Photon in a Double Slit

The last person whose death caused enough grief to rattle my existence and to rewire some of my perceptions about this world was the mysterious death of Sushant Singh Rajput, in June 2020. In December 2024, the only person who has loved me utterly and selflessly, loved with everything she had, my grandmother, my dear naniji, who cried happy tears at 30,000 feet because her youngest grandson was the first person to get her onboard an airplane, knocked on the doors of heaven.

I was sad. Sad enough to become socially rude and force a reclusive space for myself, space to digest this information, space to carve a few shelves of memories, and space to dump a few. But not sad enough to not make peace with the amended way of life.

Sushant’s death, on the contrary, hit like a personal loss, like a sledgehammer blow on lukewarm metal. I was reading every article, watching every video about how the case unfolded. I even unlocked my inner Byomkesh Bakshy and made theories that I narrated to my batchmates, only to get a “don’t lose your mind over a mere Bollywood actor” in return.

Growing up — in my subsequent years – to understand the concept of life and death in a way I no longer mourn death (naniji got the maximum out of me), I could never find any logic behind my reaction to SSR’s death because one, I despise celebrity worship and a vengeful mourning for an actor who does not know about your existence precisely qualifies for that and two, I was not even a fan enough to have watched his lesser known masterpiece Detective Byomkesh Bakshi by then.

Often, I would ask myself why the void created by SSR’s absence still demanded some settlement when even close losses have become easy to move on from. It took my inner detective, some good weed, a John Green novel and a video on Schrödinger's cat to dig that why.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon a YouTube video which was a detailed analysis and a review of Paper Towns wherein the reviewer says she loved the novel when she was 14, but rereading at 24, she realised the tones of misogyny, sexism along with poor characterisation and structural plot holes, which is why she rates the book mediocre at max with very few impactful portions. I read the book when I was 15, and I loved it and even took some inspiration from it. I learned to carpe this one diem you are living and keep doing it till it becomes your second nature. I learned the magic that mysteries hold, the power of being weird in your own ways, and the unjust capitalisation in English. But the review forced me to reread it to introspect my moral principles and literary standards. Definitely, there were weak points in the story, but my previous takeaways just added more layers to themselves.

Quintessentially, the novel is the journey of Quentin (Q) in his search for Margo, the mysterious girl next door notorious for her adventures with life, a search that is physical as well as philosophical, with Q asking "who is the real Margo" every step of the journey.

Q, the narrator, has a huge teenage white boy crush on Margo all his life, but realises that he barely knows her when she suddenly disappears. Everything, from her music taste to her poetry interests to her sneaker collection, comes as a surprise to Q, and maybe that is the reason Margo always seemed like a distant dream. He believes that Margo left him a clue and finally believes he can solve the puzzle, that he is close to achieving this enigma that he perceived as unattainable all his life, that he is the chosen one for this.

In the journey to find Margo, Q realises how wrongly he perceived Margo and how differently others saw her, also wrongly, but in different ways. Margo was fed up with how people perceived her with notions so strong and so strange to the extent of becoming a metaphor. For some it was a mystery, for some, it was rebellion, and for some, it was an adventure. But one fact was agreed unanimously, that Margo lives life on her own terms. Everyone reduced Margo to what they could fit in their own lens, but Margo never put a lens. She was the one to enjoy the landscape of life unfiltered. And so she escaped.

Q wanted to be the hero of this story by solving the puzzle of her life, but in the course of his journey, he realises that the puzzle loses its existence when solved. Margo could be enjoying the puzzle, navigating her way through life, or just having fun by herself. She was the flag bearer of being better as a concept. But he tries to solve her by chases and confrontations and by checking the wiring in her nervous system, but ends up with a blown-up fuse. A bittersweet end to the story.

As I finish the book, I hold my thoughts on reading it at 26, and how they are in contrast with what I learnt at 15, and with these ripe thoughts, I open YouTube and pour myself another drink. Physics is quite exciting when you are intoxicated. The colossal universe and the minuscule atoms just start making sense, and it is easier to visualise a concept created in someone else's brain, which is why on my homepage are videos with titles like “Why no one understands the Schrödinger’s cat experiment”; even when I haven't studied physics after graduation (formally) and after school (actually).

I have always wondered why Schrödinger’s cat has become a part of pop culture at a level beyond physics. It has even become an integral part of our meme culture. The common understanding of the concept is that the cat inside the box is neither dead nor alive. But no one knows the physical implication of being neither alive nor dead. Our visualisation is mostly limited to what we see, hear and feel. Whatever the five organs feed you makes your perception of every physical being, and a physical cat cannot be perceived by inputs of our senses in a neither dead nor alive state. This is precisely why it is labelled as a “thought” experiment.

