Sublimation
The properties of particles occur in pairs.
–Einstein
If we extrapolate the game
Where every snowflake’s not the same,
Where copying is not allowed
And where, in blizzards, two’s a crowd,
Where every strand of DNA’s
Made to hunt for matching strays,
Knowing in its heart of hearts
Precisely which atomic parts
The universe has yet to fake—
That undiscovered flake
Which, being instantaneously built
Engenders universal guilt
And is shunned by just the sleet
That gave it patterns to repeat,
As if the ice cold eyes
Of snow are nothing more than spies,
Architects who must be killed
When the galaxy is filled,
Stars lobotomized by sudden fame
(Snow by any shape would look the same),
As if automotive genes could care
That a spoke might need a spare,
Or that an axle might require
For its ends a second tire—
But if the absence of an also-ran
Is actually a master plan,
And the random nature of the earth
Isn’t random when it turns to birth
(How spontaneous is it when you
Have to order from the menu),
When disorder needs a list,
A catalogue to deny its gist,
And single chaos so depends
On plural structures for its ends
That the snow, inflated air,
Controls the sex life of a pair
That might like eyes just touch
Some other eyes as much
As any one of those
Infinite and sightless snows—
How selfish then to say the twin
Is nature’s kind of alien,
Rejecting what lone couples might
Flow from cloning at first sight.
April 4th, 1991, 3:52 p.m.
Alta, Utah
Cisco, Nantucket
Explanation
Every snowflake is unique. And yet particles come in pairs. No matter how unlikely the twins are to meet, they are nevertheless connected by the electric grid that has existed since before the beginning of time. An action performed on one will induce a similar effect on the other. This is a peculiarity of the quantum universe called energy exchange. It explains how information can travel infinite distances faster than the speed of light. People who have been together for a long time often finish each other’s sentences. They dream alike. They know what their spouse will say next. They can finally go on The Newlywed Game, although they may have outlasted it.
We have a friend who knew instantly when her sister was being chased down a beach in a different hemisphere. I have met a fakir who knew my favorite number, my telephone number as a child, my favorite color. We are connected by mysterious grids.
Tom Stoppard proposes in his play Jumpers that the great discoveries of science have been illogical jumps of logic, not closely reasoned step-by-step inevitabilities. In Symbolic Logic, Lewis Carroll exposed the false conclusions to which logic might draw us. We live in a quantum world of strange loops, where there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.
This was a metaphysical attempt to prove what can’t be proved, that there is such a thing as true love. The great mysteries are sacred because they remain mysteries. Despite all logic, they happen. There are holes in our logical world. The most obvious one is true love. Cathy and I know it exists because we have had it for more than forty years.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, documents that scientists set out to prove what they already believe. Einstein guessed at relativity; it was only proved after his death.