Last Friday morning, while clutching my new day’s first cup of coffee — the cats stretched out on the floor doing Kundalini Yoga… opening their chakras — Culley Jane asked me if I wanted to attend a lecture on quantum physics by Dr. Allan Franklin, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Colorado.

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“I don’t know,” I said groggily.

“Well, it’s tomorrow night,” she said. “If we’re going, we need to send an RSVP.”

“I don’t know.”

Truth be told, I figured I had already learned all that I needed to know about quantum physics fifty years ago. It was 1976, sitting around a campfire with a bunch of on-the-road hippies deep in the forests of the Missouri Ozarks, everybody stoned. Midnight. A gathering of the tribe for a bluegrass festival before taking off in the morning, hitchhiking or crowded into multi-colored VW vans to discover someplace new again.

In the smoke of the fire, we jammed on our guitars and wooden flutes and sang and shared our stories and our new ideas that the folks back home dismissed as misguided — Zen, purpose, truth. Our own interpretations of the Word.

We came from everywhere.

A gal from the Bible Belt with long red hair tied up in yellow ribbons who was out there just to put a bad situation behind her said she didn’t think God threw us out of the Garden of Eden, but had granted us a gift — the power to decide.

An Oregon poet who ’d been to the war talked about the Zen concept of “Suchness.” He said that the Beat’s guru, D.T. Suzuki, said we’d all been enlightened since before birth, but just didn’t know it.

A young Jewish guy from Jersey on his way to Austin to try his luck in the music scene there talked about quantum physics, which I had never heard of before. When he was finished, I figured I knew all I would ever need to know about it.

He said that, according to quantum physics, light is either a particle with mass or a massless wavelength depending on whether it’s being “observed” by a human being, or “measured,” which, itself, is a human creation, like the length of a yardstick in curved space.

So, right then and there my life was changed. Suddenly, I realized that we — people on a planet in space — were creating it all because we had the power to decide, to observe or to close our eyes.

I looked up at the campfire’s orange light illuminating the underside of our overhead canopy of Oak and southern Pine. I observed the faces and clothing and shapes of the others and the length of the log on which they were perched like a tiny flock of multi-colored birds.

Then I blinked.

And for an instant before reopening my eyes, the whole scene was nothing but another world of massless wavelengths on a mission to acquire the power to decide.

It was all up to me.

By deciding to go west in the morning, I transformed wavelengths devoid of mass into the High Plains and the Continental Divide.

I wondered why I had never heard of quantum physics before, not in high school or in college, where I spent my time in bars arguing about the meaning of writers like Hemingway and Faulkner who’d never heard about it either.

With a little directed study, I learned that by the dawn of WWII, the theoretical foundations of quantum physics had already been worked out by the likes of Schrodinger, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg. In their mathematical calculations, scribbled on blackboards and in their own compartmentalized minds, they could “see” and map that other world. They calculated its energy and concluded it was virtually infinite, at least sufficient to power stars and a universe.

At that point, quantum physics became quantum mechanics, building machines, like an oil well, to tap into the infinite energy of massless wavelengths to make the things that people need.

The general public got its first glimpse of the power we now possessed in 1945 over the desert sands of New Mexico and then over two densely populated cities in Japan. But was that what we wanted to do? We could build fusion reactors to heat and cool our home. We could desalinate oceans to make deserts bloom. We could make Mickey Mouse watches with access to all the world’s libraries and the criminal records of anybody we meet in a bar.

All we had to do was decide.

I was sitting in front of a blank screen on my computer when Culley Jane came downstairs to ask me if I had decided yet.

“I’m working on an idea for this week’s column,” I said. “I’m thinking. Then I’ll decide.”

I turned my computer on to catch up on the latest news. An AI-guided quantum-age missile had just turned an ancient Lebanese village into a pile of rubble and smoke.

I closed my eyes to make it all disappear into harmonically ordered wavelengths of massless light. The lucky ones were killed in a flash. Others were trapped beneath the rock of a 12^th century temple.

When I reopened my eyes, nothing had changed.

There had to be a better way.

I decided to go to the lecture.

Beneath an overhead projector of incomprehensible graphs and charts, Dr. Franklin recounted the centuries-long journey science took to find the key to open the door to the other world of limitless energy.

After he was finished, I went up to him to chat for a bit. I figured he would obviously agree that there was enough for everybody and that everybody deserved to have enough. But could he explain why we hadn’t found a better way?

Maybe the Philosophy Department was working on the problem. Hopefully, it won’t take more centuries to find the key to knowing that all we have to do is decide.

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