To Einstein’s Cat

Unlike Schrodinger’s, living in all the possibilities, you live in one, and today, it is rain. You lay curled on the floor near the radiator in the study. He comes in, sits in the reading chair. Without opening your eyes, you think about climbing up on his lap. You don’t.

You hear the latest talk: one theory that will explain it all. Light is both energy and matter and the Unified Field Theory will give the explanation for both at the same time. You remember the early days, when he was just thinking of Relativity. The way, during a thought experiment, he would pet you more and more slowly as the experiment continued, until he would stop and just hold his hand on your back. Time slows down and speeds up, he thinks; it’s not an absolute. You are shocked it took him this long to figure it out.

How long will it take for him to realize the Unified Field? On rainy days, you can hardly bear your frustration with it. Dust motes fall in the lamplight and you poke them one by one, the very movement of the air suggests its weight. Here, you want to say, this is what you’re looking for.

He doesn’t ignore you. In fact, he worries about you. He tries to get you to purr, though you refuse. He looks out the window and thinks it’s about the rain. “I know what’s wrong, dear fellow, but I don’t know how to turn it off,” he says.

Off/on. Rain/sun. Light/dark. Energy/matter. The binaries drive you crazy. The problem with the Unified Field is the attention to “unified”--implying the split--instead of a focus on “field.” It’s not the rain he needs to turn off, you think, it is the desire to name it in the first place that causes all the trouble.