A Tale for the Time Being (57 page)

When Zen came to Japan, the custom of giving a mountain name to a temple persisted, regardless of whether there was a mountain beneath it or not. As a result, even temples built on the coastal
plains of metropolitan Tokyo bear mountain names, and no one seems to mind.

There are several possible kanji for the temple name
Jigenji
, but the most likely combination is
, consisting of the
characters for
merciful
,
eye-ball
, and
temple
. The character for
gen
, or eyeball, is the same as the one in Master D
ō
gen’s
Sh
ō
b
ō
genz
ō
,
Treasury of the True Dharma Eye
.

The most probable kanji for
Hiyuzan
seems to be
(Hidden Hot Spring Mountain); however, when I first read the name, the
combination of characters that popped to my mind was
, which can be translated as Mount Metaphor. I couldn’t help but think of
René Daumal’s brilliant work
Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing
. The object of Daumal’s quest is a unique
and geographically real mountain, whose summit is inaccessible but whose base is accessible. “The door,” he writes, “to the invisible must be visible.” Mount Analogue is
where
peradam
can be found, an extraordinary and unknown crystalline object that can be seen only by those who seek it.

All of this might seem like a digression and quite beside the point, but when old Jiko’s temple proved so elusive, thinking of Mount Analogue gave me an enormous sense of hope.

The experiment goes like this:

A cat is put into a sealed steel box. With him in the box is a diabolical mechanism: a glass flask of hydrocyanic acid, a small hammer aimed at the flask, and a trigger that will either cause
the hammer to release, or not. The factor that controls the release is the behavior of a small bit of radioactive material being monitored by a Geiger counter. If within, say, an hour, one of the
atoms in the radioactive substance decays, the Geiger counter will detect it and trigger the hammer to shatter the flask, releasing the acid, and the cat will die. However, there is an equal
probability that no atom will decay within that hour, in which case the trigger will hold and the cat will live.

It seems simple enough; however, the point of this thought experiment is not to torture the cat. The point is not to kill it, or save it, or even to calculate the probability of its succumbing
to either fate. The point is to illustrate the perplexing paradox of the so-called measurement problem in quantum mechanics: what happens to entangled particles in a quantum system when they are
observed and measured.

The cat and the atom represent two entangled particles.
¹⁶⁴
Entangled means that they share certain characteristics or behaviors, in this case
their fate within the box:
decayed atom = dead cat
; and
undecayed atom = live cat
. The two behave as one. Together in their box, the entangled atom/cat are part of a quantum
system that is being measured by an observer, who, let’s say, is you.

Now, hold that thought for a moment, because in order to proceed, we need to understand two other fundamental quantum phenomena:
superposition
and
the measurement problem.

Imagine that instead of an entangled atom/cat in the box, you were measuring a single electron. Before you open the box to observe it, that electron exists as a
wave function
, which is
an array of itself in all of the places it might possibly be in the box. This quantum phenomenon is called
superposition
: that a particle can be in all of its possible states at once.
(Think of a superimposed photograph of a pacing tiger in a pen, taken with a shutter that exposed the film every couple of seconds. In the superimposed photograph, the tiger would appear to be a
blur or smear. In a microscopic quantum universe, governed by the principle of superposition, the tiger
is
the smear.)

The measurement problem arises the moment you open the box to observe the particle. When you do, the wave function appears to collapse into a single state, fixed in time and space. (To use the
tiger analogy, the smeared tiger becomes a singular beast again.)

Okay, now, let’s go back to the entangled cat and radioactive atom. The state we’re measuring here is not the location of a tiger, but rather the entanglement of atom/cat. Instead of
the possible positions of the tiger in the cage, we’re measuring degrees of the cat’s aliveness, its existential status, as it were.

We know that on account of the measurement problem, the moment you open the box to measure the cat’s state, you will find the cat either dead or alive. Fifty percent of the time the cat
will be alive. The other 50 percent of the time, the cat will be dead. Whichever it is, the cat’s state is singular and fixed in time and space.

However,
before
you open the box to measure it, the cat’s state must be smeared and multiple, like the blurred tiger. Due to the quantum principles of entanglement and
superposition, until you observe it, the cat must be both dead and alive,
at the same time
.

Of course, this conclusion is absurd, which was exactly Schrödinger’s point. But the questions his thought experiment poses are interesting: At what point in time does a quantum
system stop being a superposition of all possible states and become a singular, either/or state instead?

And, by extension, does the existence of a singular cat, either dead or alive, require an external observer, i.e., you? And if not you, then who? Can the cat be an observer of itself? And
without an external observer, do we all just exist in an array of all possible states at once?

There have been many attempts to interpret this paradox. The Copenhagen interpretation, formulated by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1927, supported the theory of wave function collapse,
positing that at the point when observation occurs, the superposed quantum system undergoes a collapse from the many into the one, and that this collapse
must
happen because the reality of
the macroscopic world demands it.
¹⁶⁵
The problem is that nobody has been able to come up with the math to support this.

The many-worlds interpretation, proposed by the American physicist Hugh Everett in 1957, challenges this theory of wave function collapse, positing instead that the superposed quantum system
persists and branches.

At every juncture—in every Zen moment when possibilities arise—a schism occurs, worlds branch, and multiplicity ensues.

Every instance of
either/or
is replaced by an
and
. And an
and
, and an
and
, and an
and
, and another
and
. . . adding up to an infinitely
all-inclusive, and yet mutually unknowable, web of many worlds.

The astrophysicist Adam Frank told me that what’s important to remember about quantum mechanics is that while there are many interpretations, including the Copenhagen and
many-worlds hypotheses, quantum mechanics itself is a calculus. It’s a machine for predicting experimental results. It’s a finger, pointing at the moon.

Professor Frank was refering to an old Zen koan about the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, who was illiterate. When asked how he could understand the truth of the Buddhist texts if he couldn’t read
the words, the Sixth Patriarch raised his arm and pointed to the moon. Truth is like the moon in the sky. Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon’s location, but it is not the
moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the
same thing.

“Not same,” old Jiko would have said. “Not different, either.”

Hugh Everett published what came to be called his “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics in 1957, in
Reviews of Modern Physics
, when he was
twenty-seven years old. It was his doctoral thesis at Princeton. It was not well received. The leading physicists of his day called him crazy. They called him stupid. Everett, disheartened, gave up
on quantum physics and went into weapons development. He worked for the Pentagon’s Weapons System Evaluation Group. He wrote a paper on military game theory, entitled “Recursive
Games,” which is a classic in the field. He wrote war games software that would simulate nuclear war, and he was involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He advised the White House on nuclear
warfare development and strategy during the Cold War, and he wrote the original software for targeting cities and civilian population centers with atomic weapons, should the nuclear Cold War turn
hot. He’d already written the mathematical proof of his many-worlds interpretation, and he believed that anything he could imagine would occur, or already had. It’s not surprising that
he drank heavily.

His family life was a mess. He had a remote and troubled relationship with his kids. His daughter, Liz, who suffered from manic depression and addiction, tried to commit suicide by taking
sleeping pills. Her brother, Mark, found her on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the hospital, where the doctors were able to restart her heart. When Mark returned home from the hospital,
Everett looked up from his
Newsweek
and remarked, “I didn’t know she was so sad.”

Two months later, Everett himself died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. In this world, he was dead, but he believed that in many worlds he was immortal. His wife kept his cremated
remains in a filing cabinet in their dining room before eventually complying with his wish and throwing them in the garbage. Mark went on to have a successful career as a rock musician, but
Liz’s life spiraled downward. When she finally succeeded in killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills in 1996, she wrote a suicide note that said: