12 Addled Men by Jon Wesick

12 Addled Men by Jon Wesick

“Gentlemen of the jury.” The judge pointed to the defendant, a dark-haired man wearing round glasses. “Erwin Schrodinger is accused of constructing a fiendish device by which he killed his cat, Molly. You’ve heard the evidence. Now you must decide whether he is guilty or not guilty. However you decide, your decision must be unanimous.”

& & &

Twelve jurors filed into a deliberation room containing a long table surrounded by wooden chairs. Most loosened their ties. A few hung jackets in the coat rack near the entrance. After failing to turn on the wall-mounted fan, Juror Seven moved to the bank of windows that looked out on the city’s skyline.

“Supposed to be the hottest day of the year.” Juror Seven mopped his face with a handkerchief and adjusted his straw hat.

“Why don’t you go to where there is no heat and cold?” Juror Eight asked. His hair was a haphazard mass of curls shaped like the tracks of electron-positron pairs in a magnetic field.

“Where’s that?”

“When hot be totally hot. When cold be totally cold.” Juror Eight took his seat.

“Hey, check these out.” Juror Seven removed a stack of punch cards from his striped sports coat and showed them to Juror Six. “Three-dimensional Ising model. I got a hot date with the UNIVAC at seven-o-clock to simulate iron. Guess you could say it’s due to my magnetic personality.” The two opened a window.

“So, is this your first trial?” Juror Twelve asked Juror Ten. “I mean, I found the talk about the foundation of quantum mechanics interesting.”

“Ah!” Juror Ten waved his handkerchief. “It’s an open-and-shut case. Who cares about the damn cat, anyway?”

“All right. All right, please take your seats,” Juror One said. “We’re here to decide whether Schrodinger killed his cat. We need to deliver a unanimous verdict of twelve to nothing.” He tore a sheet of paper into twelve strips. “If no one minds, I’d like to start with a secret ballot to see where everyone stands.”

“Sure, then maybe we can get out of here.” Juror Seven looked at his watch.

Juror One passed out the papers. The others marked their ballots, folded them, and passed them back. Juror One sorted them. He wrinkled his forehead at one ballot and placed it apart from the others.

“That’s eleven votes for not guilty and one zero.”

“It’s not a zero,” Juror Eight said. “It’s an enso, a Zen circle that means reality lies beyond the opposites.”

“Boy!” Juror Seven jumped to his feet. “There’s always someone who’s gotta ruin everything.”

“So, what do we do now?” Juror Ten asked. To call him overweight would be an understatement. He was one pastrami sandwich away from gravity overwhelming the nuclear and electric forces that kept his body’s shape and causing him to collapse into a black hole.

“Why don’t we start by those who voted not guilty explaining why Juror Eight is wrong?” Juror One tapped a legal pad with his pencil.

“I don’t know,” Juror Two said. He was a slight man whose head seemed to sink between his shoulders when he spoke. “The experts convinced me that we couldn’t be sure so I’m not going to send the defendant to jail.”

“The cat’s either alive or dead!” Juror Three opened his notes and pointed to the pages. He had the body of a man who hauled beer kegs for a living and drank the contents after work. “Just like the defendant is either guilty or not. It’s just common sense.”

“It’s very simple.” Juror Four cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. “In quantum mechanics, a particle can be in two states at once. For example, an electron could be a combination spin up and spin down. After you measure the spin, the wavefunction collapses and the electron is in only one, say spin down. Now, what Mr. Schrodinger did was very devious. He put a radioactive sample, that could either decay or not, in front of a Geiger counter that was attached to a vial of poison in a box along with a cat. Since the box is sealed, nobody has measured the inside. So, the radioactive source is in a combination of decayed and not decayed. Does that mean the cat both alive and dead? My opinion is that quantum mechanics predicts statistics from large populations. That being so, we can’t know for certain the cat’s dead. Therefore, I vote not guilty.”

“I’d like to pass if that’s all right.” Juror Five avoided the others’ gazes by looking at the pencil in his hands.

