Paul Levinson - The Chronology Protection Case

Carl put the call through just as I was packing up for the day. She says shes some kind of physicist, he said, and although I rarely took calls from the public, I jumped on this one.

Dr. DAmato? she asked.

Yes?

I saw you on television last weekon that cable talk show. You said you had a passion for physics. Her voice had a breathy elegance.

True, I said. Forensic science was my profession, but cutting edge physics was my love. Too bad there wasnt a way to nab rapist murderers with spectral traces. And youre a physicist? I asked.

Oh yes, sorry, she said. I should introduce myself. Im Lauren Goldring. Do you know my work?

Ahm The name did sound familiar. I ran though the Rolodex in my head, though these days my computer was becoming more reliable than my brain. Yes! I snapped my fingers. You had an article in Scientific American last month about some Hubble data.

Thats right, she said, and I could hear her relax just a bit. Look, Im calling you about my husbandhes disappeared. I havent heard from him in two days.

Oh, I said. Well thats really not my department. I can connect you to

No, please, she said. Its not what you think. Im sure his disappearance has something to do with his work. Hes a physicist, too.

Forty minutes later I was in my car on my way to her house, when I should have been home with a pizza and the cat. No contest: a physicist in distress always wins.

Her Bronxville address wasnt too far from mine in Yonkers.

Dr. DAmato? She opened the door.

I nodded. Phil.

Thank you so much for coming, she said, and ushered me in. Her eyes looked red, like she suffered from allergies or had been crying. But few people have allergies in March.

The house had a quiet appealing beauty. As did she.

I know the usual expectations in these things, she said. He has another woman, weve been fighting. And Im sure that most women whose vanished husbands have been having affairs are quick to profess their certainty that thats not whats going on in their cases.

I smiled. OK, Im willing to start with the assumption that your case is different. Tell me how.

Would you like a drink, some wine? She walked over to a cabinet, mustve been turn of the century.

Just ginger ale, if you have it, I said, leaning back in the plush Morris chair shed shown me into.

She returned with the ginger ale, and some sort of sparkling water for herself. Well, as I told you on the phone, Ian and I are physicists

Is his last name Goldring, like yours?

Lauren nodded. And, well, Im sure this has something to do with his project.

You two dont do the same work? I asked.

No, she said. My areas the cosmos at largebig bang theory, black-holes in space, the big picture. Ians was, is, on the other end of the spectrum. Literally. His areas quantum mechanics. She started to sob.

Its OK, I said. I got up and put my hand on her shoulder.

No, she said. It isnt OK. Quantum mechanics could be frustrating, I know, but not that bad. Why am I using the past tense for Ian?

You think some harms come to him?

I dont know, her lips quivered. She did know, or thought she knew.

And you feel this has something to do with his work with tiny particles? Was he exposed to dangerous radiation?

No, she said. Thats not it. He was working on something called quantum signaling. He always told me everything about his workand I told him everything about minewe had that kind of relationship. And then a few months ago, he suddenly got silent. At first I thought maybe he was having an affair

And the thought popped into my head: if I had a woman with your class, an affair with someone else would be the last thing on my mind.

But then I realized it was deeper than that. It was something, something that frightened him, in his work. Something that I think he wanted to shield me from.

Im pretty much of an amiable amateur when it comes to quantum mechanics, I said, but I know something about it. Suppose you tell me all you know about Ians work, and why it could be dangerous.

What I, in fact, fully grasped about quantum mechanics I could write on a postcard to my sister in Boston and it would likely fit. It had to do with light and particles so small that they were often indistinguishable in their behavior, and prone to paradox at every turn. A particularly vexing aspect that even Einstein and his colleagues tried to tackle in the 1930s involved two particles that at first collided and then traveled at sublight speeds in opposite directions: would observation of one have an instantaneous effect on the other? Did the two particles, having once collided, now exist ever after in some sort of mysterious relationship or field, a bond between them so potent that just to measure one was to influence the other, regardless of how far away? Einstein wondered about this in a thought experiment. Did interaction of subatomic particles tie their futures together forever, even if one stayed on Earth and the other wound up beyond Pluto? Real experiments in the 1960s and after suggested thats just what was happening, at least in local areas, and this supported Heisenbergs and Bohrs classic Copenhagen interpretation that quantum mechanics was some kind of mind-over-matter dealthat just looking at a quantum or tiny particle, maybe even thinking about it, could affect not only it but related particles. Einstein wouldve preferred to find another causenon-mentalfor such phenomena. But that could lead to an interpretation of quantum mechanics as faster-than-light actionthe particle on Earth somehow sent an instant signal to the particle in spacewhich of course ran counter to Einsteins relativity theories.

Well, I guess that would fill more than your average postcard. The truth is, blood and semen and DNA evidence were a lot easier to make sense of than quantum mechanics, which was one reason that kind of esoteric science was just a hobby with me. Of course, one way that QM had it over forensics is that it rarely had to do with dead bodies. But Lauren Goldring was wanting to tell me that maybe it did in at least one case, her husbands.

Ian was part of a small group of physicists working to demonstrate that QM was evidence of faster-than-light travel, time travel, maybe both, she said.

Not a product of the mind? I asked.

No, she said, not as in the traditional interpretation.

But doesnt faster-than-light travel contradict Einstein? I asked.

Not necessarily, Lauren said. It seems to contradict the simplest interpretations, but there may be some loopholes.

Go on, I said.

Well, theres a lot of disagreement even among the small group of people Ian was working with. Some think the data supports both faster-than-light and time travel. Others are sure that time travel is impossible even though

Youre not saying that you think some crazy envious scientist killed him? I asked.

No, Lauren said. Its much deeper than that.

A favorite phrase of hers. I dont understand, I said.

Well, Stephen Hawking, for one, says that although the equations suggest that time travel might be possible on the quantum level, the Universe wouldnt let this happen She paused and looked at me. Youve heard about Hawkings work in this area?

I know about Hawking in general, I said. Im not that much of an amateur. But not about his work in time travel.

Youre very unusual for a forensic scientist, she said, with an admiring edge I very much liked. Anyway, Hawking thinks that whatever quantum mechanics may permit, the Universe just wont allow time travel because the level of paradox time travel would create would just unravel the whole Universe.