Miss Buddha (31 page)

Ruth waited quietly for her book to be
returned.

Kristina closed it again, turned it over and
scanned the back cover. Much praise. Then she looked up at Ruth for
some time before she said, “Who are you?”

That was not the question Kristina had
intended to ask. She had intended to ask how, and why. But when the
question left her lips it surprised Kristina more than Ruth.

“Your most precocious student,” said
Ruth.

“I’d say,” she said. The, “Do you understand
this?” meaning the book she was now preparing to return to
Ruth.

“Yes,” said Ruth. Again, truthfully.

Kristina handed the book back to her. “No,
really, Ruth. Who are you?” Not really believing her own question,
but feeling the need to ask it. “No ten-year old girl reads, much
less understands books on quantum physics.”

“This one does.”

Kristina pulled out a chair from a nearby
desk and sat down. Thoughts came tumbling down like boulders, large
and clumsy. Ruth, still as a tree looked at her, unopened book in
hand. Curious. Waiting.

“I know,” began Kristina. “I know that
you’re advanced for your age. But this,” she nodded at the book,
“is more than advanced. It is,” she paused, looking for words,
found them, then added them, more to herself, “it’s a little
frightening.”

Ruth nodded an adult nod, yes, she
understood. A little frightening.

“Are you someone?” said Kristina, unable to
let go of the notion.

“Yes,” answered Ruth. “I am someone.”

“You know what I mean,” said Kristina.
Though that didn’t come out right. It sounded like something she
would have said to her husband in an argument. She felt her face
color. Looked down.

“I do know what you mean,” said the
child.

“Well, then. Are you?”

“Yes,” said Ruth.

“Who, then?”

“One day,” said Ruth, and with such finality
that Kristina knew not to inquire further, “I will tell you.”

::
70 :: (New York)

Julian Lawson was sitting in the back seat of
the family car when he shocked his father.

He was eleven, curious, and bored. The
weekend at the upstate cabin had been a rain-out. Five people in
the small house, pinned down by pelting weather, for two days. Not
a recipe for tranquility.

Now he sat behind his father. Sally to his
right. Alice to her right. Both older than Julian, both reading.
Julian looked out at the gray skies through the rain-streaked car
window, and wondered aloud, “What makes gravity pull?”

His farther Alex thought of himself as a
theoretical physicist. Not that he thought of himself as anything
very often (or of himself at all), he preferred thinking in
formulae. In aesthetic symbols and numbers that ebbed and flowed
like music across blackboards, whiteboards, and screen, boards and
boards and screens of them, pages thick with of them, code void of
life or meaning to all but the initiated.

Alex Lawson was one of the initiated.

Then, still wondering from the back seat,
his son said, “There doesn’t seem to be a good reason why it
should, does it?”

Alex did not answer, unsure of what to say.
He was actually holding his breath.

“Perhaps it’s a matter of longing,” said
Julian, to whom that seemed natural enough.

“What are you talking about?” said
Alice.

“Gravity,” said Julian.

His father shot him a long glance via the
rearview mirror, “What do you mean by longing, Julian?”

“Perhaps it feels separated.”

“What feels separated?” said Sally.

“The things that long to be closer,” said
Julian.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever
heard,” said Alice.

“Stupid as they come,” said Sally.

“Girls,” said Olga, their mother. She did
not like them ganging up on Julian. It was unfair, and childish,
and she tried to convey all of that in that one word thick with her
still heavy Russian accent, both the “r” and the “l” very
distinct.

Neither girl answered their mother.

Nor did Alex Lawson answer
is son, he was still too stunned to assimilate what his son was
saying.
Longing
was not the word he himself had assigned to the
theta
variable in his
current equation, the word he had used was
yearning
. Splitting hairs though. And
how on earth?

Julian, unaware of the always-to-be-expected
sisterly taunting and of his father’s silent bewilderment,
continued to look out the car window, and said nothing more.
Really, he had only been thinking aloud, hardly aware of having
spoken.

That same evening—everybody safely back in a
far drier Brooklyn, spread out through their two story brownstone
and very happy to be back in civilization, as Alice liked to put
it—Alex knocked on Julian’s door.

When Julian didn’t answer, Alex eased the
door open. Julian, bent over a book at his desk, didn’t notice.
Alex knocked again, harder, on the now mostly open door, hard
enough to disturb his son, who turned around.

“Dad,” he said, a little surprised to see
him, a little worried even. Was something the matter?

“Julian.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, not at all.” Alex stepped into the room
and closed the door behind him. “What you said today,” he
began.

“When?”

“In the car.”

“What did I say?”

“About longing. Gravity, and longing.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Julian, remembering. A
little embarrassed. “I was just talking.”

“What made you think of it?” said his
father.

Julian shifted in his chair, a little
uncomfortable about being put on the spot. “I wasn’t really
thinking,” he said. “Or, more like I was just thinking aloud.”

“Yes, but where did the longing come
from?”

“When I’m away,” he said. “I sometimes long
for my room. Sometimes I even long for Alice and Sally. I know that
might be hard to believe, but I kind of like having them
around.”

“Believe it or not, I used to long for our
cabin when I was your age.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“But why gravity? Do you think matter has
that capacity?”

“Of longing, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“You mean because it’s inanimate?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Well, how can something inanimate have the
power to pull? If it can pull, it can probably long as well.”

Again, his son’s perspicacity rocked him
momentarily speechless. “Good point,” was all he eventually
managed.

A long, and a little awkward silence settled
upon the room. Alex didn’t know what else to say and Julian—still
not certain why his father had come in the first place—wanted to
get back to his reading, but did not want to be impolite.

“Well,” Alex finally said, “I’ll let you get
back to, to your book.”

