The Copenhagen Interpretation

The Copenhagen Interpretation

Dr. Jonas Werner opened the locket, and the smiling face of his late wife, Ellen, looked up at him.

“Talia will be home soon,” he whispered. “You’d be so proud of her, getting her degree in just three years.”

He leaned forward and kissed the picture, then chuckled at his own face smiling up from the locket’s other side, before his eyes filled with tears.

“You were so young. So much lost time together.”

As he closed the lid, his finger felt a blemish, just a tiny dimple on the bezel of the pendant. Curious, he picked at it with his fingernail and felt the slightest click as the back of the pendant snicked open.

“What the—?”

On the body of the pendant, a string of digits glowed.

***

Talia shuffled to the front of the bus.

“Late night?” she said to the woman hugging the bus’s steering wheel. The clock on the dashboard read 11:50 PM.

The beads in the woman’s hair rattled when she shook her head. “Nope. This is my last stop, Honey. I don’t work late on New Years Eve. Too many drunken fools out tonight.”

Talia stepped off the bus into the slush at the edge of the sidewalk. As the door closed and the bus pulled away, she hugged her thin coat tightly around herself and hunched her shoulders against the cold. The frozen fog made the light from the line of lamps into fuzzy glowing bulbs. Leaning forward against the chilly wind, Talia trudged toward her home, an old brownstone. By the time she climbed the stone steps to the front door, the only part of her body that wasn’t freezing was where the curiously warm pendant pressed against her chest.

Once inside, she slipped off her boots and hung up her coat before heading to the kitchen to make a nice, hot cup of tea. But as she passed the door to her father’s study, the sounds of shuffling papers and muffled curses stopped her in her tracks.

“Dad?” she called as she opened the heavy wooden door.

Sure enough, her father, who had been missing for the past month, was frantically searching the mess on his large desk.

“Talia,” he said, startled. “I wasn’t expecting you this early.”

“It’s New Years Eve, Dad.”

He glanced at the electronic clock-calendar on the desk, which read 11:56 PM, and scowled and yanked open the top desk drawer.

Talia stood and stared. “Where have you been? You’ve been gone for a whole month.”

Rather than answering her, his eyes focused on the pendant nestled between her collarbones.

“There it is. Oh, thank God. Give it to me.”

Talia covered it with a protective hand. “Yeah. I found it when I was looking for some clue as to why you just disappeared. A note or something would have been nice.”

Dr. Werner was frequently absent for days at a time, doing research for his next history textbook. But a month-long absence without a word of explanation was very unusual.

“Uh, sorry. Give me the pendant. Please.”

“But it’s beautiful. And it was Mom’s, right? There are pictures of you and her inside it.”

Talia pried the locket open to reveal the pictures of a much younger Dad and her Mom, whom she missed every day.

Jonas nodded. “She always wore it. I…I thought I’d lost it.”

He glanced at the clock again. 10:58 PM.

“Talia, I need that pendant. Give it to me now!”

Startled by her dad’s tone, Talia unclipped it from around her neck but clutched it tightly.

Talia said, “It was just sitting right there in the middle of your desk.”

Even to herself, she sounded petulant and defensive.

“Open or closed?” Dad asked as he shook his outstretched hand.

“Huh?”

“Was it open or closed when you found it?”

“Oh, closed. Why?”

He let out an exasperated sigh. “I was afraid I might have broken it when I dropped—when I left it here.” He gave Talia a nervous smile. “May I have it back, please?”

She looked down at the ornate scrollwork on the cover. “Oh, okay, I guess. I was hoping—”

“No! I need it back.” He looked at the clock again. It read 11:59 PM. He held out his hand. “Please. Quickly.”

Frowning, she snapped the locket closed, but before handing it over, her fingernail slipped into the hidden indented latch, and the back popped open.

“What’s this?”

On the back of the pendant was a button and a display that counted down as she watched.

00:00:00:05, 00:00:00:04

“Talia! Give it to me!”

00:00:00:03, 00:00:00:02

“Talia, push the button!”

As the timer reached 00:00:00:01, Talia, thinking the pendant might explode, squeezed the button. She only held it down for about a second and a half, but during that moment, her world changed.

A tingling sensation filled her body, and she felt the world, the universe, her entire reality spinning backwards. The display flashed a total of sixteen times:

00:00:00:02 00:00:00:03 00:00:00:07 00:00:00:13 00:00:00:26 00:00:00:51 00:00:01:43 00:00:03:25 00:00:06:50 00:00:13:39 00:00:27:19 00:00:54:37 00:01:49:14 00:03:38:27 00:07:16:55

When she, gasping, released the button, the setting sun was shining through the study’s window.

