Here & There (15 page)

“Explain.”

“Ok, so back to Alice and Bob and their spinning coin. They share their superposition while it’s spinning.”

“
Oui
.”

“What if Alice caught it and slapped it down on the back of her hand but left it covered. Who has head and who has tails
?
”

“Still unknown, no
?
”

“Completely unknown. So they’re still in their shared superposition, each having a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails, right
?
”

“Right.”

“Now, suppose that Alice and Bob had a special device that could slice the coin along the circumference into two half-coins, without them seeing, and then seal each half-coin into an envelope, giving one to Alice and the other to Bob.”

“Still unknown states, therefore still in superposition, as long as they don’t peek.”

“So assuming no peeking, Alice could get on a plane and fly to Fiji and take a boat to an isolated island. She could then open up her envelope—”

“Drop out of her superposition—”

“And instantaneously know Bob’s state.”

“
Oui
.”

“No, I mean, imagine she had a cell phone with her. Cell signals are electromagnetic waves that propagate at the speed of light. Now, tell me, what would take longer, for her to see tails after she’s opened her envelope or for Bob to tell her over the phone that he has heads
?
”

“It would take longer for Bob to tell her.”

“So then the information about Bob’s state of heads ‘travels’ faster to her than the speed of light.”

“Yes, but, can’t nothing travel faster than the speed of light
?
Isn’t it ’ze universal speed limit
?
”

In response, Reinier opened up his hands, palms up as if to say,
and there you have it, abracadabra.

“Wait,” Elle protested. “But ’ze information, I mean I know it did, but it didn’t really travel.”

Reinier repeated the gesture and said in a horrible French accent, “
Et voilà
. As far as I’m concerned, traveling is for suckers. That, my love, is entanglement. Obviously quarks aren’t coins, and it’s not just a simple matter of slicing one in half and sending the halves on their merry way to opposite ends of the world, but the analogy holds. Two entangled quarks share a superposition. If you affect the spin of one, the other instantaneously registers it without any transfer of information—locality be damned. Not to mention, that on my end, I can pick the state. By pairing Bob’s quark with another one on his end, I can make the new one spin up, so Bob’s has to spin down, so Alice’s has to spin up.”

“And then there’s your information transfer. No, not transfer, iteration.”

“An information iteration. I like that. We call it entanglement swapping, but information iteration really has a nice ring to it. I might steal that.”

“Copyright!! Trademark!” Elle scrambled to plant her literary flag, pushing him over and smothering him with her naked body. The two laughed and kissed. Elle grabbed hold of his hands and intertwined her fingers between his.

“So,” Elle said, inches away from Reinier’s face, eyes locked. “These two entangled quarks, they stay connected, in sync with each other, no matter how far apart they go
?
”

“They could cross the universe. If Alice spins up, she knows Bob must spin down.”

“How romantic.”

Reinier rolled his eyes in response.

Elle shifted her leg and applied a solid pressure with her thigh against his groin. “It’s romantic.
Dites-moi. Dis-le
,” she hissed.

Reinier laughed and quickly capitulated. “Alice and Bob are very romantic. They’re romantic,” he groaned through mock pain.

“That’s right. They are.” Elle kissed him and sucked his bottom lip as she pulled away. Then she bit it and tugged gently.

“So romantic,” Reinier continued with his faux pleading, with only one of his lips available to him. “We should double with them.”

“As long as you realize there will be NO entanglement swapping of any sort,” Elle said and rolled off him, onto the mattress. She lay next to him, still holding his hand, fingers entwined. “
Alors
, entanglement not so inexplicable.”

“Not as an analogy. But for the life of us, we physicists can’t figure out how it actually works. Drove Einstein nuts. Nevertheless, a sailor can still cross an ocean without being able to explain the wind.” Reinier shrugged, “‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’”

Elle took that in. “That is good. I might steal ’zat.”

“You’ll have to steal it from Arthur Clarke.”

“I still don’t understand where the chromodynamics fit in.”

“Well, I didn’t want to overwhelm you—”

Elle lifted his hand to her mouth and bit it. Hard.

“Bore you!” a pained Reinier amended his previous statement. “I didn’t want to bore you.”

Again, laughter.

“Go. Tell me.
Sans
sass,” Elle directed him.

“You and I have very different ideas of pillow talk.”

As Elle lifted his hand toward her bared teeth about to bite down, Reinier launched into chromodynamics. “So, as we all know, quarks interact with each other via gluons—OW!”

Elle had bit him again.

“What
?
I’m explaining!”

“Make it make sense before I get another craving for flesh.”

