A hypothetical experiment in which a cat kept in a closed box can be alive and dead at the same time – as long as nobody lifts the lid to take a look.
A Q&A with Colm O'Shea, Quantum Shorts finalist
Read the story first: A World Apart
Can you give a short introduction to yourself?
I teach essaying to college students, and the essay—ideally—is a sandpit of ideas to play in. Conceptual play (exploring ideas just for the fun of it) is my favourite thing to do.
How did you come up with the idea for your story?
The quantum theorist Paul Dirac said: “A place is nothing: not even a space, unless at its heart—a figure stands.” I love that strange quote. I think he’s saying that a reference point is always needed: there’s no high without low, no left without right, and no “nothing” without “something” (and vice-versa). I’ve been carrying that idea around for a long time, but it didn’t occur to me to use it as a seed for a short story until I saw the Quantum Shorts fiction invite. Since I’m also intrigued by the possibility of sentient AI, I wanted to imagine what it would be like for an AI consciousness to realize that she isn’t just the “figure” in the story, but rather she is the interrelation of the space and the figure. She discovers she is the intersection of all possible computable worlds.
One final note on the idea source: I stole the fly image from an Emily Dickinson poem “I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died.” It’s a poem about an indeterminate state between life and death.
Your story makes interesting use of perspectives with a little twist at the end. Was it tricky to plan or write?
No one knows where ideas come from, but my media diet plays a big role in what emerges on the page. For instance, before I wrote “A World Apart,” I had been doing math/logic puzzles. One of the puzzles struck me as especially tricky, because the perspectives of the characters in the scenario—what they know and don’t know—played a part in the solution. So although I didn’t know exactly how to translate that experience into a short story, I knew that I wanted a radical perspective shift to occur by the end somehow.
What makes you interested in quantum physics?
Oddly, perhaps, I came to the mysteries of quantum physics when I was writing a book on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the Buddhist concept of non-duality. Murray Gell-Mann, the CalTech scientist, was a fan of the Wake because it’s basically a vast nest of puzzles. In fact, Gell-Mann coined the word “quark” from a line in the book: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!”
I know there are a lot of amazing applications of quantum theory yet to be discovered, but I’m most excited about how it might help us understand what consciousness is—about what thisness is.
What is your favourite science-inspired book?
I’m going to cheat and give three answers: one book that helped me teach my kids; one that makes me reflect on strange questions; and a final one that made me dream when I was a child. The first is a wondrous introduction to geometry by my friend the mathematician Paul Lockhart called Measurement. This connects to my second choice, Shape, by Jordan Ellenberg, which asks odd questions like “How many holes does a straw have?” (He gives more than one possible answer.) Finally, the first science fiction book I read was Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage. That made me want to dream up my own fantastic voyages.
What does being a Quantum Shorts finalist mean to you?
When I was a kid, I felt that school was a sorting mechanism, and the “arty” people went in one group, and the “math-science” people went in another. They were segregated tribes, almost. I’m not denying that kids have natural inclinations, but to reinforce that art/science division squanders an opportunity for children—and by extension adults—to explore the whole geography of the brain! I would say to both tribes that the best treasure tends to be buried in the place you don’t feel you belong, or even feel afraid of. For me, for a long time, that was math and physics. Being picked as a finalist makes me want to reach out to people who think “I’m not a math/physics person.” Science and literature are everyone’s birthright. If you shut yourself off from some of the most exciting ideas humanity has ever played with, you are depriving yourself.