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The Testimony of Daniel Pagels by Vickery Turner, Macdonald, pp 354,
£13.95

This is a courtroom mystery with a difference. The subtitle gives the
subtheme away – ‘a novel of quantum possibility’. The defence of a man accused
of murder rests upon the claim that a human being can travel instantaneously
from one place to another, as a quantum leap on the grand scale.

Alas, hard though the author tries, she does not succeed in making a
plausible case for the defence, nor does she explain the quantum mysteries
correctly. It ought to be subtitled ‘a novel of quantum impossibility’.

For example: the jury in the case is amazed to see a demonstration of
the Young’s slit experiment using a piece of white board with two slits
cut in it and an ordinary flashlight. I would be equally amazed, and so
would Young, since you need very narrow slits and monochromatic light to
make the interference fringes. We are also told that ‘a quantum leap is
a gigantic leap’ – a hoary chestnut, but totally false. The key feature
of a quantum leap is that it is discontinuous, and in most cases it is the
smallest change that it is possible to make.

This is why physicists get so much innocent entertainment from advertising
which claims that this year’s model of some consumer product is ‘a quantum
leap’ better than last year’s model – the ad is claiming, no doubt accurately,
that the manufacturers have made the smallest possible change that they
could to the old design.

Poor John Bell is also invoked erroneously: ‘Bell’s theory shows that
information travels faster than the speed of light.’ No. The whole point
about Bell’s theorem (not theory) and the famous Aspect experiment is that
it does not involve the transfer of information faster than light. Which
completely destroys the case for the defence.

Ah, you ask, but what about the story? We can forgive a writer much
if she tells us a rattling good yarn. Well, if you like cliche, this may
be for you. The defendant is a part-Indian American (look, I know we should
say ‘native American’, but Vickery Turner says ‘Indian’) who lives in a
camper and works as a gardener. He has Mystic Thoughts, and has brought
up his grandson (abandoned by a drug addict mother) to be a free spirit.
The district attorney and the sheriff are really dim; there’s a beautiful
girl in there somewhere, a lucky escape from custody, a chase, and finally
a confession by the real murderer.

Give me Perry Mason any time – much more believable.

John Gribbin and Paul Davies’s book The Matter Myth was reviewed last
week.