Budayeen Nights Read Online Free Page A

and three brothers would not even look at her or offer her their farewells.
    The years passed ever more quickly. Jehan became a woman of the streets. For a time, because of her youth and beauty, she earned a good living. Then as the decades left their unalterable blemishes upon her, she found it difficult even to earn enough for a meal and a room to sleep in. She grew older, more bitter, and filled with self-loathing. Did she hate her father and the rest of her family? No, her fate had been fixed by the will of Allah, however impossible it was for her to comprehend it, or else by her own timidity in the single moment of choice and destiny in the alley so many years before. She could not say. Whatever the answer, she could not benefit now from either insight or wisdom. Her life was as it was, according to the inscrutable designs of Allah the Merciful. Her understanding was not required.
    Eventually she was found dead, haggard and starved, and her corpse was contorted and huddled for warmth coincidentally in the same alley where the young man had so carelessly despoiled any chance Jehan had for happiness in this world. After she died, there was no one to mourn her. Perhaps Allah the Beneficent took pity on her, showing mercy to her who had received little enough mercy from her neighbors while she lived among them. It had always been a cold place for Jehan.
     

    For a while estranged from Heisenberg, Jehan worked with Erwin Sehrodinger in Zurich. At first Schrödinger’s ideas confused her because they went against many of Heisenberg’s basic assumptions. For the time being, Heisenberg rejected any simple picture of what the atom was like, any model at all. Sehrodinger, older and more conservative than the Gottingen group, wanted to explain quantum phenomena without new mathematics and elusive imagery. He treated the electron as a wave function, but a different sort of wave than de Broglie’s. The properties of waves in the physical world were well known and without ambiguity. Yet when Sehrodinger calculated how a change in energy level affected his electron wave, his solutions didn’t agree with observed data.
    “What am I overlooking?” he asked.
    Jehan shook her head. “Where I was born they say, ‘Don’t pour away the water in your canteen because of a mirage.’ “
    Schrödinger rubbed his weary eyes. He glanced down at the sheaf of papers he held. “How can I tell if this water is worth keeping or something that belongs in a sewer?”
    Jehan had no reply to that, and Schrödinger set his work aside, unsatisfied. A few months later several papers showed that after taking into account the relativistic effects, Schrödinger’s calculations agreed remarkably well with experimental results after all.
    Schrödinger was pleased. “I hoped all along to find a way to drag Born and Heisenberg back to classical physics,” he said. “I knew in my heart that quantum physics would prove to be a sane world, not a realm populated by phantoms and governed by ghost forces.”
    “It seems unreal to me now,” said Jehan. “If you say the electron is a wave, you are saying it is a phantom. In the ocean, it is the water that is the wave. As for sound, it is the air that carries the wave. What exists to be a wave in your equations?”
    “It is a wave of probability, Born says. I do not wholly understand that yet myself,” he said, “but my equations explain too many things to be illusions.”
    “Sir,” said Jehan, frowning, “it may be that in this case the mirage is in your canteen and not before you in the desert.”
    Schrödinger laughed. “That might be true. I may yet have to abandon my mental pictures, but I will not abandon my mathematics.”
     

    It was a breathless afternoon in the city. The local Arabs didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat, but the small party of Europeans was beginning to suffer. Their cruise ship had put ashore at the small port, and a tour had been arranged to the city some fifty miles