Machines Like Me

This was the first of his poems that Adam recited to me. He had come into my bedroom without knocking just after eleven one morning, while I was working at my screen, hoping to take advantage of volatility in the currency markets. There was a square of sunlight on the carpet and he made a point of standing in it. I noticed he was wearing one of my turtleneck sweaters. He must have taken it from my drawer. He told me he had a poem he urgently needed to recite. I swivelled in my chair and waited.

When he finished I said unkindly, ‘Short at least.’

He winced. ‘A haiku.’

‘Ah. Nineteen syllables.’

‘Seventeen. Five then seven then five again. Here’s another.’ He paused, looked towards the ceiling.

‘Kiss the space where she

trod from here to the window.

She made prints in time.’

I said, ‘Spacetime?’

‘Yes!’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘One more. I’ve got to get on.’

‘I’ve got hundreds. But look …’

He left his illuminated spot and came to my desk and put his hand over the mouse. ‘These two rows of figures, don’t you see? Intersecting Fibonacci curves. A high probability that if you buy here and wait … now sell. Look. You made £31.’

‘Do that again.’

‘Best to wait.’

‘Then do me one more haiku and leave.’

He returned to his square of light.

‘You and the moment

Came when I touched your—’

‘I don’t want to hear that.’

‘I shouldn’t show it to her?’

I sighed and he moved away. As he reached the door I added, ‘Clean up the kitchen and bathroom, would you please? Difficult to do with one hand.’

He nodded and went away. A kind of peace or stability had settled over our household, despite the matter of Gorringe’s release. I was more relaxed. Adam was spending no time alone with Miranda, while I was with her every night. I was confident he would keep his promise. He had told me several times that he was in love, and chaste love was fine by me. He wrote poems in his thoughts and stored them there. He wanted to talk to me about Miranda but I usually cut him off. I didn’t dare attempt to power him down and I had no particular need. The plan to get him back to the salesroom was set aside. Love appeared to have softened him. For reasons I didn’t understand, he was eager for my approval. Guilt, perhaps. He had fallen back into a routine of vague obedience. I remained cautious because of my wrist and I was watchful – but nothing of that showed. I reminded myself that he was still my experiment, my adventure. It was not supposed to run smooth at every turn.

With Adam’s love came intellectual exuberance. He insisted on telling me his latest thoughts, his theories, his aphorisms, his latest reading. He was putting himself through a course on quantum mechanics. All night, while he charged up, he contemplated the mathematics and the basic texts. He read Schrödinger’s Dublin lectures, What is Life?, from which he concluded that he was alive. He read the transcript of the celebrated 1927 Solvay conference, when the luminaries of physics met to discuss photons and electrons.

‘It was said that at these early Solvay meetings there took place the most profound exchanges about nature in the history of ideas.’

I was at breakfast. I told him I’d once read that the elderly Einstein, while at Princeton in his final years, started each day with eggs fried in butter and that in Adam’s honour, I was frying two now for myself.

Adam said, ‘People said he never grasped what he himself had started. Solvay was a battlefield for him. Outnumbered, poor fellow. By extraordinary young men. But that was unfair. The young Turks weren’t concerned with what nature is, only with what one could say about it. Whereas Einstein thought there was no science without belief in an external world independent of the observer. He didn’t think quantum mechanics was wrong so much as incomplete.’

This after one night’s study. I remembered my hopeless brief entanglement with physics at college, before I found safety in anthropology. I suppose I was a little jealous, especially when I learned that Adam had got his mind round Dirac’s equation. I cited Richard Feynman’s remark that anyone who claims to understand quantum theory doesn’t understand quantum theory.

Adam shook his head. ‘A bogus paradox, if it’s even a paradox at all. Tens of thousands understand it, millions make use of it. It’s a matter of time, Charlie. General relativity was once at the outer edge of difficulty. Now it’s routine for first-year undergraduates. The same was true of the calculus. Now fourteen-year-olds can do it. One day quantum mechanics will pass into common sense.’

By this time, I was eating my eggs. Adam had made the coffee. It was far too strong. I said, ‘OK. What about that Solvay question? Is quantum mechanics a description of nature or just an effective way of predicting things?’