Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

ENTANGLEMENT

But this time I felt as if I were watching myself do it, as if it were a performance.

What I normally say instead is that it isn’t that magical things are necessarily impossible—only that they must be confined to environments we haven’t yet observed.

I’ve never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.”

It’s a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they’ve been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking.

but the fact is that I like doing things the hard way.

Like every woman I’ve ever talked to about it, I hated pumping: the indignity, the surge of hormonally triggered sadness, the primitive machine’s repetitive wheeze.

It was the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that.

I tend to be slow to notice my own feelings. It’s easier for me to identify deviations from a baseline than it is to speculate about motivations.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

This like a dream Keeps other time And daytime is The loss of this.

For time is inches And the heart’s changes Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.

that we hadn’t lost just one Charlie but as many as the number of people who were seated here today.

had an imagination and a will like no one I’d ever met, that when she wanted something, it seemed she was able to shift the ground in front of her.

Higgs is important because it creates a field, producing profound effects on the particles around it, while remaining invisible itself;

I knew I was betraying my friend and felt guilty.

Arty carries the kind of suppressed excitement that you sometimes find in people who’ve just fallen in love, an almost maniacal focus on one thing, and a just barely concealed desire to turn any conversation to that subject.

Kaiser suggests that the FFG’s open-mindedness toward parapsychology and ghosts, combined with their minor celebrity as members of the counterculture, helped to keep quantum entanglement—the “spooky action” between distant particles that Einstein refused to countenance—on the map.

It turned out that spooky action, at least, was right: pairs of subatomic particles like electrons can be “entangled” in such a way that observing one of them instantly influences the other, even after they’ve moved far apart.

The observer is important because these quantum particles exist as probabilities; they don’t have a fixed position or momentum until a scientist pins one down by measuring it. By measuring one, she instantly influences the other, si...

my ordinary life buzzed with possibility every time I looked at my phone.

we didn’t know that space and time are one thing, like a fabric.

He says that time is just a human invention, and so there’s no real past, present, and future. Everything is just nows. So even after your body dies, your consciousness is just in another now. Einstein said that, too.”

But he thought the idea that we outlive our physical body was ridiculous.”

but once I was in a relationship, I was usually the one in control.

at first I thought that was only because she and Neel didn’t yet know each other well.

What do we get out of entering into other people’s suffering in art, when we often avoid it in life?”

you would have to step outside of conventional society in order to negate some of the power relations that corrupt love.

“I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn’t manifest itself. Like a reflection.”

“Like a reflection that’s different from what’s doing the reflecting,”

and for just one second I

was in that other world, the reflection.

I wonder if happiness is the point. Maybe passion, something that can keep you satisfied inside your own head, independent of other people, is going to be worth more in Jack’s lifetime.

Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It’s almost nothing—I can’t feel it—but it’s the same force that binds our planet to our star.