Windfall
Dusk in a woodland clearing, surrounded by the happy faces and sparkling eyes of the Scout troop he was fortunate enough to lead. He was, Walter decided, very definitely at his happiest and in his natural element. Life was good.
The woodfire was crackling — and okay, there was lots of smoke, and not yet any evidence of flames as such, and the smoke did keep getting blown into his eyes. But even so, he was confident it would soon look a lot more like a woodland camp-out fire and a lot less like a damp pile of randomly-snapped branches and wet leaves. More to the point, his happy little band of scouts were sitting and contentedly chatting around the conversation circle, no doubt waiting eagerly for another one of Walter’s justly-famed scary camp-out stories. But which one should it be: the Curséd Doll, the Evil Axe, the Scratches Inside the Coffin Lid…?
“You know Buddhists, right?” Danny suddenly piped up, somewhere at the far side of the dense smoke. “Our Barry said that in his RE lesson, Miss told them that Buddhists have trees that get blown down in the forest and don’t make any sound at all. Totally quiet! How cool is that, eh!?”
“What do you mean?” Spud demanded, leaning to one side so as to peer past the smoke. “How can a tree blowing down not make a sound? I’d have thought it’d make one hell of a racket — all branches breaking and roots snapping and things getting smashed. Unless it was a right tiny one, maybe? Like those ‘Bonzer’ trees they make, the little big trees?”
“Bonsai,” Walter tried to correct, but his contribution was unheard as another of the boys spoke over him:
“Did Barry say that they were Bonzer trees, these silent ones?” That was Andrew, their Patrol Leader — a few months older than the others and (Walter had always hoped) therefore possibly more sensible.
“He didn’t say,” Danny admitted. “But I reckon it’s got to have been a big one. I mean, have you ever heard of a Bonzer tree getting blown over?”
“No,” Spud replied. “But then again, I’ve never heard of a silently falling tree before, either. What brand of trees do they have in Buddha-land?”
“Bamboo,” offered Andrew. “I’m sure I’ve seen Kung Fu videos of Buddhists knocking seven bells out of one another with bamboo sticks. Maybe the silent trees are bamboo?”
Unwisely, Walter again decided to contribute his own thoughts on the question. “Well boys,” he began. “First of all, bamboo isn’t a tree. It’s a grass. And second, it isn’t silent; it makes a rattling sound when the wind blows. And third…”
“Hang on,” Spud interrupted. “You’re saying that in Buddha-land, the Buddies make their trees out of grass? Clever buggers, aren’t they!?”
“No, no, no,” insisted Walter, trying to swat away Spud’s confusion. “I’m saying that bamboo isn’t a type of tree. It’s grass.”
“Ah, I get it… So the clever buggers are making bamboo out of grass!?”
“I’m still puzzled, Danny,” said Andrew, before Walter could dig a deeper hole for himself. “Are you saying that the Buddies have got proper real trees, but they’re silent? How does that work exactly? I mean, just listen to all these ones around us now. They’re making a proper din, creaking and rustling and there’s hardly any wind. How are they going to fall over quietly?”
There was a pause as each listened intently to the forest, with a few silent wishes from Spud that maybe a tree or even a branch or two might be encouraged to fall and test the Buddhists’ claim. Sadly, none complied.
“Maybe… Maybe if the wind is too loud to hear the trees?” Danny suggested eventually. “You know, sort of howling and drowning out anything else. That’s probably what Barry meant, don’t you think?”
“Look, lads,” Walter said, trying desperately to re-assert his authority. “The Buddhists don’t have silent trees. It’s a riddle. You’re meant to think about what it means. They have another one as well: ‘What’s the sound of one hand clapping?’”
Again, silence in which only the crackling of the fire and the rustling of the (decidedly non-fallen-over, non-silent) trees could be heard. Eventually, Spud threw up his hands and sighed. “Okay, Sir. I give up. What’s the answer?”
“There is no answer,” said Walter. “With Buddhists’ riddles, you’re meant to think about it…”
“No answer!? That’s a bloody rubbish riddle!” Spud scorned. “How come they can make bamboo out of grass, but they can’t write a riddle for toffee?”
