen Dr. Gedanken?”

I shook my head.

“I was sure he’d come to my Wonderful World workshop, but he didn’t, and the hotel says they can’t find his reservation,” he said, scanning the lobby. “I found out what his new project is, incidentally, and I’d be perfect for it. He’s going to find a paradigm for quantum theory. Is that him?” he said, pointing at an elderly man getting in the elevator.

“I think that’s Dr. Whedbee,” I said, but he had already sprinted across the lobby to the elevator.

He nearly made it. The elevator doors slid to a close just as he got there. He pushed the elevator button several times to make the doors open again, and when that didn’t work, tried to readjust their fractal basin boundaries. I turned back to the desk. “May I help you?” Tiffany said.

“You may,” I said. “My roommate, Darlene Mendoza, will be arriving sometime this morning. She’s a producer. She’s here to cast the female lead in a new movie starring Robert Redford and Harrison Ford. When she gets here, give her her key. And fix the air-conditioning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

The Josephson junction is designed so that electrons must obtain additional energy to surmount the energy barrier. It has been found, however, that some electrons simply tunnel, as Heinz Pagel put it, “right through the wall.”

—FROM “THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF QUANTUM PHYSICS,”

A. FIELDS, UNW

Abey had stopped banging on the elevator button and was trying to pry the elevator doors apart.

I went out the side door and up to Hollywood Boulevard. David’s restaurant was near Hollywood and Vine. I turned the other direction, toward Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and ducked into the first restaurant I saw.

“I’m Stephanie,” the waitress said. “How many are there in your party?”

There was no one remotely in my vicinity. “Are you an actress-slash-model?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m working here part-time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons.”

“There’s one of me,” I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. “I want a table away from the window.”

She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me. “Our breakfast specials today are papaya stuffed with salmonberries and nasturtium/radicchio salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll take your order when your other party arrives.”

I stood the extra menu up so it hid me from the window, opened the other one, and read the breakfast entrees. They all seemed to have “cilantro” or “lemongrass” in their names. I wondered if “radicchio” could possibly be Californian for “donut.”

“Hi,” David said, grabbing the standing-up menu and sitting down. “The sea urchin pâté looks good.”

I was actually glad to see him. “How did you get here?” I asked.

“Tunneling,” he said. “What exactly is extra-virgin olive oil?”

“I wanted a donut,” I said pitifully.

He took my menu away from me, laid it on the table, and stood up. “There’s a great place next door that’s got the donut Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk in It Happened One Night .”

The great place was probably out in Long Beach someplace, but I was too weak with hunger to resist him. I stood up. Stephanie hurried over.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked.

“We’re leaving,” David said.

“Okay, then,” she said, tearing a check off her pad and slapping it down on the table. “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”

Finding such a paradigm is difficult, if not impossible. Due to Planck’s constant the world we see is largely dominated by Newtonian mechanics. Particles are particles, waves are waves, and objects do not suddenly vanish through walls and reappear on the other side. It is only on the subatomic level that quantum effects dominate .

—EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

The restaurant was next door to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which made me a little nervous, but it had eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice and coffee. And donuts.

“I thought you were having breakfast with Dr. Thibodeaux and Dr. Hotard,” I said, dunking one in my coffee. “What happened to them?”

“They went to Forest Lawn. Dr. Hotard wanted to see the church where Ronald Reagan got married.”

“He got married at Forest Lawn ?”

He took a bite of my donut. “In the Wee Kirk of the Heather. Did you know Forest Lawn’s got the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme?”

“So why didn’t you go with them?”

“And miss the movie?” He grabbed both my hands across the table. “There’s a matinee at two o’clock. Come with me.”

I could feel things starting to collapse. “I have to get back,” I said, trying to disentangle my hands. “There’s a panel on the EPR paradox at two o’clock.”

“There’s another showing at five. And one at eight.”

“Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address at eight.”

“You know what the problem is?” he said, still holding on to my hands. “The problem is, it isn’t really Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, it’s Mann’s, so Sid isn’t even around to ask. Like, why do some pairs like Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman share the same square and other pairs don’t? Like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?”

“You know what the problem is?” I said, wrenching my hands free. “The problem is you don’t take anything seriously. This is a conference, but you don’t care anything about the programming or hearing Dr. Gedanken speak or trying to understand quantum theory!” I fumbled in my purse for some money for the check.

“I thought that was what we were talking about,” David said, sounding surprised. “The problem is, where do those lion statues that guard the door fit in? And what about all those empty spaces?”

Friday, 2–3 P.M. Panel Discussion on the EPR Paradox. I. Takumi, moderator, R. Iverson, L. S. Ping. A discussion of the latest research in singlet-state correlations including nonlocal influences, the Calcutta proposal, and passion. Keystone Kops Room .