“Doctor-patient privilege applies to whatever you say right now. I’m ethically bound to keep this to myself.”
“Okay,” he said. “I don’t mean to make this sound all cloak and dagger. But I have been working with viruses.”
I felt something squeezing in my chest. Viruses? Since when?
“I see,” Reiner said.
“I suppose that could be viewed as a contaminant of sorts.”
You suppose? I wanted to interject. And you’re just now mentioning this?
If we hadn’t been in a hospital, talking to a doctor, I never could have kept my poise.
“What kind of virus?” Reiner asked.
“The tobacco mosaic virus,” Matt said. “It’s a real scourge where I come from. But it’s a good, solid, well-studied virus. It’s very stable. It can survive at a wide range of temperatures or in a vacuum. And it’s pretty commonly available for research purposes.”
“What, exactly, have you been doing with it?”
“How much do you know about quantum physics?”
“I pretty much peter out at Schrödinger’s cat.”
“Okay, so let’s start at the top,” Matt said, slipping into professor mode. “The quantum world is a very strange place. Particles can make sudden leaps from one place to another and leave no footprints behind as to how they did it. Or they can pass through solid walls, which we refer to as quantum tunneling. It’s all very unsettling and very difficult to imagine, even for people like me who deal with it all the time. The way we reassure people is by telling them it’s okay for all this weirdness to exist, because it’s all happening on an incredibly small scale. Here in the world we can see, what we call ‘classical’ physics rules the day. Newton’s apple still falls from the tree and that sort of thing. Or at least that’s what we thought. But it turns out it’s more complicated than that.”
“It usually is,” Reiner said.
“In the last few years, we’ve been able to get larger and larger objects to act in these bizarre quantum ways. To ‘interfere’ them, as we say. We started with particles, which are incredibly small—ten to the negative fifteen meters. Then we moved up to atoms, which are ten to the negative ten meters. Then we were dealing with molecules like carbon-sixty, which we call a buckyball. It’s ten to the negative nine meters, which is still very, very small, but absolutely huge compared to where we started. Then we got to clumps of atoms, getting up to ten to the negative eight meters. And now?
“A group of researchers at Delft University of Technology interfered a silicon wire that is ten to the negative six meters. That’s billions and billions of atoms, plunged into a quantum state. We’ve reached the point where no one knows exactly how large we can go. Where does quantum physics end and the classical world begin? The limits appear to be technical rather than theoretical.”
“Matt did his postdoc at Delft,” I added quietly.
“Now, so far, we’ve only been talking about inanimate objects. But the smallest life-form, a virus, is ten to the negative seven meters. And some bacteria aren’t much larger. We’ve already surpassed that sizewise. Could we actually interfere a living thing? Or is life, in fact, the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical one? Is there something about a living thing—about consciousness, perhaps—that simply won’t comply with those weird quantum rules? Or can life go quantum too?
“It’s one of the biggest questions in physics, in all of science for that matter, and there’s a guaranteed Nobel Prize in it for whoever gets the answer. Because if life can go quantum, it literally changes existence as we know it. What if we can have viruses or bacteria or even microanimals like tardigrades making quantum leaps or traveling through solid walls? We literally may never look at the world the same way again. So that’s been the goal of my research. To see if I can get a virus to demonstrate quantum interference.”
Interference. It was actually the perfect word to describe what this virus had done to our lives.
“How come you didn’t tell me about this?” I asked quietly.
He looked at me apologetically. “I don’t know. I feel like I got my PhD and then tenure by playing it safe, just doing the kind of predictable, incremental science you need to move your career ahead. Once I got tenure, I was ready to take a moon shot. But at the same time it’s so audacious, I felt almost silly talking about it. To some people, saying you’re trying to interfere a virus is like saying you want to bike to Mars.”
“No, I mean why didn’t you tell me after the first fit?” I asked. “Seriously, medical science is powerless to explain what’s happening to you, and you didn’t think that maybe spending half your day with a quantum virus had anything to do with it?”
“But the tobacco mosaic virus doesn’t infect humans,” he said. “At least it shouldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, this is the part, I admit, I’m a little unsure about. I keep mutating it by accident.”
He said this simply, like he was referring to spilling a cup of water in a bathtub. I was gripping his bed rail so hard I was sure I was breaking blood vessels.
“A mutated quantum virus,” I said, and even I could hear that I was now yelling. “Even better. I guess now I understand why you never told me the details about your research, because I would have asked if you had lost your damn mind. It seriously never occurred to you this was why you were freaking out?”
Matt just sat on his bed, shrinking quietly.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You basically have no idea what this thing is or might be capable of, do you?”
“I wouldn’t say no idea,” he muttered.
“Well, then, what? What have you created? We don’t even know whether it’s the mutation that’s doing this or if it’s because you’re taking these mutated creations and trying to send them into quantum orbit. How do you know you haven’t done something that made a plant virus capable of infecting humans? Or that you haven’t enabled this one particular virus to make some kind of quantum leap into your brain? You’re basically playing God here. Well, congratulations, Prometheus, you’ve stolen fire and now it’s burning you.”
I pointed to Reiner. “He ought to order a psychiatric evaluation not because of conversion disorder, but because you really are crazy.”
“This virus definitely sounds like something we need to look into,” Dr. Reiner said, as if this profound understatement might make Professor Bronik’s hysterical wife calm down.
I let go of the bed and grabbed Matt’s hands.
“Matty, please, please tell me you’re going to stop messing with this thing.”
“But it’s my work,” Matt said quietly. “I’ve spent years building toward this. This is . . . it’s everything. It’s my whole career.”
“Yeah? And I’m your wife. And somewhere out there is your son. We’re your family. And we need you. We need you more than a Nobel Prize. I’m worried that if you keep doing this, next time it won’t be six hours. Or eight hours. It’ll be forever. Or no one will get to you in time with a shot of norepinephrine and we’ll find you dead on the laboratory floor. You have to ask yourself: What’s more important, your work or your life?”