Julian smiled and turned back to the text,
father almost forgotten by the time he found is place again.

:

Not only did Julian skip the third grade, he
skipped the seventh grade as well, graduating high school at
sixteen. Yes, he was aware of his brilliance, but he was never
conceited about it. In fact, he was too busy researching, figuring,
finding, thinking, postulating—and discussing-slash-arguing with
his father about the researched, figured, found, thought, and
postulated—to be conceited.

Alex, himself a Cal Tech graduate, had
little problem arranging for a generous Cal Tech scholarship for
his son, who, as a result, arrived there as the youngest freshman
in the school’s history to delve further into particle physics.

He made it well known that he intended to
be—was, in fact—an experimenter, not a theorist (like his father).
Nobody tried to disabuse him of that approach.

Ten years later he is still in Pasadena. He
had not really intended to stay in California, but the prestigious
school offered him both tenure and several grants to continue his
research and he (as his father put it) would have been an idiot to
turn down such an opportunity.

:: 71 :: (Pasadena)

The year was 1998, the season was late fall,
and the event was a donors’ dinner held at the Athenaeum—the time
honored Cal Tech building dedicated to the goddess of wisdom.
Julian Lawson was there to thank as many donors as possible,
Kristina Medina was there because her father’s company, Cortez
Construction, was a generous Cal Tech sponsor. Her parents were
away on vacation, so the task fell on her to represent the company.
Naturally, the invitation had read “Mr. and Mrs. Medina,” but her
husband had regretfully to decline the invitation. There were
depositions to take in New York, and they were more pressing than a
night of Cal Tech appreciation. Besides, it was Kristina’s family
money that were being appreciated, anyway. Did she mind going by
herself?

No, not really.

So, Kristina Medina, in her flowery and
colorful best arrived for the both of them, conspicuous as a Rose
Parade float among the grays and blacks of the conservative donor
community. She even caught Julian’s attention.

As he pressed her palm in thanks, she
pressed right back—sign of life, thought Julian, weary after
thanking so many weakly past-their-prime palms for their invaluable
support of science and progress.

Pressed right back, she did, and said,
reading his name tag, “Julian Lawson.” Looked up, “I think I’ve
heard of you.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Julian.

“Pity,” said Kristina.

They were not seated together at dinner, not
even close, but—bored to tears by their respective dinner
neighbors—sought each other out in its aftermath.

“So, Mr. Lawson, what do you do,
actually?”

“Actually,” said Julian, sensing that she
did in fact want to know, “when it comes to particle physics, there
are two breeds of scientists: the theorist and the experimenter.
Well, there is also the materialist, and he comes in the theorist
and experimenter flavors as well.”

“And you are a non-materialist
experimenter?”

“Precisely.”

“What is a materialist?”

“Oh, that’s a question.”

“I know.”

“Well, the short answer is that a
materialist is a scientist who does not believe in nonlocality. And
nonlocality is defined as an instantaneous influence or
communication without any exchange of signals through space-time.
Locality, on the other hand is the idea that all interaction or
communication among objects occur via fields or signals that
propagate through space-time obeying the speed-of-light limit.”

“Should that make sense to me?”

Julian found himself laughing, and heartily
at that. Then said, “I don’t see why not.”

“And what does the non-materialist
believe?”

“He believes in nonlocality.”

“And what does the non-materialist particle
physics experimenter do, actually?” She wanted to know, again,
actually.

“He, in a word,” then groped around for the
next word, the right one.

“Experiments,” she suggested.

As simple as that, yes. “Precisely.”

“How, though?”

Julian took a good look at Kristina and saw
that there was more than politeness behind that short question.
“You do want to know, don’t you?”

“I do want to know, yes,” she confirmed.

Still he hesitated. Instead he said, “Do you
want something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine,” she replied.

So, instead of drifting towards the open
bar, he answered her question: “Right now, I hope to establish
nonlocal synchronization between coordinated quantum particles.”
And added, “Beyond any doubt.”

Kristina said nothing, but he had her
attention.

“Quantum particles—and don’t ask me to
explain them, for they are not really particles and not really not
particles—often form bonds, and once they do they tend to act like
identical twins, one does precisely what the other does, no matter
the distance between them, and instantly.”

Kristina—she appeared tremendously awake,
holding the younger man’s eyes steadily—still said nothing.

“We call these twin quantum
particles
correlated
. And one of the two correlated quantum particles can, and
often—under certain circumstances—does, shift polarity, and in that
same instant,” he stressed
same
, both with his voice and with
his hands, “no matter what the distance apart—it can be
light-years, literally—it’s twin will change polarity as
well.”

“That sounds impossible.”

“I agree.”

“But it happens?”

“It happens.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s been proven.”

“But not,” she said, apparently remembering
what he had said, “beyond any doubt?”

He took a long look at her before he
answered, “It is proven to the experimenter’s satisfaction.”

“But not to the theorist’s?”

“But not to the theorists,” he confirmed.
“We have no doubt, and when I say we, I mean the doers. But the
thinkers, at least some of them, and some of the leading ones at
that, like to poke holes—sometimes I think just for the sake of
poking holes.”

“But how can you doubt the outcome of an
experiment. Isn’t that the very purpose of the thing, to dispel
doubt, because your eyes see?”

Julian nodded. Yes, that’s
true. That’s true. Then said, “The trick with quantum experiments
is that we’re dealing more with traces and effects of things than
with things themselves. No one’s ever
seen
an atom, you know. They’re too
small. And quantum particles are magnitudes smaller. But even the
smallest thing casts a shadow, and we’re very good at catching and
reading shadows.”

“And?”

“And the shadows show the instant
correlation.”