“What the—?”

“Oh, thank God,” Jonas muttered as he flopped down into his desk chair.

Talia, her mouth hanging open, followed his eyes to the clock-calendar.

12/31/2027 4:43 PM

Confused, she looked down at the pendant, still open in her palm. The display read 00:07:16:52 00:07:16:51 00:07:16:50 …

“Dad, what just happened? Tell me!”

“Okay, okay. First, just gently close the locket.”

She did, then gingerly set it down on the desk like it was a delicate flower—or a bomb. Jonas snatched it up and tucked it into the inside pocket of his ubiquitous professorial tweed sport jacket.

“You’ve got questions. Let me explain, as best I can. Mom’s locket is also a…a time machine.” He held up a hand to stop her questions. “I don’t know how it works, or where she got it, so don’t ask. Actually, you’re the physicist. Maybe you can answer those questions. Anyway, the display shows days, hours, minutes, and seconds. It’s always counting down toward all zeroes.”

“It was on one second when I pressed the button.”

He nodded. “That was cutting it way too close.”

“Why? What happens if the counter hits zeroes?”

“I have no idea, and I don’t want to find out. Not yet, at least. Maybe it wraps around to some really big number of days. Or, it could just stop working altogether. Who knows, maybe it’s a countdown to the end of the world.” He shrugged. “The point is, when you press the button, you jump back in time as far as the display shows. We just jumped back to earlier this afternoon.”

Talia’s mind reeled. Time travel? How is that possible? It isn’t, not without… She couldn’t even think of a wildly possible, completely outlandish physical mechanism that would send them hours into the past. But the sun setting outside was proof positive that something had happened.

She checked her cellphone. It, too, read 12/31/2027 4:45 PM.

A thought occurred to her when she looked at her dad’s rapidly graying hair. “How many times have you done this?”

Jonas gave her a sheepish grin. “A few?”

“How far back?” He just shrugged. “You’ve been jumping back and forth through time, and you didn’t tell me?”

“Just back.”

“What?”

“You can only jump back. Then you have to live forward. So, I’ve only gone back a little bit…a few times.”

She was furious, but her curiosity overwhelmed her anger. She held out her hand.

“Let me see it.” Her dad shook his head. “Come on. I’ll be careful. I’m the physicist, remember?”

Reluctantly, he handed the pendant back to her. And she gingerly opened the back.

“How do you know how long to hold it down?”

Jonas pulled out his cellphone. “I made an app. It’s basically a spreadsheet that calculates the data and time when each jump will land. It takes a tenth-of-a-second to fire each time, so I know how many times to push the button.”

“I wonder why it sent both of us back when I pushed the button.”

“Well, I was looking at it, too.”

“You have to look at the pendant for it to work?” she mused.

He nodded. “Otherwise, the pendant jumps back, but you don’t. That’s how I lost it last time.”

“You have to observe it…the wave function. Huh. So, the Copenhagen Interpretation is correct.”

“The what?”

She waved her hand. “It’s the standard way of understanding quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger Wave Function. The system is in a superposition of multiple states until it is observed. Then it collapses to a definite state.”

“The cat-in-a-box thing?”

“Exactly. The alternate Many-Worlds Theory says the universe splits every time a decision is made. This thing somehow folds space-time along the time dimension.”

Her fingertip slid across the inside of the back cover. “What’s this? Dad, there’s a faded inscription here.”

Talia held the locket under the desk lamp, snapped a picture with her phone, and zoomed in.

“Oh my God.”

“What? What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Jonas, Come back for me.’ Dad, I think Mom—”

Talia stopped, her throat suddenly squeezed shut, and her eyes filled with tears.

Her dad finished her thought. “Mom wants us to go back and save her.” He took the pendant from Talia. “We need time to figure this out. You’ve been at the lab all day, right?” She nodded. “Good. Look at the timer.” She did, and he pressed the button.

00:07:06:55 changed to 00:14:13:49.

***

The sun was no longer setting. In fact, the view through the window showed the snow-covered backyard bathed in morning sunshine. The clock-calendar read 12/31/2027 9:46 AM.

For the next three hours and fifty-three minutes, Talia and her dad made their plans.

“Mom left the salon at 12:22 on May 4th, 2018. She started to cross Main Street, with the light, when the jerk who killed her ran the red light, turning in front of the trolley coming toward the intersection on Broad Street. He claimed he didn’t see her because the trolley was in the way.”

