My History with the Article
I first read Dr. James Ludebaker’s account of Dr. Haymon Walter’s protracted study of “two entangled persons” in the fall of 2013. At the time, I was navigating a divorce that not only felt like a personal crisis but a public failing. My husband and I, both professors at the University of New Hampshire, often found ourselves in the same rooms at department events; we passed each other practically every other day in the hallways. As others looked on, we forcefully ignored one another. In the midst of all this, I received an email from a friend of mine from graduate school, Dr. Anna Winthrop, with the subject line inane. In the body of the email, I found the word repeated—Inane—sitting alone, surrounded by white space and hyperlinked to the article in question, published by an online quarterly focusing on human-interest pieces written by and about the scientific community. I skimmed it in my office, during my self-designated lunch hour, while eating a turkey and ham sandwich that I’d forgotten to remove from my satchel and place in the mini fridge tucked underneath my desk. (The fridge’s location was dictated by my desire that students sitting across from me not see it, that it not ruin the academic ambiance of the space.) The temperature at which the mayonnaise had been stored was not ideal. I’d just met with a student who’d told me that I was grading him too harshly. I’d explained that all my tests were multiple choice, so it wasn’t the sort of thing where I could adjust his score even if I wanted to. “These aren’t long-answer questions,” I said. “There’s no room for interpretation. You’re either right or you’re wrong.”
I’d met Dr. Ludebaker once before, at a conference years before my divorce, and only in passing: a tall, wide man with a mustache that a romantic partner in the seventies had probably found alluring, cementing it as a permanent feature. I’d never met Dr. Walter, though I’d heard of him. He was a great “character” in the field, known as much for his discoveries as his eccentricities. Too distracted to really take in what I’d read, I replied to Dr. Winthrop’s email with a throwaway: Thanks for sending!
That evening, on a whim, I pulled up the article again, lying on my cot in the Portsmouth apartment I was renting. The place resembled a museum storage room. The many objects of my former life—lamps and bookcases and books packed into milk crates and chinaware packed into boxes and board games and an expensive, handcrafted wooden dresser and art prints (mostly Rothkos) and a television and a disassembled king-size bed frame and other odds and ends—were all packed neatly into the small space, stacked atop one another or leaning against the walls. My husband and I had agreed that he could keep the house and I could keep what was in the house, whatever I wanted from it, and the lion’s share of our joint savings account. He’d said to me, “This is my dream house. How often have I said that this is my dream house?” And I was forced to agree. I’d never said that it was my dream house. I’d only ever said, “I love this house,” but he’d said that too, and with greater frequency.
I’d taken as much as I could. Every so often, I would go back and knock on the door. It was different from seeing him on campus. On the porch we used to share, we did not hesitate to glare at each other. He would say, “Oh, hello,” in an unwelcoming sort of way, and I would say, “I’ve forgotten something.” I’d roam around the house, he would disappear into his office, and I would almost get the sense of being properly home again. The now-empty spaces were as substantial as the things I’d taken out of them. From his office, he’d call out, “Are you done?” and I would grab one or two items, like our knife collection or the shower curtain, and I would return to my apartment and add them to the pile. The apartment contained a living area, a bathroom, and a kitchenette with a hot plate. I ate instant oatmeal for breakfast and pasta for dinner. It occurred to me, sitting in class with my students, that our diets probably looked quite similar.
I was, as I am sure you have gathered, in an odd place. Reading the article for a second time, I found myself enthralled. In it, Dr. Ludebaker wrote of his good friend, Dr. Walter, who had undertaken a study of two people he understood to be “phenomenally linked.” Two women, one from San Francisco, California, the other from Cape Town, South Africa, who were paired like a set of elementary particles in human form, matter and antimatter. “Dr. Walter,” Dr. Ludebaker wrote, “thought that neither woman—her geographic location, her social position, her actions, her thoughts and feelings—could be explained without reference to the other, as is the case with entangled particles.” According to Dr. Walter’s theory, the one relied on the other, was influenced by her movements, and vice versa—a sort of physical inter-contextualization that had made itself evident both mathematically and intuitively to Dr. Walter’s subtle mind.
Reading it, I said to myself, “Of course it’s nonsense,” seeing that it was nonsense but feeling an unexpected affinity for it. It soothed me, somehow. When I finished it, I wanted to begin again. I wanted to linger, to live in the world that it seemed to imagine. Imagining that world put me at ease.
