Vignette

A Quantum Moment

by Larry Baggett

"Oh, I think I cut myself!" I remember saying that.
In truth it may well have been my Mom who told me that I said it.

That June day in Mobile, my friend Glen Presley and I had slingshots,
which nobody's mother had forbidden us to play with, and our plan was
to arm ourselves with a sack of rocks and go somewhere to hone up on our
slinging. We found some rocks, but it was getting an ammo belt that was
our problem. It had to be some kind of pouch that could be attached to our
belts or shorts, so we could have both hands free to load and sling. The
perfect solution appeared in my mom's kitchen: a couple of those string
bags that potatoes came in. The bag had a nice wide opening at the top,
and the mesh was just fine enough to hold our ammo. The only problem
was that the string handles needed to be cut so we could tie them around
our belts. Easy enough. Just get a knife and cut it.

"Use your scissors," my mother said, as she always did when I asked for a
knife. I had some silly baby scissors that would hardly cut tissue paper,
let alone a real ammo belt loop, so her wise safety directive was ignored.

There are events in life that people might call bifurcative moments,
an unperceived fork in the road, or a wrinkle in time that keeps you
pondering what would have, could have, happened if ... What if the
trajectories of the shots fired by Lee Harvey Oswald or John Hinkley
had been just a couple of inches different? What if Princess Diana's
chauffeur had consumed one fewer cognacs? Name your own favorite flip
of the coin moment. I like to call such an event a "quantum moment."
Modern physicists teach us that the state of a system, though ordinarily
flowing along smoothly in time, can appear to switch instantaneously to
a totally different state. We tend to think of this as a quantum leap
forward, but Heisenberg and company would tell us that it equally well
could be a leap backward or even more likely a leap sideways. It's an
unexpected discontinuity, at least to our perception. We do indeed like
to believe that there is the other fork.

For me such a quantum moment happened like this. My mom was in our
kitchen preparing lunch, I walked in and saw a paring knife on the
counter. What if I'd obediently turned around and found my scissors?
No, I took the knife to cut the string on my potato sack.

"Never cut toward yourself," my dad had instructed me over and over. Yet
I cut toward myself with the paring knife. Yes, the point of the knife
went straight into my right eye. "Oh, I think I cut myself!"

Well what was a mother to do? Her five-year old is standing there in the
kitchen, the dagger in his hand, his lifted eyelid revealing an enormous
gash in the eyeball, and Glen Presley there, barefooted holding a potato
sack full of rocks. The details of what happened next no longer exist
in my memory, but no doubt there was a rapid trip to the hospital or
doctor's office or whatever place was available in Mobile in June of
1944. Certainly there were no cell phones to call Dad and maybe not even
a land line in our little military project house.

I believe that a Dr. Sellers immediately operated on me and sewed up
the gash in my eye, and everybody went home to wait and see what would
happen to Larry. But Larry wasn't all right. Indeed my right eye was
seriously damaged from the injury, so that its likelihood of regaining
any vision at all was quickly deemed by Dr. Sellers to be minimal. And
then the story got worse.

One day, just a few weeks later, we were in a city park, and at some
point my mother realized that I couldn't see what she was sitting
on. "What's this?" I must have asked, while running my hands over the
seat and the back. "Oh, it's a bench," I figured out. She probably asked
me some questions: "Can you see the bench? Can you see how many fingers
I'm holding up? Do you see your dad over there?" I think I gave wrong
answers to all these queries, no doubt throwing everyone into a frenzy. I
was evidently totally blind in both eyes, and, surely unfathomable to them
all, I hadn't even noticed that it was happening. Could I see yesterday?
Could I see two days ago? Could I see last week?

"Sympathetic Ophthalmia" was the final diagnosis. Sometimes, when one
eye is seriously injured, the other one goes totally blind due to some,
not well understood, cooperative link between the two optic nerves,
and that's apparently what happened to me.

Now, some sixty-five years later, I am retired, thinking back
on my career of forty years as an active and, I immodestly say,
internationally-recognized mathematical researcher at the University of
Colorado, where I have taught hundreds of both undergraduate and graduate
mathematics students.

What if my particular quantum moment hadn't happened? Would I have
played baseball in high school, in college, maybe made it to the Majors?
How would I have performed as a hunter, a bicycle rider, an operator of
a lawn mower, or even a bagger at the grocery store? Would I have been
popular with girls, winking at them during class, swirling one around
the homecoming dance floor, or showing off in front of them at the beach?
Could I have flown an airplane, hitchhiked to California, become a movie
critic, been a surgeon, ...?

Not even Heisenberg knows. Maybe I would have been a mathematician.