“What’s got hands but can’t hold anything?” Danny called out.
“A clock!” Spud responded. “See? A riddle’s like that. What falls into a bath but doesn’t get wet?”
“I don’t know,” Walter admitted.
“A shadow!” Danny responded, laughing.
“Huh! Those Buddies can keep their bamboo trees made out of grass and their rubbish riddles,” scorned Andrew. “Our riddles are way better!”
“Look,” said Walter, frustration boiling over. “I told you already. The Buddhist riddles aren’t like that. They’re meant to make you try and hold two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time. That’s the one hand clapping. You can either be clapping, or you can have one hand. You can’t have both at the same time. It’s a contradiction. Or the riddles are about reality and the observer — and whether something really happens if there’s nobody to witness it. That’s the tree falling. Do you see?”
The conversation circle was shocked into silence at Walter’s sudden, uncharacteristically articulate lecture. That was until a new, flatly monotonic voice called out from the far side of the smoke. “It’s quantum mechanics. The Tao of Physics!”
This was Nigel: the newest, youngest Scout in Walter’s troop — and widely believed to be some kind of autistic weirdo. Or genius. Or both. He read Scientific American and New Scientist and watched science documentaries for fun. Opinion was divided as to whether he was more likely to earn a Ph.D. and win a Nobel prize sometime in the next twenty years or to be arrested as a homicidally sociopathic cannibal. (For his part, Spud didn’t really see why those two should be mutually exclusive.)
“It’s quantum mechanics,” Nigel repeated flatly. “The observer interacts with the experiment, and that interaction determines what the experiment shows: whether light is a particle or a wave; a clue as to whether there’s some deeper, underlying reality. It’s all about superpositions, like Schrodinger and the cat!”
After a short pause, to see if their resident genius/weirdo had anything further to contribute, Spud gently asked the question on all their minds: “What’s a Schrodinger?”
“He was an Austrian physicist, who did an experiment about a century ago,” Nigel explained. “He locked a cat in a box with some poison…”
“Hang on a minute,” Andrew objected. “Whose cat?”
Nigel replied, “Does it matter? Just a cat — any cat…”
“You can’t just put a cat in a box with some poison!” Danny protested. “The RSPCA would go proper mental at you. Remember, there was that woman who put a cat in a wheelie bin? They went mental at her! She was in the papers and on the telly and everything.”
“He was Austrian and it was about a hundred years ago, so I imagine they had different laws there then,” Nigel continued. “Anyway, so the cat was in the box with the poison — and it was in a state of super-position of being both alive and dead, so you couldn’t tell…”
“How did he get it in the box?” Spud demanded. “I mean to say, Austrian or not, if anyone tried to put our cat in a box, he’d have your face off. It’d be in a state of spitting fury never mind a super-position or whatever. The vet needs to put on chainmail gauntlets and a visor to examine him on the table, never mind stuffing him in a poison box!”
“Yeah, but Spud, that’s so she can stick a thermometer up his bum,” Danny laughed. “It’s bound to get a touch frisky if you try that, isn’t it!? I would!”
“Maybe he put some cat food in the box to encourage it in ?” Andrew suggested. “That’s what Mum always does when she has to take our cat to the Vee-Ee-Tee. Anyway, so go on then Nige. What’s the cat-poisoning Austrian got to do with these silent trees the Buddies have?”
“It’s all to do with the observer. If nobody observes the cat in the box, it is both alive and it is dead. If there is nobody to observe the tree falling, there is nobody to receive the air disturbance that it makes, and therefore nobody to perceive that disturbance as a noise. And hence, unobserved the falling tree makes no noise.”
“It’s not quite like that…” Walter tried to say, but Spud talked over the top of him:
“That’s nonsense,” he objected. “What about the birds? What about the mice, the voles, the badgers, the worms, the flies, the ants…!? There’s always something there that hears,” Spud added.
“You make an excellent point, Spud,” Nigel conceded. “In the universe there’s always something that observes!”
And then, as if on the perfect cue, a dead branch fell (noisily!) to the floor behind them.
