A Meditation on Quantum Mechanics

As with the Liszt Un Sospiro (track 8), hands overlap here as well, as notes crisscross themselves like diamonds on riplets. Roberts says that the great piano teacher Marguerite Long maintained that Debussy thought of the opening of the piece as "a little circle in water with a little pebble falling into it." As ripples fan out from the center, the way nacre encrusts itself in circles around pearls, or trees grow outwardly in rings.

    I am reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's captivating discussion of Cantor sets in Gödel, Escher, Bach, those mirrors in mirrors which replicate themselves to infinity, as a Beethoven Sonata is a widening gyre around the center of its beginning, expanding into inaudibility. Cantor sets are caused by the fact that particles interact. No particle exists until it's relations with other particles are plotted, similar to the plot of Goethe's roman, Elective Affinities, where people are treated as electrical charges. As Tom Stoppard said,

Things we know about are influenced by things we know little about, which in turn are influenced by things about which we know nothing at all.

    Such hypothetical interactions have been scoffed at, but the recent invention of the Quantum computer utilizes just these atomic pairs, where to observe an atom is to force it to stabilize, thus making it either positive or negative. At the same time, its twin atom adopts the opposite charge, even if it is quadrillions of light years away, thus evidencing a force faster than the speed of light. Such twinnings of identities may also give ESP a scientific basis in fact. The fact that twins often have simultaneous thoughts would then seem to arise from their shared atoms at birth.

    And so the lowly musician may have some reasonable basis for attempting to draw parallels between notes, to twin themes. Even the notion of being meant for each other may become a certain inexorable atomic truth rather than a romantic bit of nonsense. I have taken the liberty of exploring the amorous consequences of this subject in the poem below.