Ruhan Zhao
I never believed in Fate, yet on my way to the Beijing Institute of High Energy Physics this morning, I couldn’t help but go straight to the old fortune teller sitting at roadside.
The old man had chosen an unexpected place to set up his stall. He was surrounded by several of the most advanced research institutes of science and technology in the world. How dare he hawk his cheap tricks to those scientists? Yet strangely enough, he seemed to be doing good business just about every day. In fact, several of my colleagues said that his predictions were amazingly accurate.
Of course, I didn’t buy any of this nonsense. I didn’t believe the future could be told, and I never bothered to speak to him.
But today was different: a precarious task awaited me at my institute. Maybe he was for real, maybe he wasn’t. I didn’t know, but I knew I needed some comfort, and I hoped he could ease my nervousness.
I stood in front of the stall. The beautiful beams of morning sunlight were just touching the treetops, and I could hear birds singing in the distance. There was no one around except me. It was still early. I might be his first customer.
The stall was simple. A large piece of white cloth spread out on the ground in front of the seated old man. In the middle of the cloth was a Tai Chi symbol. A Chinese antithetical couplet was painted along two sides of the cloth:
Knowing the heaven and the earth;
Telling the past and the future.
The old man looked like a typical fortune teller (if there is such a thing): very thin, white hair, and a long silver beard under his chin.
“You want to know your fortune?” he asked.
I nodded.
He studied my face. After a while, he nodded slowly and said, “You have a square face with a wide mouth and broad forehead. This is a noble face bestowed with a good fortune. Your whole life must be smooth and well.”
Every fortune teller had the same approach. If someone worked in a famous institute in the nation, he must have a “smooth and well” life. I knew that.
“You are reaching a crisis in your work,” he continued. That was surprising. We were performing a crucial experiment today, one that might change my life, no matter whether it was successful or not. But how could he possibly know it?
I thought about it for a while and then started to understand. I had never gone to this fortune teller before. Why should I come today? Obviously because I was in the middle of a crisis. I was on my way to my institute. It was logical for him to guess that the crisis was about my work. He was clearly very perceptive and skilled at observing people. No wonder people told me he was good.
“Let me look at your palm,” the old man said.
I stretched out my hand.
“Not this one. The left hand, please.”
Left hand. Of course. Man left, woman right. A man’s fate could only be told from his palm-prints on the left hand. Every Chinese person knew the rule of palm-print reading. How could I have forgotten? Embarrassed by my blunder, I offered him my left hand.
The old man pulled my hand closer with his emaciated hands, and read my palm-prints carefully. He concentrated so intently that he looked like a scholar studying a reference book. His eyes were so close to my palm that I wondered if he had a vision problem and had left his glasses at home.
Suddenly, his expression changed. He raised his head and looked straight into my eyes.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“There will be a disaster at your workplace today,” he said, staring at me and pronouncing each word carefully. “Don’t go to your institute.”
That got my attention. Telling me I was in a crisis might be a simple guess—but telling me that a disaster awaited me didn’t seem like a simple fortune teller’s trick. The experiment scheduled for today was indeed very dangerous—but how could he know? How could he be so sure that it would go wrong? Was he really able to tell the future? Should I believe him and go home? No, that was ridiculous. He was just some street mountebank, and I had important scientific work to do. The experiment was vital to our research, and a positive outcome would produce a long-awaited scientific breakthrough. I couldn’t simply withdraw based on the work of an old man on the street.
Besides, I’d never really believed in fortune telling. I was a scientist. He was a charlatan or, at best, a good guesser. Mystifying people was part of his job. He probably wanted to scare me, to predict a disaster to see my reaction. It didn’t take a genius to guess my work was dangerous. He knew I was working in the Institute of High Energy Physics. He had already guessed correctly that my work was in crisis. He had probably observed that I was anxious and nervous when I approached him. He probably put all that together and guessed—not predicted, but guessed—that I’d be involved in a disaster. If I was frightened away from my work, no one would know if his prediction was right or not. Later he might tell other people that he saved my life. It would certainly be good for business, especially if I confirmed it. If I didn’t go to the institute, if we didn’t run the experiment, who could know if it would have ended in a disaster? He was on safe ground, not me.
“How did you know that?” I asked, trying not to sound too serious.
“Look.” The old man pointed to my left hand. “Your life line and career line are very close to each other. They are also long and clear. This shows that you are very successful in your work. However, there is a short and deep line cutting through both of these lines. From the position of this short line, I can tell that today, something disastrous will happen to you. It will terminate not only your career, but also—your life!”
“Are you saying that I will die today?”
He nodded. “I beg you: do not go to work today.”
This was too much. I couldn’t stand this nonsense anymore. I took out a ten-yuan banknote from my pocket and dropped it next to him. Then I stood and walked toward my institute.
“You must not go there today,” shouted the old man.
I stopped, turned around, and smiled at him. “Thanks. But I am a scientist. I believe in science. We don’t tell the future, we build it.” Then I walked away, feeling his sad gaze following me to my building.
Although I didn’t believe in fate and mysticism, I did feel uneasy after this incident. However, after entering the institute, I was soon immersed in the preparations for our experiment and became completely oblivious to what the old man had told me.