“Why didn’t they just open up the box to see if the cat was alive?” Juror Six asked.

“And risk killing the cat?” Juror Three yelled. “You gotta be crazy!”

“Look! Quantum mechanics gives the right answers!” Juror Seven said. “Who cares about some silly experiment, anyway?”

“And who cares about the damn cats?” Juror Ten stood and circled the table. “You know how they are. Wrecking your sweaters with their claws! Always stinking up the house with their litter boxes and canned tuna!”

“Yeah, well I’m a veterinary assistant who takes care of cats all day.” Juror Five sprang to his feet. “Maybe you can smell the dander on me but I don’t like your tone.”

“All right. All right,” Juror One said. “Calm down.”

  “What do you want, anyway?” Juror Seven stood and hovered over Juror Eight. “Are we supposed to sit here all-night discussing cats when we could be calculating Lamb Shifts and Mott Scattering, instead?”

“I don’t know.” A bead of sweat rolled down Juror Eight’s forehead. “I just think a fundamental property of reality is worth talking about. If we spent an hour, you’d still be able to get to that computer.”

“Fine!” Juror Seven moved away. “What do you want to talk about?”

“The double-slit experiment,” Juror Eight replied,

“The double-slit experiment! Who cares about the double slit experiment?” Juror Seven threw up his hands and stepped toward the bathroom door.

“You don’t think it’s odd that a single photon passing through two slits interferes with itself?” Juror Four was so cool, he could turn any metal into a superconductor just by touching it. Despite the heat, he kept his tie neatly knotted and jacket buttoned.

“And that the interference pattern gets washed out when you test which slit it passes through?” Juror Eleven added.

“No!” Juror Seven said. “It just works. Okay?”

“How much longer are we going to talk about this?” Juror Three asked.

“All right. I’ll make you a deal.” Juror Eight stood. “Take a secret ballot and I’ll abstain. If everyone else votes not guilty, I’ll go along with you. But if even one of you votes hung, we talk about this some more.”

After the ballots were filled in, Juror One counted the results. “Not guilty. Not guilty, …, Not guilty.” He paused at a stick-figure drawing of a man with his head in a noose. “Hung.”

“It was you! Wasn’t it?” Juror Ten pointed at Juror Five. “Cat-loving bastard!”

“Sit down or I’ll punch you in the nose.” Juror Six shook his fist at Juror Ten.

Juror Ten turned his back.

“Calm down,” Juror One said. “Yelling isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

“I voted hung,” Juror Nine said. He was so old he looked like the twin who’d stayed behind after the other rocketed off at near lightspeed toward Alpha Centauri. “Want to know why?”

“Sure,” Juror Six said. “Tell us.”

“I’ve always suspected that quantum mechanics isn’t telling the whole story.” Juror Nine stood and leaned forward with his palms placed on the table. “Here’s my reasoning. Suppose a spin-zero nucleus breaks into two spin-one-half pieces and we detect the pieces on opposite sides of the galaxy. Now spin-one-half particles can be either spin up or spin down but quantum mechanics says each fragment doesn’t make up its mind until we measure one. Suppose fragment one come out as spin up. Then according to quantum mechanics an instantaneous signal, moving faster than the speed of light, crosses the galaxy to tell fragment two it has to be spin down. Something’s going on under the hood that quantum mechanics isn’t telling us about.”

“Nonsense!” Juror Seven said. “All you’re doing is adding unmeasurable details to a theory that already works. I’m changing my vote to hung.”

“You can’t do that!” Juror Eleven said.

“Occam’s Razon, my friend. I can do whatever I want.” Juror Seven hung his jacket on the back of his chair.

“Let’s have another vote.” Juror One tapped his pencil on a legal pad. “Everyone for not guilty, raise your hands.”

Jurors One through Six, Ten, and Eleven raised their hands.

“That’s eight not guilty. Those for hung.”

Jurors Seven through Nine raised their hands.

“Three hungs.”

“I change my vote to guilty,” Juror Twelve said.

