DISENTANGLEMENT

DISENTANGLEMENT

Disentanglement

She had parted ways with her Ex to live alone and concentrate on her first love –Physics. Her Doctoral programme had suffered from this love affair and trauma nobody seems to understand, yet she finished from Yale and now on a post Doc at Wits in South Africa. Her father, born of white South African father and Nigerian mother comes around in summer to see how “Lady Physics” fares.

“Every quantum packet, and by this I mean energy unit, is entangled; but what happens when you try to disentangle the already entangled quanta? Do they stay disentangled or is it impossible to disentangle them?” She tries to explain her Doctoral thesis to her father in one of his visits.

This is Physics headache in the 2020s and Kekie Remlap has an answer the world is afraid to hear. Her dissertation laid a mathematical foundation for a conclusion bizarre to the physics world at Yale. Entanglement it says, is the web of reality: remove a strand, disentangle the minutest of quanta and the universe collapses into a void of that spacetime proportion. However, disentanglement cannot happen within the universe because it is a quantum fitted whole.

Kekie Remlap’s findings suffer from two setbacks; she doesn’t look like the truth and the experiment will take the whole universe to perform. For a woman physicist, Maria Curie’s face is expected, not some bimbo with a quarter of n***o’s blood. Even though a white and grey matter of 168 IQ, well above Einstein’s by 8, sits in the hollow of that bimbo’s cranium.

“Shall I disentangle one for the world to see?” She had had sleepless night asking that question. The mathematics she had worked out, but the experiment will take the whole universe to perform. Before the birth of quantum physics, things used to be so simple - from hypothesis to experimentation. Quantum brought all the weirdness and unpredictability. She’ll therefore sits her father down to listen to her thesis.

He hates sitting in that studio-room; his fear for mathematics comes to life like a crushing juggernaut. Every piece of paper and flat surface in the room has mathematical equations splatter on them and choking him. But if listening is the therapy her daughter needs, he’ll rather sacrifice his time for it.

“Imagine you entered a village in the middle of nowhere and you discovered everybody, young and old, is of necessity engaged to someone; what will be your reaction?”

“Well, you face your business that took you there?” Her father responded matter-of-factly.

“Well, you have to be engaged before you can step into the village, don’t you think? And the moment you stepped into the village confirmed that you are engaged already.” Kekie retorted.

“Well, I will like to know the goddam person I’m engaged to without my consent.” His father said. Yes, that is the common sense position of a conscious matter, but we are talking about unconscious matter here, Kekie thought.

Science hitherto held that disentanglement was impossible, but Kekie had reasoned that for experiment confirming entanglement to be possible, you will have to disentangle. This can only imply entanglement jumps from one entangled particle to another.

Until donkeys understand this, it is not likely to sail through, he sighs. He muses at how a donkey might react entrapped in a room with shape shifting aqua-lion, its body made of a million mathematical equations. His daughter’s voice crashed in from nowhere, spinning an entangled universe into a fine thread of Fibonacci series.

Her phone comes alive as she intensifies making her father to understand her point. A message in her mail-box is inviting her to CERN in Switzerland for a conference. Her thought accelerates like particles in the Large Hadron Collider. She wished she could doubt the authenticity of the mail, but the undersigned was her external examiner at Yale. So, two entangled humans retire for the day both day-dreaming: one spinning towards a career at CERN in Switzerland, the other spinning towards ignorant bliss on a farmland somewhere in KwaNibela province by the shore of St. Lucia.

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“We are fascinated by your proposition that entanglement, though fractal is sequenced in Fibonacci series, so we came up with series of experiments to test this.” The voice of Mac Page briefing Kekie Remlap about how her thesis had given them inspiration at CERN reminds the visitor of the drama at Yale during her defense. Page had called this ‘the incongruous oxymoron’ to which one of the examiners had to stir up Neil Bohr to come to her defense - after all, quantum physics owes no one the right not to disappoint expectation.

At the end of the day, Kekie was made to know how testing her hypotheses had produced unexpected result. Five years had been spent by the league of scientists to disentangle a quantum particle completely; a tricky venture at that, for you would have to ransack every atom in the universe to ascertain your is truly disentangled. However, “Kekie’s postulate” has helped them to achieve this easily. You don’t need to ransack every atom in the whole universe, if a quantum particle is completely disentangled, it will create what they call “anomalous void.” However, sitting in the middle of this void is antimatter.

The reality of what has happened dawns on her gradually. Somehow, the doctoral thesis she managed to finish had given CERN the key to creating antimatter within a split second! A gram of antimatter is sufficient enough to fuel a starship’s 4.37 light years to Alpha Centauri, but unfortunately, it will take 100 billion years to produce 1 gram of antimatter using previously known method. Now, Kekie just gave the world the math to produce this powerful fuel at the snap of a finger!

Sometimes, things may not be simple with quantum physics, but you just need to take a quantum leap of faith, she thought.