These elementary particles hold together the quarks that lie at the heart of matter.
** QUANTUM SHORTS 2023/2024: PEOPLE'S CHOICE
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He returned to the redwood forest in Big Sur to clear his mind. His oncologist had told him the only treatment left for his leukemia was a bone marrow transplant from a close relative. But his only relative in the United States—his father—had died three years ago.
This forest was his sanctuary. He came here often when facing uncertainty and challenges. A biophysicist, he enjoyed cracking problems that his peers thought had no solution. While he considered the iterative process of conjectures and refutations too time-consuming, his proficiency in mathematics gave him the intuition to sort out competing hypotheses quickly. He taught his students, “Nature favors solutions that embody mathematical parsimony.” He became a star at Stanford after he presented how biophoton emission in onion roots was mathematically related to equations of quantum mechanics. His recent paper theorized that the root systems of plants could communicate with other plants nearby and far away. While the reviewers of his paper admired the elegance of his theory, they wondered how he came up with his ideas.
He never revealed the source of his insights. It would sound too personal, too anecdotal. He had intuited the entire phenomenon on a solo camping trip in this same forest two years earlier. His own consciousness intercepted the chatter between plants. He didn’t see or hear or smell the chatter. He just knew—like the way an animal intuitively knows that clouds stay in the sky, or that leaves rustle when the wind blows. He couldn’t explain in words how he knew what the plants knew. However, with mathematical equations, he was able to reconstruct the phenomenon. He was convinced that plants—and perhaps all organisms—possessed waves of consciousness with quantum characteristics. However, the central idea of his theory would conflict with the dominant tenet of quantum physics. His equations implied a conscious observer is caused by wave function collapse, not vice versa.
He awakened deep in the night to the gurgling croak of ravens in the forest. He opened his campervan’s sliding door and felt a breeze under the clear sky, where the moon shone like a street lamp. The sweet smell of damp earth vivified him. He removed his glasses to heighten the connection he felt with the trees, the soil, the ravens, the rats, the deer, the entire forest, and beyond. He let his mind drift. He could sense the presence of his parents—and their parents before them. He was startled when he sensed his descendants.
This means I could survive leukemia. But how? He was married once, but he divorced, without children.
He felt an insect bite on his thigh two inches above his left kneecap, right on the pea-sized, diamond-shaped birthmark he and his father both shared. He thought of his father and remembered his words. “Find Wei-ling. Tell her I love her.”
Wei-ling was his sister. His parents had given her away to a childless couple—childhood friends of his mother—shortly after she was born. “Xiao-ming, we can’t keep your sister.” He recalled his mother crying and mentioning China’s one-child policy. “They live three blocks away. Honest people. They promised we can visit her.” However, three years later, in 1989, his parents went to Tiananmen Square the night the soldiers intervened. His mother was shot dead on a side street. His father fled with him to Hong Kong and later to the United States. In a letter, the couple who adopted Wei-ling told his father, “She misses you all. She is too young to understand. The police say you are a fugitive. Please stop writing to us.”
The moment he got out of the forest and found a cellular signal, he called a former MIT roommate, now a professor at Beijing University. He told him his sister would be the best donor to give him bone marrow. “Please help me find her.”
“Beijing has twenty million inhabitants. I can’t possibly find her,” his former roommate said. “Besides, your father was a fugitive.”
“Nobody said this was going to be easy. I’ll come myself.”
“That would be best. If you’re willing to spend a few days with my colleagues and graduate students, I can help make arrangements.”
A month later, after spending a week giving the series of talks he promised, he went to the address found in his father’s letters. Upon arriving, he found only a municipal park with a jogging trail curved around a manicured lawn dotted with shrubs and flowers. A plaque in front of a giant banyan tree described that the park had been built ten years ago in this very location, where hundreds of homes nearby had been burned after a storm of lightning. Miraculously, the banyan tree survived the fire unscathed.
He recognized the tree. He had played hide-and-seek around it as a child. The tree’s aerial roots had dropped from the branches into the soil, forming a labyrinth of root trunks. He placed his forehead on a root trunk and closed his eyes. Where is my sister?
He heard a cry from a little boy thirty feet away. Wearing a helmet, the boy sat on the ground whimpering, a toppled bicycle with a pair of training wheels lying next to him. He knelt to examine the boy. There was blood on his knee, and, above it, he saw a diamond-shaped birthmark. Then he heard a voice calling his name. “Xiao-ming.” He thought he had misheard it—only his father would have called him by his Chinese name.
The voice was from a woman walking toward the boy.
The woman helped the boy get up. “Xiao-ming, I told you not to pedal so fast.”
“Did you name your son after your brother?” he asked.
The woman pulled the boy closer to her. “How did you know that?”
He pulled up a pant leg to show his birthmark above his knee. “I lived here thirty years ago.”
The woman covered her mouth and burst into tears.