“Electrons make up most of what we see around us.  They are very small and very strange.”

“Mike Morton said something like that.”

“I’m sure he did.  Even back at NASA, Mike had some odd ideas.  Still grounded in fundamentals, but odd.  Kooky is what I used to call them.  But looking back, I think I was caught up in my own hubris.”

“Are we still talking about electrons?”

“Yes—whose strangeness we have only recently come to realize and accept.  And quite reluctantly, at that.”

“Strange, as in…?”

“It turns out the universe is not at all what we thought.”  Townsend glanced at Angela, staring and thinking.  “A man named Thomson discovered the first electron in 1897, and since then, we have come to understand just how strange they really are.”

Townsend continued thinking before abruptly reaching into a pants pocket and retrieving a penny, which he fingered gingerly.  “In the world we live in, the physical world, things are logical.  Predictable.  But in the quantum world, they are anything but.”

He reached down to the table and moved the envelope.  Then with a finger, he stood the penny on its edge and flicked it with his other hand, sending the coin spinning in a blur.

Townsend pointed to the coin.  “What do you see?” he asked.  “Heads or tails?”

Rickards stared at the whirling coin.  “Both?”

“Exactly,” said the older man.  “Unlike our world, the quantum world is not predictable.  It’s just the opposite.  It is extremely unpredictable.  Or should I say—unreliable.  Allowing for things to be in more than one state at a time.  Like this penny.”

Still watching the spinning penny, he said, “In the quantum world, this penny can be both heads and tails.”

Without warning, he abruptly flattened the coin under his palm, “unless we measure it.”

Angela and Joe remained quiet, intently listening.

Townsend slowly raised his hand, revealing the coin, now still displaying its head side up.

“In the quantum world,” he said, “things can be two things at once, or even more—until they’re measured.”

“Until it’s measured?”

“Or observed.  Believe it or not, because we cannot know what state an electron is in, or even where it is, it can be considered to be in all places at once.”

They both stared at Townsend, perplexed.  “But that’s impossible.”

“In our physical world, yes.  But not in the quantum world.  It has been proven many times over, yet no one accepts it easily.  Not even Einstein.”

“Einstein knew about this?”

“Oh yes.  It was his ultimate nightmare.  A sensible world built upon the foundation of an utterly nonsensical quantum world.”

They both stared at Townsend, gaping as they tried to comprehend what he was saying.

“And Mike Morton…?”