The Observer Effect by Mackinley Clevinger, April 18, 2016
It still isn’t time; calm down, you’re alright. “And in just a few moments, the woman herself will be joining us to tell us about her new insights into…” She’s checking an empty notepad. They want theatrics, not the truth. Why am I here? “Well, I’m sure she’ll be telling us all about it, right after these messages.” I’m going to have to walk out there after their sponsors are done planting themselves in people’s heads. I belong in a lab, not on a talk show…
I smiled at the hostess as she walked off the raised-stage towards me, a man with a clipboard walking beside her and talking. It’s publicity. You can’t get funding if no one knows about you, and they asked for you specifically. It’ll only be a few minutes, and then you can go back to the hotel and be alone again. It’ll only be – “Mrs. Stella?”
“Just Ms., actually. Wait, no; Dr. What would you like?” You can be sociable; you’ve done it before. You made it through the interview, you’ve been in meetings, this isn’t anything new to you. “We’re live in a few minutes, Lauren. Usually you science-types have props or experiments, but I hear you were a last-minute catch; do you have anything ready?” What?
“I… thought you were going to interview me?” You practiced explaining it hundreds of times in the mirror. “Yes, I am, but I always give eggheads the floor for a few minutes to talk about how smart they are. The audience feels more engaged when we shake up the routine of pretending to be having a private conversation.” Ignore the remarks, fight the panic, be a normal person.
Oh god please stop. “You are going to entertain my fans one way or another, hear me? As either yet another childish ‘funky’ scientist or a laughingstock; your choice.” She stepped back and fixed her cuff, looking at her watch. “You’re on that stage in two minutes. Don’t screw this up.” She turned away from me while my legs trembled, her assistant giving me a weak smile before hurrying away. My chest jolted, mind fogging over in panic.
No. You are not going to mess this up and be a bumbling fool because of a domineering host who doesn’t respect you. It doesn’t matter. You just need to think something up; some way to entertain hundreds of thousands of people when you normally avoid crowds larger than five. You can… you can… I bowed my head and pinched the bridge of my nose, breathing deeply and fighting back nervous tears.
“Now, all the way from her lab on the other side of the country: Dr. Lauren Stella is here to tell us about the research she and her team has been doing. Lauren?” The research. The science. You’ve debated and discussed that for hours on end; all you have to do is talk about it for ten minutes, and you’re free. You can do this. I can do this. The nervous heat left me, replaced with a cool resolve as I stepped into the light to a round of applause. You’re here for the science.
I sat down and shook the hostess’s hand, smiling at the crowd and waving at the cameras. They didn’t matter, they were a means to an end. “So, Lauren… What have you been researching?” She’s smiling and looks kind, but I still saw the other her from behind the curtain. It’s not important. “Well, Kate – you don’t mind if I call you Kate, do you?” Someone told me not to call her Kate, she hated that. “Not at all, Lauren; now, you’re leaving us in suspense. What’s the big deal?”
“Where do I even begin?” My mind’s blanking. Stall. “Well, hopefully soon, Lauren; we don’t have forever.” Don’t think, just talk. “Well, Kate, you say that, but how do you define – Wait. Sorry; off-topic. The Observer Effect, that’s what I’m here to talk about.” Okay, stepping stones, you’re getting there. “It’s nice to finally know what you’ve been doing, Lauren, but what is it?” Put words together, think; you have spent years working with this, but be likeable and not too stuffy and crap I stopped smiling.
“Uhm… well… in layman’s terms, it means that looking at something changes it.” I cleared my throat, roughly plastering a smile over my face. She’s going to try and play me off as an idiot, and I’m not helping my case. “So you’ve been going around and… looking at stuff. Are you hiring? Sounds like my dream job.” The crowd laughed. At me. Stop being useless.
“I mean… imagine that there was an amateur singer. When they’re by themselves, they sing with confidence and sound amazing, but the moment someone’s watching them, they lose their nerve.” Like me. “I can imagine that pretty well, Lauren.” She winked at the audience; they’re laughing again. “What we do, though, is take that concept and look at incredibly small things; so small that even looking at it is enough to change it. It’s like… looking at leaves on the ground, but the only way to see them is to blast them with a leaf blower, y’know?
“So we have all these situations where we know what something is before it undergoes a process, and we can see what it becomes after that process, but whenever we actually look to see what’s going on in the middle of that scenario, it all changes into something different. Our observing the process collapses the wave function, which isn’t even an actual physical thing but more of an idea of the path that these particles move in which is shifted by our observance, and the crux of our research comes out of trying to find out what these particles are doing when we’re not looking at them, but to look at them we have to put something into the system so that it can return information, the inputting changing our results so we can never really know what’s happening.”
I blinked, and the world popped into focus again. “Uhm… I mean, that’s some of the simple stuff involved in the Observer Effect, but I think I found a way around that.” How long has it been? Are we almost done? “It’s still in its early stages, but it could have a serious impact on how we view Quantum Physics, so… yeah. That’s…” How long did it take to get to the hotel? Only a few minutes. I could be reading test results in less than fifteen minutes from now… “It’s been pretty interesting. Sorry, I get a bit lost when I talk about my work.”
“No, it sounds… very interesting, Lauren. Very important. I understand you had a little presentation for us before you left?” Oh, yeah. Yeah. “I do, Kate; more of a though experiment, really, but you can’t exactly lug a lab onto the stage so this’ll have to do.” I turned in my seat to look directly at the crowd, quieting the rising tension. You’re going to be okay. “A prevalent idea in a lot of circles is that multiverse theory, and the Observer Effect plays into that. You see, observing these particles isn’t a binary; there are different ways to look at them, and we can do so in different strengths, each of which will get us a different result from our observations.
“But, before we observed these particles, any of these theoretical results were possible, and it’s only by observing it that we find out which one is the one that we’ve experienced in our reality, while all the other possible situations have played out in different universes where we observed different things. That isn’t exactly the focus of my research, but what it means to us, right now, is that there are an infinite number of scenarios that could be and are played out tonight.” You’re almost done, just keep talking. Entertain and get out.
“What do you mean, Lauren?” Some of them are getting it, just need to finish this… “Well, let’s say that there is the observer and the event; Kate and I are the main event, and the crowd is the observer. Now, how we act will change based on how the crowd observes us; how disruptive or supportive they are will change how we behave, and every possible scenario has been played out, theoretically, in different versions of our reality.
“So, in some realities, no one watched this show and I was a lot less self-conscious of how I was talking, and it sparked the end for your career, Kate.” The crowd laughed. It worked. Being mean is funny... I want to leave now. “Well, thank you Dr. Stella for…for that.” The crowd chuckled, but I didn’t care. I can be back with my data in ten minutes, and back at the lab by tomorrow night, and away from all these people even sooner.
“It’s been an experience, Kate.” We shook hands, and she turned towards the cameras. “We’ll be back from commercial break with viewer calls telling us what you think about Lauren’s research. Call in to our studio and let us know your thoughts, right after these messages.” I didn’t care, I was done. I stood up and headed for the exit to the parking lot, Kate’s cruel face and rudeness washing out of my mind as I turned my thoughts towards my research, done with worrying about what other people thought of me. Data doesn’t care about how I talk, my lab-mates care more about my ideas than anything else, and the world doesn’t have to like me for me to help it. All I need is my research.