To find you like this!

  

The torture was exquisite; he had never experienced torment like it; his back was a mass of cool flame. He held his breath; a film of sweat beaded his upper lip; from his tightly squeezed eyelids a salt tear emerged and slipped down his nose; he whimpered slightly and squirmed.

The torment ceased.

“Oh God, don’t stop!”

And the feather-light fingers recommenced the faint, so faint, brushing of his skin, raising goose-flesh where they touched, and sending a charge along the nerve from each vertebra, to electrify his whole body. They moved to the baby-soft skin of his flanks, to the delicate skin under the whole length of his arm down to his wrist: a maddening susurration from fingers that knew the precise level of pressure required to render him helpless; in thrall to a sensation never dreamt of in his most ardent imaginings.

“Turn over.”

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A Wet Wednesday

Quantum entanglement leads to friction

A wet Wednesday

It was raining, it was Wednesday. And like all wet Wednesdays, there was nothing to do but twiddle the thumbs and sigh. And that was what he did, until his exasperated partner said, “Stop doing that! Do something useful.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know; read a book, read an article – read this!” He passed over a science journal he had been reading.

“It’s all gibberish.”

“Nonsense. It’s very simple, you just have to be open to new ideas.”

“OK, explain quantum physics to me in words of one syllable. Make me understand.”

“Can you manage a few more syllables? The two words have each got two.”

He sighed. “All right. Go on then.”

“Once upon a time,” the graduate-summa-cum-laude began, “some scientists began to realise that light travelled in waves.”

His partner closed his eyes and began to regret he’d started this. “So?”

“But light consists of photons – individual particles. When they travel as a wave, how do you know where an individual particle is?”

“You tell me.” As if I care, he thought.

“You might want to know where it is, or you might want to know how fast it’s going. If you look at where it is, you can’t measure how fast it’s going. You can only see it in one state or the other – not both. It’s called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.”

“Who? No don’t bother. Keep going.”

“As soon as you observe, or measure, one state of its existence, you cancel the possibility of its other state. I won’t bore you with Planck’s Constant…”

“Please don’t.”

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