the essence of quantum mechanics. But there is this interesting fact, which is that that kind of math only works—it only provides an accurate description of the system—until you open the lid and look inside. At that point, you see a live cat or a dead cat. Period. It has become a classical system.”
“Department of . . . Deadly Observations?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes.
“Anyway, that’s what you mean by the collapse of the wave function.”
“Yes, it’s just physicist-speak for the thing that happens when all of the superimposed terms—the descriptions of different possible realities—resolve into a single, classical outcome that our brains can understand.”
“Our scientific, rational brains, you mean,” I corrected him.
A look of mild satisfaction came onto his face. “Exactly.”
“But now we’ve circled back to my theory!” I complained.
He looked mildly confused. “Which theory is that?”
“The one that belongs more to children’s literature than to reality—remember?”
“Oh, yeah. People have to believe in magic.”
“Yes!”
“That’s not exactly what I’m saying,” he said. “Yes, human consciousness is in the loop. But hear me out. If you buy the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, it means that all possible outcomes are really happening somewhere.”
“There’s one world with a live cat and another with a dead cat.”
“Exactly. No kidding. Complete, fully independent realities that are the same except that in one of them, the cat’s dead, and in the other, it’s alive. And the quantum superposition? That just means that the scientist standing there with his hand on the lid of the box is at a fork in the road. Both paths—both worlds—are open to him. He could shunt into one, or the other. And when he hauls the lid open, the decision gets made. He is now in one world or the other and there’s no going back.”
“Okay,” I said. Not in the sense of I agree with you but of I am paying attention.
“The scientist can’t control which path he or she takes,” Tristan continued.
I saw that he was trolling me—waiting for me to pick up the bait.
No, it was more than that. He wanted me to mention a possibility that he could think about, but never say out loud—because he was all Mr. Science.
So I did. “Let’s switch it up a little, then,” I said. “And swap out the white lab coat and the clipboard for, I don’t know, a pointy black hat and a broom. And lose a pronoun. If she did somehow have the ability to choose which world she was going to be shunted to when she opened the lid—if she could control the outcome—”
“It would look like magic.”
“What do you mean ‘look like’? It would be magic.”
“Just saying,” Tristan said, “that it’s about choosing possible outcomes that already exist—slipstreaming between closely related alternate realities—as opposed to bringing those realities into existence.”
“But that’s a distinction without a difference.”
“As far as normal observers are concerned? People who haven’t studied quantum physics? Sure,” he agreed.
“Put it however you like,” I said. “A witch may summon the desired effect from a parallel-slash-simultaneous reality. Thus the historical references of witches’ magic as ‘summoning’—that is quite literally what they were doing.”
“My hypothesis,” Tristan said—pronouncing the word with exaggerated care, since he had a few Old Tearsheet Best Bitters in him—“is that photography disables this summoning, as you called it. Photography breaks magic by embalming a specific moment—one version of reality—into a recorded image. Once that moment is so recorded, then all other possible versions of that moment are excluded from the world that contains that photograph.”
“I get it,” I said. “There is no wiggle room left in which to function magically.”
He nodded. He seemed relieved to have got all of this off his chest. And that I hadn’t laughed him out of the room.
“You’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I said.
He nodded.
“But it wasn’t until we saw the daguerreotype of the solar eclipse that the penny dropped.”
“That’s right.”
“That was only about the bazillionth daguerreotype ever made,” I pointed out. “People had been taking photographs for sixteen years by that point. What’s so special about that one?”
“The scope of it, I think,” Tristan said. “The number of minds, and worlds, affected. If I’m Louis Daguerre screwing around in my lab in Paris, taking pictures of whatever is handy, then I’ve collapsed the waveform, yes. But only inasmuch as it encompasses my brain and a few little objects in my lab. If I show the daguerreotype to my wife or my friend, then the effect—the collapsing of the waveform—spreads to them as well. And we can guess that witches who live in the neighborhood might sense a dampening of their magical abilities, without understanding why. But the total eclipse of the sun on July 28, 1851, was probably witnessed by more human beings than any other event in the history of the world up to that point.”
“Of course,” I said. “Everyone in Europe could see it—”
“Just by looking up into the sky. Hundreds of millions of people, Mel. That event captured more eyeballs, at the same moment, than any Beyoncé video on YouTube. And to the extent that it was frozen, embalmed, on a daguerreotype, well—”
I was nodding. “If previous uses of photography had dampened magic, then this was like dumping the Atlantic Ocean on it.”
He nodded. “When the shutter opened to capture that first perfect image of the eclipse, magic ceased to function across all human societies.”
We back-checked the dates of all documents from 1851. Indeed: there were three from the first half of the year (two English, one Italian). There was a fragment of one in late July (Hungarian). There were none after July 28, the date of the eclipse. None.
“That’s it,” muttered Tristan, preoccupied, getting to his feet. He rested his hands on his desk and stared absently at the wall.
“Yes,” I said. I felt deflated. Although he’d never told me why DODO was so interested in understanding magic, common sense screamed it was because they wanted to be able to do it. Department of Doing the Occult? Which clearly could never happen: “There’s no getting rid of photography, so there’s no bringing magic back.”
Tristan froze and, after a beat, jerked his head in my direction. “You’re right,” he said, staring. “That’s it. Where there is no photography, there could still be magic.”
“That’s not quite what I said.”
He began to pace the office. We had made it somewhat larger by knocking out walls that separated it from adjoining spaces, but this still required following a figure-eightish path between piles of books, artifacts, freestanding gun safes, to-be-recycled beer bottles, and still-unexplained high-tech military gear. “How do we get rid of photography,” he murmured, more to himself than to me.
“We cannot ‘get rid of photography.’”
“No, it’s definitely possible,” he insisted, eyes unfocused as he paced. “I just have to figure out how it’s done.”
“What do you mean, how it’s done?”
He shook his head, grimacing, dismissing me. “I’m not seeing something,” he said. “What