The cat is said to be in a state of quantum superposition, which implies that the cat can be in any possible state from alive to dead. This state is difficult to visualise because it cannot be explained by any previously established i.e., axiomatic knowledge. You can only explain what it is not. Any attempts to explain this state through existing models will lead to misunderstanding, and hence the phrase neither dead nor alive is the most simplified explanation. And this thought experiment is correlated with the actual phenomena of interference wave pattern in the double slit experiment.

In this lesser-known experiment, physicists were desperate to evaluate photon behaviour as the beam of light passes through the slits, since photons do not pass through both the slits or either of the slits to create an interference pattern on the screen. So, they placed a tiny bulb between the slits to monitor it, but—plot twist — now there is no interference pattern.

The moment one tries to measure light's behaviour, the canvas loses the vastness of all possibilities and is restricted to two slit-like projections. The cat could be in any state from dead to alive, laughing or dancing or drinking or cleaning its coat or planning a heist, but when you open the box, the possibilities shatter. The two slits are analogous to dead or alive states, contrary to all that is in between, which existed before we interacted with the system.

I see Margo as the photon who would create patterns, beautiful but not decipherable. Try to decipher and there are no patterns. "Everything is uglier up close," Margo used to say. I slept that night with the joy that made Archimedes run naked, shouting Eureka.

The theory

Whenever we impose a frame of reference on any subject matter, we measure it within the bounds that we have set up, and the state of quantum superposition breaks. Schrodinger is popular because he familiarised the terms by correlating the behaviour of micro entities with a macro system. And since thoughts have already been linked to energy, by scientists and philosophers alike, thoughts also follow norms of quantum superposition, just like light particles, but with different sets of measurements to break their interference pattern. Human interactions are largely clouded by preconceived notions of where one comes from or what one does.

Allow me to explain,

A few weeks back, I entered the Delhi Airport smoking room with a copy of Midnight’s Children in my hand. A gaze hazed by freshly exhaled smoke fell upon the book in my hand before it could look for my face. I approached him, and we talked about the book I was reading, and the book he was reading, he finished his cigarette, I finished mine, talked about our favourite authors and novels, about the impact literature has on our lives, lit another one and shared it, all the while without knowing each other's name, regionality, profession or anything else. "One of the best conversations I have ever had," he said instead of goodbye.

I take the flight back home, attend a cousin's wedding where hundreds of far-fetched relatives bomb me with banalities of "how many days are you home for”, "how many work hours do I put in", and the most irritating "when are you planning to marry?" I someday wish to gather enough courage to confront how annoying these people are.

Another example is of the reviewer who is reading the book with the burden of her age and through the lens of a moral compass, and thus restricts herself from the joy of tiny metaphors and playfulness. If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, then why do 10 years of maturity snatch the joy out of something? In the book Tuesdays with Morrie, a major contributor to my tryst with death, Morrie says: "I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man." And Morrie is a man, non-fictional, who is known to live his life to the fullest. Because he doesn't let the measurement of age restrict his universe.

When we sophisticate ourselves with societal norms and behave in a certain prescribed way, we limit people in a stereotypical fashion. This is why it is so hard to break gender stereotypes and gender-based roles, because a woman is supposed to behave in a certain way. This is why we are obsessed with identity, enough to let our ego consume us and enough to burn buses and vandalise property for our love for a public figure. This is why most of our conversations are hate-driven, against the natural language of love.

When I think about it the next morning, it doesn’t make sense. I slept, dying to share this revelation with my nerdy friends, fantasised my eureka moment in my dreams, accompanied by loud, prolonged applause in the TEDx studio. And I wake up believing I made a forced correlation. I cannot even convince myself about the idea, how will I convince anyone else? But somehow, I cannot let it slide.

A few days later, I stumbled upon the Instagram account of Sushant Singh Rajput and observed something. I had already read the bio, and I assumed it was just because of his interest in physics, but this time, something clicked. Like the crisp clink of a lighter breathing a flame. It says “Photon in a double slit.” Sushant was an engineer with a deep interest in astronomy and astrophysics, an avid reader with a collection of 125 books with themes including cognitive science and behavioural economics, who quoted Rumi and Nietzsche, who made Van Gogh mainstream. He followed his interests with passion and with fire, interests related to anything and everything, not restricting himself to acting or science or art. Exploring his capabilities, just like a photon in a double slit, exhibiting quantum superposition. Maybe his approach to science was a little twisted like mine; maybe this is a string that connects me to his subconscious. This is why I feel devastated every time I realise that he is no longer between us. And it feels like poetic justice to close my argument about a science concept’s link with philosophy, aided by string theory, another science concept linked with philosophy. Interestingly, Margo also believed in string theory.