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can smell it, so can others.”
    â€œI’ll be fine,” I said.
    â€œNo.” She shook her head. “Somehow I don’t think you will.”

 
    7
    Satvik stood in front of the diagram I’d drawn on my marker board.
    He was silent as he considered the scribblings. At one point, his hand went to his ear, tugging at the earlobe. I didn’t want to prompt him. I was interested in his unadulterated opinion.
    â€œOkay, what is it?” he asked finally. It was already late, and many of the other researchers had gone home for the day.
    â€œThe wave-particle duality of light.” I said.
    I’d spent most of the day drawing and going over checklists in my head. Part of it was just overcoming inertia, building myself up to actually do it. The other part, maybe, was finding a path to believe it all again. Can you half believe something? No, that wasn’t quite right. This was quantum mechanics. The better question: can you both believe in something and not?
    Satvik stepped closer to the marker board.
    â€œWave-particle duality,” he said slowly under his breath. He turned to me, gesturing at the diagram. “And these lines over here?”
    â€œThis is the wave part,” I said. “Fire a photon stream through two adjacent slits, and the competing waves create an image on the phosphorescent screen. The frequencies of the waves zero-sum each other in a set pattern, and a characteristic image is captured there.” I pointed to the drawing. “Do you see?”

    â€œI think so. The photons act as the waves.”
    â€œYes, and as the waves pass through the slits, one wave front becomes two, the ripples overlap, and you get the interference pattern.
    â€œI see.”
    â€œBut there’s a way to produce a totally different result. A totally different image. If you put a detector at the two slits”—I began drawing another picture below the first—“then it changes everything. When the detectors are in place, a kind of translation occurs, from the conjectural to the absolute—and when you look at the results, you realize that somewhere between the gun and the screen, light has stopped behaving like a wave and started behaving as a particle series.”

    I continued, “So instead of an interference pattern, you get two distinct clusters of phosphorescence where the particles pass straight through the slits and contact the screen without impacting each other.”
    â€œThis uses the same gun?”
    â€œYes, the same photon gun. The same two slits. But a different result.”
    â€œI remember now,” Satvik said. “I believe there was a chapter on this in grad school.”
    â€œIn grad school, I taught this. All those probabilistic implications. And I watched the students’ faces. The ones who understood what it meant. I could see it in their expressions, the pain of believing something that can’t be true.”
    â€œThis is already a famous experiment, though. You are planning to replicate?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWhy? It has already been replicated many times; no journal will publish.”
    â€œI know. I’ve read papers on the phenomenon; I’ve given class lectures on the details; I understand it mathematically. Hell, most of my earlier research at QSR is based on the assumptions that came out of this experiment. Everything else in quantum mechanics builds from this, but I’ve never actually seen it with my eyes. That’s why.”
    â€œIt is science.” Satvik shrugged. “It’s been done already, so you don’t need to see it.”
    â€œI think I do need to,” I said. “Just this once.”
    *   *   *
    The next few weeks passed in a blur. Satvik helped me with my project, and I helped him with his. We worked mornings in his lab. Evenings we spent in North building, room 271, setting up the equipment for the experiment. The phosphorescent