Of course, the scientific community reviled the piece. Letters of complaint were sent to the publication. One accused Ludebaker’s description of the study as “exploitative” and called out the quarterly’s editors for publishing the article “uncritically.” A number of my peers shared the article on Facebook and Twitter with the express purpose of mocking its writer and the study it described. At a faculty dinner, someone called it an embarrassment for the field. (I was eating a serving of Caesar salad as carefully as possible: trying not to take too big a bite, not letting pieces fall off my fork, not letting the dressing fleck my lips or cheeks. My ex-husband was in the room.) Another colleague responded that it was valuable only as a character study of a certain type of febrile, elderly professor who leeches off of the same institution for too long.
So yes, I read and reread the article in my cot, on my laptop, in my overloaded apartment in Portsmouth. I read it in my office, clicking back to my home screen the second I heard a knock on my door. Over a period of weeks and months, I read it almost every day. Then, one afternoon, I closed the tab in my browser, closed my laptop, and didn’t read it again for four years.
And yet, it became one of those associations that surface on a semi-regular basis. I had badly cut my index finger with a pair of cooking shears at age six—“down to the bone,” my mother still moans, shuddering at the recollection—and I often think about that incident, one that I have no memory of, when wielding scissors. It was just the same with this article. It would spring to mind when the subject of quantum entanglement came up, or celebrity divorce settlements, or even on nights when I was too tired to cook myself a good meal and the taste of canned pasta sauce lifted me from my new home, a house fifteen minutes south of downtown Ann Arbor, and dropped me back in that Portsmouth apartment. I once spent real time pondering a study to measure the frequency with which certain subject matter elicited certain associations in my own mind. The problem was that I could not track how often I thought of something, in relation to something else, without tracking those times when I did not think of it. However, in not thinking of something, one notices oneself not thinking about it, and the something is thought of. Which is all to say that, at times, not often, not rarely, I thought of Dr. Ludebaker’s article and felt a certain warmth, a pleasant softness in my chest.
Then, just a month ago, I happened to run into Dr. Ludebaker at a conference. We spoke and, afterward, I returned to the article. I printed it out and began writing in the margins. My marginalia spilled over into a lined notebook. The words from the lined notebook snuck their way, as sentences and paragraphs, onto a Word document. Finally, I submitted those words here, to a certain online quarterly focusing on human-interest pieces written by and about the scientific community—my community.
A Summary of the Article
Dr. Ludebaker begins his account of Dr. Walter’s study by emphasizing the nonscientific nature of the article itself. “I do not have all of Haymon’s work on the subject,” he writes, “but I was his primary confidante and source of feedback for the five years in which he pursued his theory.”
“What I hope to deliver,” he writes, “is a general, if not technical, knowledge of the project.”
With this framework in place, he describes how the study came to be:
On July 8, 2004, Dr. Hayman Walter, Professor Emeritus at NYU, strikes up a conversation with a tourist at a café bordering Washington Square Park. The tourist, a woman named Thabisa Moodley—South African, Black, five foot seven, thirty-two years old—tells him that she’s on vacation. She’s enjoyed New York City so far. Every morning, she eats a bagel. Every afternoon, she drinks tea and strolls around a park—“a different park each day.” Every evening, she goes dancing. To save money, she and her friends are staying in a hotel right next to the Metro-North station up in Mt. Vernon. Laughing, she describes herself as the first person to commute on vacation. Later that day, she’s going to the Cloisters. They talk about how the best vacation is often a generic vacation: people have fun in the same ways everywhere, the tourist sites are often the tourist sites for a reason, the beaten path often has the best architecture. Dr. Ludebaker writes that Dr. Walter called him a few minutes after the interaction ended—“as he often called me three or more times in a day”—and mentioned Thabisa: “That speaking with her had left him with that specific sort of cozy feeling of having completed a successful conversation with a stranger. The sense of the world as a universal neighborhood. That feeling that only a stranger can provide.”
Two hours later, now getting his afternoon coffee at the same shop where he’d met Thabisa, Dr. Walter had the exact same interaction with a woman from California: Louise Eunice, white, five foot three, thirty years old. According to Louise, she too, was on vacation to New York—though she was traveling alone. Every afternoon, she ate a croissant. She was staying south of Prospect Park. She kept making plans to go to the Met and canceling them because she found all that art intimidating. As the interaction unfolded, Dr. Walter found himself increasingly agog. He had trouble keeping his mouth from falling open. There was, here, a strange synchronicity. This was the exact interaction he’d had with Thabisa, though in a different register, played on a different instrument.