Connie Willis: The Best of Connie Willis

“All our rooms are pretty much the same,” Tiffany said. “Except for how many beds they have in them and stuff.”

“My room has a person in it!” he said. “Dr. Sleeth. From the University of Texas at Austin. She was changing her clothes.” His hair seemed to get wilder as he spoke. “She thought I was a serial killer.”

“And your name is Dr. Whedbee?” Tiffany asked, fooling with the computer again. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

Dr. Whedbee began to cry.

Tiffany got out a paper towel, wiped off the counter, and turned back to me. “May I help you?” she asked.

Thursday, 7:30–9 P.M. Opening Ceremonies. Dr. Halvard Onofrio, University of Maryland at College Park, will speak on the topic, “Doubts Surrounding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Ballroom .

I finally got my room at five-thirty after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

“What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institut Henri Poincaré people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”

“Speaking of St. Louis,” Dr. Takumi said, “have you seen David yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Last year at the annual meeting you two were practically inseparable. Moonlight riverboat rides and all.”

“What’s on the programming tonight?” I said to Abey.

“David was just here,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going out to look at the stars in the sidewalk.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Abey said. “Riverboat rides and movie stars. What do those things have to do with quantum theory? Racine would have been an appropriate setting for a group of physicists. Not like this… this… Do you realize we’re practically across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? And Hollywood Boulevard’s where all those gangs hang out. If they catch you wearing red or blue, they’ll—” He stopped. “Is that Dr. Gedanken?” he asked, staring at the front desk.

I turned and looked. A short roundish man with a mustache was trying to check in. “No,” I said. “That’s Dr. Onofrio.”

“Oh, yes,” Abey said, consulting his program book. “He’s speaking tonight at the opening ceremonies. On the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Are you going?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, which was supposed to be a joke, but Abey didn’t laugh.

“I must meet Dr. Gedanken. He’s just gotten funding for a new project.”

I wondered what Dr. Gedanken’s new project was—I would have loved to work with him.

“I’m hoping he’ll come to my workshop on the wonderful world of quantum physics,” Abey said, still watching the desk. Amazingly enough, Dr. Onofrio seemed to have gotten a key and was heading for the elevators. “I think his project has something to do with understanding quantum theory.”

Well, that let me out. I didn’t understand quantum theory at all. I sometimes had a sneaking suspicion nobody else did, either, including Abey Fields, and that they just weren’t willing to admit it.

I mean, an electron is a particle except it acts like a wave. In fact, a neutron acts like two waves and interferes with itself (or each other), and you can’t really measure any of this stuff properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that isn’t the worst of it. When you set up a Josephson junction to figure out what rules the electrons obey, they sneak past the barrier to the other side, and they don’t seem to care much about the limits of the speed of light, either, and Schrödinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead till you open the box, and it all makes about as much sense as Tiffany’s calling me Dr. Gedanken.

Which reminded me, I had promised to call Darlene and give her our room number. I didn’t have a room number, but if I waited much longer, she’d have left. She was flying to Denver to speak at C.U. and then coming on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the middle of his telling me how beautiful Racine was in the winter and went to call her.

“I don’t have a room yet,” I said when she answered. “Should I leave a message on your answering machine, or do you want to give me your number in Denver?”

“Never mind all that,” Darlene said. “Have you seen David yet?”

To illustrate the problems of the concept of wave function, Dr. Schrödinger imagines a cat being put into a box with a piece of uranium, a bottle of poison gas, and a Geiger counter. If a uranium nucleus disintegrates while the cat is in the box, it will release radiation, which will set off the Geiger counter and break the bottle of poison gas. Since it is impossible in quantum theory to predict whether a uranium nucleus will disintegrate while the cat is in the box, and only possible to calculate uranium’s probable half-life, the cat is neither alive nor dead until we open the box .

—FROM “THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF QUANTUM PHYSICS,” A

SEMINAR PRESENTED AT THE ICQP ANNUAL MEETING BY A. FIELDS,

PH.D., UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA AT WAHOO

I completely forgot to warn Darlene about Tiffany, the model-slash-actress.

“What do you mean, you’re trying to avoid David?” she had asked me at least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”

Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.

“Because I want to attend the programming,” I said the third time around, “not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”

“And David is a middle-aged man, who, I might add, is absolutely charming. In fact, he may be the last charming man left in the universe.”

“Charm is for quarks,” I said and hung up, feeling smug until I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change.

Tiffany asked, “May I help you?” and left me standing there.

After a while I gave up and went back to the red and gold sofas. “David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”

“There are no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.

“What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program away from him.

“There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.”

I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.

“If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”

Dr. Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.

“Did they give you a room with a semi-naked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me 1282, but the room numbers only go up to seventy-five.”

“I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,” I said.

The most serious difficulty quantum theory faces today is not the inherent limitation of measurement capability or the EPR paradox. It is the lack of a paradigm. Quantum theory has no working model, no metaphor that properly defines it .

—EXCERPT FROM DR. GEDANKEN’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor who couldn’t remember where he’d stored my suitcase, and unpacked.