That sincere confession, steeped in a scientist’s way of thinking yet overflowing with romantic poetry, shook Shen Shuhe to her core. She gazed deep into Lu Chenjue’s eyes and sensed the immense loneliness hidden behind the young professor’s cold, proud exterior. It was the solitude of an exceptional intellect, forever standing at the edge of human knowledge and staring into the universe’s endless void.
Shen Shuhe gently turned the teacup in her hand. The warmth of the porcelain seeped into her fingertips, bringing with it an almost uncanny sense of reality. She smiled faintly, her smile as elegant as an orchid just beginning to bloom beneath the rain. Her soft voice carried the rise and fall of an ancient lyric: “Chenjue, do you know the ci poem ‘Like a Dream’ by the poet Li Qingzhao? It contains these two lines: ‘Last night, light rain and fierce wind; deep sleep could not dispel the lingering wine. I asked the one rolling up the blinds, who answered that the crabapple blossoms were unchanged.’”
She raised her head, her eyes brimming with understanding as she looked straight at Lu Chenjue. “The one rolling up the blinds sees with the naked eye and finds only that the crabapple blossoms remain as intact as they were yesterday. But in truth, after a night of rain, wind, and storm, how could those flowers have remained unchanged? They have endured the impact of raindrops and the shifting of the wind; their state has completely changed before anyone ever rolls up the blinds to observe them. Isn’t that very similar to the concept of ‘quantum superposition’ you’re always talking about?”
Lu Chenjue narrowed his eyes slightly, his physicist’s sharp instincts immediately drawn to the intriguing comparison. “Explain that more clearly, Shuhe.”
Shen Shuhe tilted her head slightly, a veil of dark hair falling softly over her forehead and lending her an intensely intellectual beauty. “In quantum mechanics, before we perform a measurement—in other words, before we ‘open Schrödinger’s box,’ or before we ‘roll up Li Qingzhao’s blind’—a physical system always exists in a superposition of every possible state. The crabapple blossoms out there may already have fallen all over the ground, yet they may also still be standing strong and displaying their beauty on the branches. Our lives are the same. Before you stepped out of your lonely laboratory and came here, your life and mine were independent streams of state, superposing countless possibilities of meeting or missing each other.”
She gently laid her hand over Lu Chenjue’s slightly cold hand on the antique wooden table. The warmth of their skin touching made them both tremble faintly. “You said you were a lonely free electron in a vacuum. But according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, precisely because you are a free electron, the probability of finding you at every coordinate in this universe is infinite. You are not isolated, Chenjue. Your state contains every beautiful possibility life has to offer. And the moment you walked through the door of this library in the rain of Bac Kinh, our wave functions chose the most perfect in-phase state on their own. We are not alone, because in this quantum world, every beautiful possibility exists in parallel, waiting for us to discover it together.”
Lu Chenjue stared in silence at Shen Shuhe’s small but incredibly warm hand resting on his. That warmth was like an electric current running straight into his heart, shattering every cold mathematical barrier and filling the lonely void that had occupied his soul for so long. He gently turned his hand over, threading his long, powerful fingers between Shen Shuhe’s slender ones and holding on tightly, as though he wanted to seize his own entire universe.