Page 69 of The Paradox Club

“Do you have one?” asked Tess, sitting up straighter.

“I do,” said Vivian, winking again at Tess.

“Yeah,” growled Montag 5. “Tell us a story. Might help Nemo 7 fall asleep.”

Vivian sat up on the bed and smoothed her skirt. “This story is for Tess,” she said, “but the two of you are welcome to listen if you like.”

TESS AND HARRY ON THE DOCK

“Have I told you about Heisenberg?”

“No.”

“Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist. He’s one of the people who pioneered quantum mechanics.”

“What’s quantum mechanics?”

“Something I can rarely explain to college students, much less to an eleven-year-old.”

“That’s okay, I’ll look it up.”

“Heisenberg developed something called the uncertainty principle.”

“I’m uncertain about a lot of things. Does that make me a famous physicist?”

“I don’t know about famous, but it’s a good start for being a physicist.”

“I thought scientists were supposed to know everything.”

“Not everything. And the most important thing for them to know is what they don’t know.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean don’t trust anyone who tells you they know everything.”

“Not even you?”

“There are many things I don’t know. Any good scientist is much more interested in the things they don’t know than the things they do know.”

“What did Warner Heisenberg not know?”

“Werner.”

“Whatever.”

“The uncertainty principle says that sometimes when we know one thing, it’s impossible for us to know another thing.”

“I thought the more you learned, the more you knew.”

“That’s true to an extent. But imagine you are in a room with two doors. We’ll call them door A and door B. You are only allowed to go through one of those doors. Suppose you pick door A.”

“I would pick door B.”

“Okay, you pick door B. As soon as you pass through door B, you know what is on the other side. But at the same moment, you make it impossible to know what is on the other side of door A.”

“Werner was studying the physics of going through doors?”

“Not exactly. He was studying very small particles, and he said that if you know how fast one is moving, then you can’t know where it is; and if you know where it is, you can’t know how fast it’s going.”