ENTANGLED STATES

Coming of age in superposition.

“The quantum world was the first place where I knew queerness,” Padavic-Callaghan writes. “Meeting its not-wave-not-particle denizens was the first time I ever saw something like a possibility of myself.” Born in 1991 in what had been Yugoslavia, in the midst of war, Padavic-Callaghan moved to the U.S. at 16 and eventually became a physicist, then a science journalist. Feminine and masculine, Croatian and American, scientist and reporter—for every binary, they were somehow neither and both. So it makes sense that their book—a work of memoir and science writing—should be the same. As Padavic-Callaghan moves between science and story, the physics becomes a metaphor for the personal, and vice versa. One minute we’re learning about the fragility of quantum memory, the next we’re watching Padavic-Callaghan as a kid headbanging to hard rock in the car with their father. The “many worlds” interpretation of quantum theory inspires us to take all the possible versions of ourselves that might exist in parallel universe and live them fully and fiercely in this one. “Unlike Schödinger’s cat,” they write, “which stays in a single state once you have collapsed its wavefunction, I could never stay collapsed for very long.” Because the book is organized thematically, we end up revisiting the same time periods, and in places, the story gets redundant. Some personal sections—the chapter on makeup and fashion, for one—drag on past the point of the emotional punch. Still, there’s fresh talent here. Padavic-Callaghan’s prose is vulnerable and sharp. They describe crying as grief “transmuted into water and salt,” and a toothache as a “scream…trapped in the bone.” In their hands, the mathematics of knot theory becomes moving. They push the boundaries of what a science book can be. They leave us with the sense that if quantum physicists can build “tolerance for complexity and in-between-ness,” maybe the rest of us can, too.

An unconventional take on physics that stings like an exposed nerve and shines with humanity.