Infinity: A Jenlisa AU

Chapter 10

"What happened to them?"

"We don't know. Recording devices can't be used inside. The only report we can hope for at this point has to come from someone who manages to make it back. Like you did."

The inside of the box is empty, unadorned, and dark.

Walls, floor, and ceiling made of the same material as the exterior.

"It's soundproof, radiation-proof, airtight, and, as you might have guessed, puts out a strong magnetic field." He explains.

As Jennie closes the door, a deadbolt thunks into place on the other side.

Staring at the box is like seeing a failed dream raised from the dead.

Jennie's work in her late twenties involved a box much like the one she saw. Only it was a one-inch cube designed to put a macroscopic object into superposition.

Into what physicists sometimes call, in what passes for humor among scientists, cat state.

As in Schrödinger's cat, the famous thought experiment: Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying.

It's an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying.

Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead.

And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states.

In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes.

For instance, a dead cat.

And that becomes our reality.

But then things get really weird.

Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead?

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there's a branch.

One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one.

And it's the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there's an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse —where everything that can happen will happen.

Jennie's concept for her tiny cube was to create an environment protected from observation and external stimuli so my macroscopic object—an aluminum nitride disc measuring 40 µm in length and consisting of around a trillion atoms—could be free to exist in that undetermined cat state and not decohere due to interactions with its environment.

Jennie never cracked that problem before her funding evaporated, but apparently some other version of her did. And then scaled the entire concept up to an inconceivable level. Because if what Yang is saying is true, the box does something that, according to everything Jennie knows about physics, is impossible.

She feels shamed, like Jennie lost a race to a better opponent. A woman of epic vision built the box.

A smarter, better Jennie.