Reinier gave Elle a wary eyebrow raise. “Quarks interact with each other through something called a strong interaction, sort of like the strong force that keeps protons pressed together in nuclei in spite of the significant pressure of the magnetic force from their like positive charges that pushes them apart.”

“I’m with you, keep going.”

Reinier let out a sigh full of mock relief. “These strong interactions are described by quantum chromodynamics. The intricacies of this aren’t so important, the only essential part is that gluons are the means by which these interactions are transferred.”

“Got it.” Elle nodded once in the affirmative. “What’s a gluon
?
”

Reinier bit his lip as he considered a feasible answer. “What photons are to electromagnetic force, gluons are to the strong force between quarks.”

Reinier waited to see if that landed.

“So how light comes to us in packets of photons
?
” Elle asked.

“Perfect. Gluons are packets of strong force, the means by which quarks exchange force. So within quantum chromodynamics, each gluon has a color charge and an anticolor charge. Again, not analogous to the macro real world, but they’re properties of gluons.”

“Ok.” Elle nodded once again. “Down at that small a level I’m sure the idea of color holds no meaning,
oui
?
”

“
Oui
. So gluons are constantly passed back and forth between quarks through emission and absorption. Subsequently, when a gluon is passed from one quark to another, a color change occurs in both.”

“Like with Alice and Bob and their coin
?
”

“Exactly like with Alice and Bob. If Alice’s quark emitted a red-antigreen gluon, it would become green, and if Bob’s quark is
green and absorbed Alice’s red-antigreen gluon, it would become red. In doing so, while their colors are always changing, their strong interaction is preserved.”

“Alice and Bob stand on a seesaw and each throw a ball of equal mass (but different colors) to the other. Who has the red or green ball keeps changing, but they stay balanced on the seesaw.”

“Good enough,” Reinier said with equal doses of encouragement and let’s-not-get-hung-up-on-the-small-stuff. “Now the interesting thing is because gluons have a color charge, they can also emit and absorb other gluons.”

“Like adverbs,” Elle interjected. When she saw his look, she clarified, “They can modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.”

Reinier shrugged. “Perhaps. Anyway, this instigates what’s known as asymptotic freedom. The upshot of which is that as quarks get closer to each other, the chromodynamic binding force between them weakens. That’s what this equation here describes.” Reinier grabbed behind her knee, raised her leg a little, and pointed at the conglomeration of Greek letters and numbers that circumscribed Elle’s leg just north of her knee.

He didn’t notice the spark flash in Elle’s eyes when he grabbed her. Nor hear the slight, sharp intake of breath. When you breathe in, you know . . .

“Conversely, as this distance increases, the binding force strengthens. As this happens, the color field is stressed. Like a rubber band getting stretched. This one predicts the amount of stress.” Reinier’s hand drifted further north to another equation.

The further up his hand moved, the further back Elle’s bottom lip retreated into her mouth. Inversely proportional, Elle thought as she gnawed on her lip while Reinier continued, oblivious, caught up in his infinite, infinitesimal magic show.

“Now, and here’s the really fascinating part, the more this
rubber band is stretched, the more stress to the color field, the more gluons of the appropriate color are needed to strengthen the field. And that’s where this equation comes in.” Reinier continued his path northward, rapidly approaching the fork in her road.

Elle’s bottom lip had completely disappeared by this point.

“Above a certain threshold, to compensate for this, gluons are spontaneously created, as are quarks and antiquarks. Matter, or more appropriately, the building blocks of matter, are conjured out of thin air. Hadronization. That’s what this is all about. That’s the whole shebang.”
*
Reinier lightly slapped his right hand against the inside of her left thigh, “With the magic of hadronization,” he raised his hand up and patted it back down against the most northerly equation, “we get the impossible. Or at least the possibility of the impossible.”

*
Well that about clears it all up for me. Teleportation in a nutshell. Conjuring matter out of nothing. I think I’ll stick with Reinier’s previous explanation: magic.

Reinier finally looked up at Elle to share in the amazement at this phenomenon and the excitement of what his equation could calculate, predict, create. All he could focus on, however, was Elle’s top lip and its missing partner. “Did you follow that
?
I mean, was I clear
?
”

The corners of Elle’s mouth turned up, devil-horned bookends to the line of teeth that held her bottom lip hostage.

“Are we done talking about quarks
?
”

The devil horns sharpened.

“Good on gluons
?
”

Elle nodded her head slowly.

“Hadronization
?
”

Elle moaned softly.

“Ok. So I should stop talking then.”