"Connie Willis - At the Rialto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

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 Schrodinger'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 CU and then coming
on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the
middle of his telling me how beautiful Cleveland 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.
Schrodinger 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.
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; therefore, 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."
"Charm is for quarks," I said, and hung up, feeling smug until I