The Argument in the Study

It wasn't long before Sophie knew that the scientist friends were taking too long with their experiments. She would never get the answers she needed this way.

One of the problems with being a superintelligent mouse that has been hit with a Smartening Ray™  is that you suddenly have an entire world open to you.  The notion of taking things slow was not something her little mouse head could wrap itself around anymore.  Before, she and her brothers had spent day after day with nothing more on their minds than running mazes, eating cheese, sleeping and escaping their cages.  That last part, escaping, was something they had never been able to do anything more than dream about. 

Now that she was smarter than the scientist friends, Sophie had come to realize that the university and, in fact, the world itself was nothing more than another cage she was stuck in, dreaming of ways to leave.  Now, however, she had the imagination and the means to escape this newly realized cage.

The answer came to her one night when she was relaxing with Heisenberg and Bohr in the study after dinner.  They were enjoying a cheese plate, between them, and discussing the nature of reality, as one often will.

Heisenberg started talking about some of the newer theoretical shit the scientist friends had been kicking around. 

"When you look closely enough, you start to see that everything in the universe is in a constant foamy state of indeterminacy. Everything.  An electron isn't in one place in its orbit around the nucleus, it is in all places at the same time.

“And of course it isn't just electrons where this happens, but everywhere and everything that makes up everything.  These larger systems, the world as we know it, is all built upon the back of this microscopically microscopic frothy foam.  

“It isn't until measurements are made, observations are observed, choices are locked in, that those wave functions begin to crystalize and collapse.  But once the wave state collapses, what happens to all of those other unrealized ’might have beens’? Those places where the electron had also been? Those other potential things that could have been, before decisions were made?  

 "Our latest interpretation of the data makes it clear.  There's no question.  It isn't either/or.  It is both.  All of those things actually exist until the wave function collapses."

Bohr, who was usually a little slower on the uptake when they started talking shop like this, glared hard at Heisenberg then shot Sophie a quick look, arching an eyebrow as if to say, "Can you believe this shit!?"

Aloud Bohr simply asked, "How can that be? Let's ignore for that fact that, yes, all the experiments we've done show it to be true.  It just doesn't make sense.  It doesn't square away with the real world that we all live in." 

The phrase "the real world we all live in" caught Sophie's ear.  She put down her Munster and began to pay more attention.

Bohr continued, "It can't work that way.  More to my point, if collapsing the wave function causes this thing that was both here and there to be simply here: Where does all that other stuff, that very real stuff - that foamy, imaginary super-positioned stuff - go?"

Here he kicked back in his easy chair, picked up his cigar and lit it, as if to punctuate the point.  Advantage: Bohr.

Sophie wasn't nearly as easy to convince.  Arguments about "common sense" and "the real world" don't hold nearly so much sway with a superintelligent mouse who has recently been hit with a Smartening Ray™ and now hangs out with world famous scientists eating cheese and talking about physics each evening as you might think.  She chewed on one whisker for a while as she thought more about the problem.

 "Well, it doesn't just disappear, does it?  The Laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy and all that, right?" 

Back when the scientist friends were first teaching Sophie what they knew, one of the first things they'd talked about was one of their scientist friends from a long time ago, Lavoisier.  He was French and he had done enough experiments to come up with a piece of science that was so very very true that it came to be known as a Law. 

• In science there are ideas, which are just crazy guesses, where no one knows if they are true or not.
• Then there are hypotheses, smart ideas that need to have experiments run to see if they are true.
• Then there are theories, things that keep proving to be true in experiments and are almost certainly right.
• Finally, there are Laws, theories which have stood the test of time and shown themselves to be irrefutably, totally true. 
 

There weren't a lot of Laws but whenever the scientist friends got together and agreed on a new one, you knew it was right.   

In this case the Law of Conservation of Mass (and the Law of Conservation of Energy) were Laws, capital L.  Which meant they was true, no question.  Final answer. And the Laws of Conservation, stated simply said that energy or matter couldn't be created or destroyed, only converted from one from to another.  

 "So," Sophie continued, "If those things are in two places at once, before the wave function collapses and the quantum indeterminacy is resolved, we know that that stuff doesn't just disappear, does it?  It doesn't get destroyed.  Because.  It.  Can't."  Sophie raised her thimble of half and half higher and higher with each of those last three words, a little of it sloshing out onto her hands at the end.

"Exactly!"  Heisenberg, in spite of himself, was catching Sophie's excitement.   "There's only one possible explanation!  That stuff still exists… but not in our world."

A tingle went down Sophie's little mouse spine.  Here was something she had never before imagined or even considered.  Other worlds!  And not just the made up kind like the ones she had learned about when Einstein had first shown her the library.  But for real, totally not fake other worlds that actually existed.  Out there.  Somewhere.  And if they were out there, then someone could find a way from here to there.  

It was in that exact moment that Sophie decided that she would be the one to discover a way to reach those other worlds.  She set her mind to figure this out, more than anything else. She was determined to find a way to escape from her invisible cage!