The experiment was designed to test a revolutionary theory made by our project leader, Dr. Fang Shi. The theory postulated that if a certain group of particles with extremely high energy entered into a super strong magnetic field, the particles would stimulate a distortion of the space-time continuum in the field and then generate a gateway to a space parallel to ours. If a person happened to be placed in the distorted field, he would fall through the gateway and enter the parallel space.
We had already sent a cat to another space and successfully retrieved it. We named that animal “Schrödinger’s cat.”
The subject for today’s experiment was not a cat. It was a man.
And the man was me.
There was no lack of volunteers for today’s experiment because his or her name would be written into historical books. I was thrilled when Dr. Shi chose me, possibly as a reward for my years as his closest assistant.
The machine was huge and complicated. Staff members worked around it like ants and bees. I wore a special suit and entered the hall with Dr. Shi, who seemed much more nervous than me as he reviewed all the details. The others were eerily silent. Many of them had dedicated their time and energy to this experiment, for which the institute had invested an astronomical amount of funding. If it failed, the whole institute would probably be shut down.
The final minute arrived. I shook hands with Dr. Shi and walked toward the round plate in the centre of the hall. I stepped on to the plate and stood at the very centre of a big Tai Chi symbol.
The symbol reminded me of the old fortune teller and his stall. I didn’t believe in fate, but who could prove that fate didn’t exist? Maybe someday an Einstein or a Hawking would discover the principle of fate hidden in a quantum equation. I thought about the old man’s prediction. Would the experiment fail? Would I die?
The machine started to hum. The operators’ fingers skillfully danced over keyboards. The super magnetic field began to generate. I felt a sudden dizziness. The Tai Chi symbol on the plate began to rotate, whirling faster and faster until it was a blur. I could not distinguish Ying and Yang of the symbol anymore. All I could see were black and white circles rotating like crazy. Suddenly, I heard a tremendous explosion in the air, and then a dazzlingly bright light shot toward me. Before I knew what had happened, I lost consciousness.
When I woke up, I found myself lying on the Tai Chi symbol. Dr. Shi and the other members of the research group stood around me, observing me with deep concern.
“How do you feel?” Dr. Shi asked. “Are you all right?”
My head was burning like hell. The other people helped me to sit up. I stretched my arms and legs. They seemed to be okay.
“All right, I suppose,” I answered. “How was the experiment?”
“It is much more important to know that you are fine. Our experiment—unfortunately—failed,” replied Dr. Shi. “You didn’t reach that other space. All the high energy particles and the strong magnetic field did was knock you out. At first, we were afraid you were dead.”
Although he seemed more concerned about me than the experiment, he couldn’t hide his disappointment. He had planned this experiment for most of his career, and he had been so close to succeeding. We had checked every technical detail, and we all believed that it would succeed. The failure was devastating because we couldn’t possibly afford to try again. We were finished. All of our efforts were for nothing.
I suddenly recalled the words of that old fortune teller. He was right that my career would end today, but I didn’t die. I had bet my life against the old man. I was still alive after the accident, so I won. I laughed out loud.
Dr. Shi and the others stared at me in surprise. For a minute, they must have thought that I had contracted some mental disorder under that strong magnetic field. I stood up and assured them that I was fine.
After cleaning all the mess from the experiment, I decided to take off early. When I walked out the front door, the old fortune teller’s stall was still there, so I walked over to it.
“Hey, look at me!” I said. “I’m still alive!”
The old man raised his head, his eyes wide with wonder. He stared at me as if looking at a ghost.
“This is impossible! You must be dead at this moment!”
“Is that your wish?” I said with an amused smile.
“Why would I wish your death? I was telling the truth from your palm-prints. I have never been wrong in my reading.” The old man’s voice was shaking. “Give me your hand. I want to see it again.”
I smiled and stretched my left hand out to him. The old man hastily grasped it and began examining. After a while, he raised his head and stared at me, puzzled. “This is not the palm I saw this morning.”
I pulled my hand back and looked at the palm-prints. A chill went through my whole body. The career line and the lifeline were far away from each other, and there was no trace of any shorter line cutting through them.
Of course, I was familiar with my palm-prints. The prints on this palm were not the prints of my left hand.
They were the prints of my right hand.
I quickly checked my right hand. The career line and the lifeline were close to each other, and a short line cut through them. Those were the prints from my left hand! My left hand and right hand had been switched!
I felt a mix of terror and excitement. As a physicist, I immediately understood the reason.
Imagine a being living on a plane. If it wants to jump to another parallel plane, the only way to get there is through the three-dimensional space. But if, instead of going to that other plane, it flips itself over in the three-dimensional space, and goes back to its own plane, then its left and right sides will become reversed—which was exactly what had happened to me. My left and right hands had been switched. The only explanation was that I had jumped from our three-dimensional space into the four-dimensional space, and then flipped over in the four-dimensional space . . .
I turned around and dashed toward our institute, leaving the perplexed fortune teller behind.
Maybe his fortune telling was accurate. Maybe his prediction about me was true. But my left hand was not my original left hand anymore. My fate had been changed through the fourth dimension.
I didn’t have time to explain this to the old man. I was not sure who the winner of this battle of fate was: science or fortune-telling. I was not sure what other parts of me had been changed in the fourth-dimensional space, nor did I care. All I wanted to do at this moment was to find Dr. Shi and tell him that our experiment hadn’t failed after all.