“Oh, come on!” Juror Seven slapped his forehead. “We’re moving backwards here.”

“Let him talk,” Juror Six said.

 “I think the observer is in a superposition, too.” Juror Twelve took off his plastic-framed glasses and pointed with them as he spoke. “When he opens the box, the universe splits it two. One has the observer who sees the live cat and another universe contains the observer who sees the dead cat.”

“You’re voting to convict a man for that?” Juror Three asked.

“Makes no difference.” Juror Twelve put his glasses back on. “In the other universe, Schrodinger is not guilty.”

“You’re talking fairytales here,” Juror Four said. “There’s no way to measure the other universes.”

“It’s what the Schrodinger equations implies,” Juror Twelve said.

“We’re not making any progress!” Juror Seven looked at his punch cards.

“Very well.” Juror Twelve leaned back in his chair. “I’ll change my vote back to not guilty and send the Schrodinger in the other universe to jail instead.”

“Do you mind if I say something?” Juror Eleven asked with an accent that carried the echo of simmering goulash. “It seems to me that consciousness plays a role in observation. It’s as if quantum mechanics necessitates intelligence.”

“Let me ask you,” Juror Four said. “Would a child have enough consciousness to be an observer?”

“Yes.”

“How about a chimpanzee?”

“I don’t know.”

“They have intelligence almost as good as humans,” Juror Four said. “Researchers have even taught some to talk using sign language.”

“I suppose so,” Juror Eleven said.

“What about a dog?”

“No!”

“If a chimpanzee can observe the experiment, why not a dog? Border collies are smart. Some can recognize hundreds of commands.”

“All right.”

“Then what about a mouse, a bird, a lizard, a fish, a cockroach?”

“Ha! And what about a cat?” Juror Three jumped to his feet. “The cat witnessed his own execution!” Juror Three slapped the table. “Not guilty!”

“Let me ask you about measurement,” Juror Eight said to Juror Four.

“All right.”

“Hidden variables, statistics of large numbers, many worlds. Whatever the interpretation, quantum mechanics gives the same answer. Isn’t that, right?”

“I suppose.” Juror Four took off his glasses and pinched his nose.

“Then there’s no experiment that can tell the difference.”

“As far as we know.” A bead of sweat rolled down Juror Four’s forehead.

“Then we don’t really know what’s going on at the atomic level,” Juror Eight said. “Not only that, we can’t know.”

 Juror Four sighed, put on his glasses and muttered, “I vote hung.”

“I still say not guilty!” Juror Ten stood and circled the table. “Who cares if Schrodinger killed the cat? Cats are no good. Always scratching the furniture. Always killing songbirds. And the yowling! All night long keeping me awake with that damn yowling! Then the mother cat comes home with a dozen kittens. I know how to take care of kittens. Believe me.” He pointed at his chest with his thumb. “You put them in a bag and toss it in the river.” The others turned their backs and face the wall. “Why aren’t you looking at me? Cats are no good and you know it.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Juror Four said.

Juror Ten collapsed into his chair and hung his head.

“Let’s have another vote,” Juror One said. “A vote for hung not only means that this jury cannot decide on a verdict. It means no verdict is possible. All for hung raise your hands.”

All except Juror Three raised their hands.

“What’s wrong with you people?” Juror Three jumped to his feet and pointed at the others. “The cat’s either alive or dead. That’s just common sense but those eggheads will try to tell you otherwise. Oh, I’m wise to them. How they scratch each other’s backs and keep anyone with fresh ideas out of their ivory tower. Sure, I took their physics classes, struggled through vectors and Newton’s laws. Can I help it if I couldn’t figure out electrodynamics? All those fields and gradients are just stupid. The professor gave me a D. How was I supposed to become an engineer with a D?” He sat and put his head in his hands. “I vote hung,” He muttered.

“We’re ready now,” Juror One told the bailiff.

The others filed out of the jury room, leaving Jurors Eight and Three behind. Juror Eight removed Juror Three’s jacket from the coat hanger and put it over Juror Three’s shoulders.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Jon Wesick 2024