“He’s still in jail, right?”

Dad shook his head. “No. They let him out after only two years. Bastard,” he finished under his breath.

“Well, now we have a chance to fix it.”

“You’re right. I’ll be on the other side of Broad, and I’ll make sure he stops this time. You hang out on the corner as back-up.”

“Just make sure you don’t get hit by the idiot. I don’t want to have to do this again.”

He chuckled. “We only get one shot. Two copies of us can’t be in the same place at the same time. I’ve gotten stuck a couple of times. You become sort of like a ghost in the presence of your past self. You’re frozen until you—the past you—leaves. It’s weird and creepy.”

Talia blinked, then nodded. “Sure. The Pauli Exclusion Principle.”

“If you say so.”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about how all this works. I think it needs both the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many-Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics to work. I mean, saving Mom and thereby changing the past, should introduce a whole bunch of paradoxes.”

Jonas nodded. “That’s why you hate time-travel stories, isn’t it?”

“Right. So, for this plan to work, we have to be on multiple world-lines that split and create a whole new version of the universe.”

“Like turning left instead of right?”

“Yeah, but time is one-dimensional, so you can’t turn either left or right. You can only go straight.”

“Why is time one-dimensional?”

“Well, because—. Oh. Oh, my God. That’s it. That makes perfect sense.”

She turned to her dad, a history professor who may have just solved the biggest riddle in physics, the Quantum Measurement Problem. Her mind raced with the possibilities.

“Yes. If time is actually two-dimensional, then we don’t have to create a whole new universe every time we make a decision. We just wander across the time plane. Dad, you’re a genius!” she said as she wrapped him in a hug.

Jonas grinned despite the fact that he had no idea what his daughter had just said. Shrugging, he took out his phone and handed Talia the locket. The display read 00:10:20:40.

“Okay, the app says when the seconds reach fifteen, hit the button fourteen times. Count them out in your head, but stay focused on the display. That’ll give us plenty of time to get downtown. Got it?”

Talia nodded. “Got it. Ready? Now.”

The display flicked from 00:10:20:15 to 00:20:40:30. The desk clock switched from 12/31/2027 12:39 PM to 12/30/2027 3:19 AM, and the world switched from early afternoon to the dead of night. The sudden darkness made Talia hesitate just a little before smashing the button thirteen more times.

Outside the window, ten years worth of seasons flickered past. When Talia counted fourteen, she looked at her dad in terror.

“I think I screwed up. I hesitated.”

Jonas looked at the clock. The date was right, 5/4/2018, but the time was later than they expected, 12:06 PM.

“We’ve only got sixteen minutes! We can’t get to the garage, drive down there, and park in time. Run!”

Talia snapped the pendant around her neck as they ran for the door.

***

Fifteen minutes later, they reached the intersection of Main and Broad. Jonas, his face flushed, bent over, wheezing.

“Dad, are you—?”

“I’ll be all right,” he said as he caught his breath.

They both looked up at the sound of the trolley’s bell clanging a block away. Without a word, Jonas hurried across the street as both the trolley and the death car came toward them.

The sound of the bell over the salon’s door tinkling caught Talia’s attention as her mom, Ellen, stepped out into the Spring sunshine.

Memories she thought she had lost flooded her mind as she watched her mom, mesmerized. She looked exactly as Talia remembered her, but of course she did. As Ellen stepped to the curb of Main Street and waited for the light to change, though, they were both startled by the combination of the furious clanging of the trolley’s bell and the screech of a car’s brakes. Dad was standing in the middle of Broad Street, waving his arms above his head as the death car skidded to a stop only inches short of running him over.

“Jonas?” Ellen said. She turned from where she waited to cross Main Street and instead stepped off the curb onto Broad…right in front of the oncoming trolley.

“Mom!” Talia screamed over the panicked clanging of the trolley’s bell.

Without thinking, Talia ran the two steps to her mother, who stood frozen in fear. She grabbed her mom by the back of her blouse and dove backwards as the trolley, its bell still ringing, thundered past.

Time seemed to slow as both women fell backwards. Talia, whose fingers had hooked the locket chain around her mom’s neck, felt the necklace fade to nothing. The two landed heavily on the concrete, and Ellen turned to face her savior. Her eyes opened wide, and she broke into a wide, knowing smile when she saw her own pendant around Talia’s neck.

Looking up at her safe, living mother, Talia said through her tears, “Hi, Mom.”

THE END