Spin State - Chris Moriarty [78]
“And what does interference have to do with it? Why do you think she was looking at interference patterns in the Anaconda?”
Cohen shook out a cigarette and lit it, smiling. “Interference is central. It’s the hat trick at the center of Coherence Theory. Basically what Sharifi saw—and this takes us into the realm of quantum information theory—is that interference is really the flip side of coherence. If you really take the concept of the multiverse seriously, then entanglement, decoherence, and interference all become interdependent. In essence, they emerge as the same phenomenon occurring in different dimensions of the multiverse.”
“This is giving me a headache, Cohen.”
“Quantum mechanics gives everyone a headache. That’s just how it is. But my point is you don’t have to believe Sharifi’s idea or even be able to visualize it, really. Because it works, like a lot of the watershed ideas in quantum mechanics, whether or not you believe in it. The Everett-Sharifi Equations accurately predict a whole range of quantum behavior that prior theories couldn’t make sense of. Which goes back to what I was saying about how theories don’t have to be true to be useful.
“And Coherence Theory is beautiful, of course.” His cigarette described a delicate arc in mid-air. “Sharifi’s early papers on it were some of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in the history of modern physics. And being beautiful is almost as important as being useful.” He grinned. “More important, Sharifi would have said.”
“So you think she was looking at live fields in the Bose-Einstein beds because there was something about the relationship between entanglement, interference, and decoherence in those fields that she thought would . . . what? Prove her theories?”
“Maybe. Or she might just have hoped she could refine some aspect of Coherence Theory. But whatever she was after, it would have been primarily theoretical. A fresh direction. A big answer. A new problem. Something that meant something.”
“Well she found something,” Li said. “We know that. But then she erased her data. So whatever she found, it was something she didn’t want people to know about.”
Cohen shook his head decisively. “I don’t think that can be right. I don’t think Sharifi would have destroyed data. I don’t think any committed scientist could bring herself to do that.”
“Even if she realized that the data would prove Coherence Theory was wrong? Even if she thought it would destroy her life’s work, make her a laughingstock like Everett?”
“Even then, Catherine. Sharifi believed in knowledge. In truth. It was about being right for her, not just having people think she was right.”
“Maybe,” Li said. “Or maybe you just didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
Cohen didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke he was looking past the Ring-side skyline at the vast glittering curve of Earth. “You’ve never been there, have you?” he asked.
“To Earth? No. Of course not.” No one could go back anymore unless they fell under one of the religious exemptions. And constructs couldn’t go back even then; they were controlled technology, banned by the Embargo.
“I’ve been there,” Cohen said. “I was born there.”
“I know,” Li said, and shivered.
She had seen old noninteractive video footage of Cohen’s programming—or rather of the development of the affective loop cognitive program that eventually grew into the Emergent phenomenon that called itself Cohen. The programmers had described their work with a frankness that was shocking to modern ears. They had talked about calling behaviors, well-being-enhancement drives, emotive manipulation. Those words mocked Li every time she began to imagine that she knew anything about what happened on the other side of the interface.
“What was Earth like?” she asked, shaking off the memory of Chiara’s slender